When did you start gaining weight?

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  • ereck44
    ereck44 Posts: 1,170 Member
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    This is definitely an interesting thread. So often we are completely focused on our journey to wellness that we fail to reflect on its origins. It's a healthy thing to do sometimes, looking back - it makes looking forward that much more meaningful. Thank you for posting, OP!
    Very insightful!
  • PhatD
    PhatD Posts: 60 Member
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    My first pregnancy. I never had a weight issue until then. I didn't even know how to start to lose weight after I had her, so then my second pregnancy I was even worse off. Add in some depression and drinking a stupid amount of calories a day via soda and coffee and here I am.

    I'm 34 and for the first time in my life I'm learning about calories and protein and fat and what my body needs. Kinda sad.


    Same here. 4 pregnacies, 4 c-sections,then a tubal. I'd start losing then find out I was pregnant again. I have absolutely 0 muscle tone in my abdomen. Sad is being 50 and just now really learning what a carb is...
  • gononi
    gononi Posts: 6 Member
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    Antidepressants for post-partum after the birth of my first child I was 21. I've yo-yo'd ever since. I'm now 45, on the lower end of the yo-yo.
  • njitaliana
    njitaliana Posts: 814 Member
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    I was always underweight as a kid and from age 14 on to age 35, I was a size 5. Then I became disabled at age 35 and gained 200 pounds in the next four years. Loss of mobility, inability to stand and cook, medication, etc. Such a pain.
  • krawhitham
    krawhitham Posts: 831 Member
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    When I was 27 I was hired into a very high-stress full time job, where I ended up working 50-60 hours a week and holidays with few opportunities for breaks or vacations. I am now 31 yrs old.

    I gained weight while working at this job between 27-30 yrs old.

    Over 3 years I gained ~42 lbs. I lost that job (got laid off) and I'm determined to get back to the weight I was at 27 when I entered into the job. Simply not working full time has been wonderful for my health!

    I've lost 12 of those lbs. and I have a long way to go!
  • Novus175
    Novus175 Posts: 80
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    I started gaining when I was about 8 years. Part of it was that I was severely hypoglycemic/insulin resistant and I learned that food made me feel better. Plus, I grew up on a farm and my mother cooked like a farm wife - hearty meals with lots of starch followed by ample desserts.

    I gained weight for the next 25+ years until I hit my high weight of 273 and a doctor told me (basically) "Lose the weight or you're going to be either very sick or dead." It took me quite awhile to figure out how to lose the weight in a way that worked for my body but I finally did and I'm now thinner than I ever remember being (probably since like junior high or so). I still have about 30 pounds I'd like to lose but I feel AMAZING.
  • runsmallx
    runsmallx Posts: 20
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    I was always a "bigger" child and in high school I was tired of being the "fat friend" so I lost about 40lbs and was at my lowest weight.

    However, I broke up with my ex about 2 years ago, and that really triggered some bad stuff in me with not eating enough or too much, not exercising, I sulked and didn't do anything for days and it was just a bad time. I've been dealing with serious binging and depression I gained about 60lbs.
  • ltooor
    ltooor Posts: 16 Member
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    I was skinny until about age 3 and then spent the rest of my life overweight
  • johnsongs1
    johnsongs1 Posts: 47 Member
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    When I was 6 years old. My brother was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and my parents were always telling him to eat at meals. I'd clean my plate thinking I was making them happy! Ha! If I had only known. I slimmed down some during high school but was never as small as the other girls. But I wasn't fat during that time. Then after my first child was born, I was diagnosed with low thyroid. Been fat ever since.
  • KristinaB83
    KristinaB83 Posts: 440 Member
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    When I started playing World of Warcraft.
  • Stopin_da_yoyo
    Stopin_da_yoyo Posts: 138 Member
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    I was skinny as a child until about 3 or 4 yrs..this is when my dad left the military. Recently my mom told me that she eat hotdogs as a child...cheap food source and she said she felt guilty about things so she let me eat as muckh as I wanted. At this point I was always chubby and this increased every year....from junior high on....I was fat junior hi igh weighed avg 190's and throughout hs 220's and during college 240's and after college 270's.

    Now I am losing weight...im at 261 now and dropping!!!!!!!!
  • Whtmask
    Whtmask Posts: 219 Member
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    When I was in junior year of high school. I went through a lot of depression and also my best friend was an enabler. She was depressed and was very heavy as well. She would buy all my food for me and we'd go out 2-3 times a day, and I started taking after her by ordering the worst meals on the menu. I gained about 60lbs in two years, and 10 years later I am still struggling to get it off.
  • Lorichr
    Lorichr Posts: 54
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    My mid to late thirties I started slowly gaining weight. My metabolism definitely slowed down and my interest and abilities in cooking got greater. That is one of my struggles now as I work to maintain my weight loss; balance my love of cooking and baking with my desire to be fit and healthy.
  • crystalbluewolf13
    crystalbluewolf13 Posts: 197 Member
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    12 years old due to being beaten up in school everyday. Had to learn to hide from the bullies which meant i usually just took something quick to eat encase i had to run away so chocolate or pasties or crisps. Then i got fabulous (can you tell i'm being sarcastic) borderline personality disorder and ended going from a beautiful size 10, to a size 24 and weighing 21st 9!
  • HeidiCooksSupper
    HeidiCooksSupper Posts: 3,831 Member
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    Puberty? No probably before that. I do remember being happy at age 11 when AFTER having my appendix out and being on a liquid diet for a week I "only" weighed 135 lbs. at 5'4". That was probably the last time I weighed that little. I know I weighed 205 when I graduated high school (1969). The first time I joined Weight Watchers was 1973. Each time I did, I got my weight down into the one-hundreds, but far and away, most of my adult life has been spent at two-hundred pounds plus. I seem to hover around 280 if I'm not paying attention. At 63, I think it's time to pay attention!! I want to enjoy as many years in retirement as I was forced to work for a living!
  • Soggynode
    Soggynode Posts: 1,179 Member
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    I am curious as to when/why/how everyone started to gain weight. Was there a specific trigger? Were you in your 20s or 40s? And when you realized it was a real problem to your health.

    Already posted my "when" further up, I just wanted to thank the OP for posting this great topic. This has been one of the most insightful and open threads I've read in a long time. Thanks to everyone for sharing.
  • tolorii
    tolorii Posts: 21 Member
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    The summer I turned 20. I'd just come back from a year spent in Germany where I'd lost about 6kg. But when I came home, even though I was biking to and from work during the week (about 60km p/wk), it was the first summer in a long time that all of my friends were home from uni/travelling so I was drinking quite a lot for those three months. Then I started uni and I've been slowly putting on weight in the three and a half years since.
  • bwogilvie
    bwogilvie Posts: 2,130 Member
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    I was a little overweight as a small child, but I would say that I started packing on the pounds in my teens, when I spent a lot of time reading and watching TV after school, often snacking. It continued in college. I don't have weight records from back then but I probably weighed 180-190 lb. at my heaviest (for then), around 1991.

    I lost about 50-60 lb. in my first few years of grad school by deliberately exercising more, walking as my main form of transportation, and cooking most food from scratch. The exercise was kick-started by trying to jog with a friend; I couldn't go more than a Chicago block without being winded. I got into running regularly, distances up to 25K (but a normal run was 5-10K). When I got married in 1995, I weighed around 137 lb.

    In 1997 I started a new job. I needed to drive to get to work, and I didn't make time for exercise, but I kept eating as I had been. Over the next 11 years, I slowly gained about 85 lb.—just a little bit every year, but it added up, until I was 222 lb. From summer 2008 to the end of 2012 I tried to control it by exercising more and trying to eat less but without calorie counting. I lost a little bit and then fluctuated between 205 and 215 for a couple of years. In January 2013, I realized that what had worked in the 1990s was no longer working with a 45-year-old's metabolism, and I discovered MFP. It has worked very well!
  • cakeribs
    cakeribs Posts: 22
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    This last time, I've gained about 40 pounds since October because a lot of things in my life went south. I wasn't eating enough, I wasn't sleeping, I was VERY stressed, and at night I'd treat myself to ice cream--I couldn't afford to run away from my life, but at least I could look forward to that one solitary treat in my life.

    I now weigh as much as I did when I was 9 months pregnant. That's ridiculous.
  • cookiecutie88
    cookiecutie88 Posts: 1
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    I started (mild) binge eating and fat shaming myself at the age of 12. My main trigger was when my kid brother passed away when I was sixteen. All the lasagnas sent to the house, in the weeks following the funeral, put me into a food "coma". It made me feel better because at least I could stop crying to put all that food in my mouth.

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