What is your WHY?

My "why" is my daughter. She is 11 years old now and everything she does, everything she eats reminds me of myself when I was her age. Food has always been my comfort and my friend and I just want her to have a better relationship with food than I ever did. I never played sports mostly because I was afraid to fail due to my size. In soccer last year my daughter was treated horribly due to her size. She loved soccer for four years, now she refuses to play. I just don't want her to look to her future and see me. I want her to see that anything is possible when you are willing to work hard and make the commitment. Of course, I have to learn how to do this myself.

I didn't scroll through all the responses, so I will never know if mine's original, but my answer regardless is "why not?" You are here on this earth for however long God deems you will be here, so why not live the best life possible. For me, this means eating natures bounty, something that not only taste good but will also nourish my body and two to challenge myself athletically. After all we have these dynamic wonderful machines in our bodies and we should use them in a beneficial way and not abuse them. My analogy: I am a Porsche 911 or a Mazerati-(I do know there are more elite automobiles out there) so I'm using premium fuel, getting the engine checked regularly, and opening up on the road on occasion to see what she will do, but no crash and burn. It's funny how people baby cars and material things and do the complete opposite with their one and only bodies.It may seem selfish, but I'm doing it for me, and the icing on the cake is my family don't have to worry about my health and well being and I get to live to see them grow.

I am losing weight because:
* I want my children to have a good role model for health. I don't feel like I'll be able to encourage them to eat healthy and exercise when I don't do it myself. (My son is 21 months old and my wife is 5 months pregnant with another.)
* I want to feel healthy and avoid medical problems later on in life. I'm 28 and feel like I'm rapidly approaching an age where weight related conditions will start to affect me.
* I want it to be easier to ride my bicycle into work. Lugging 180lbs of me would be easier than 250lbs of me.
* My wife managed to lose a bunch of weight and I'm jealous.

My why goes beyond wanting to look good in shorts or have 6 pack abs.

Mine doesn't. I just want to look hawt. All other bonuses are simply fringe benefits.

What a great way to evaluate your reasons for persevering! I have several why's ,the first of which spurred me on this journey. I took my daughter to a carnival and the ferris wheel was about the only thing I could manage. More selfishly, I do not want to become my mother. She is dependent upon someone for feedings,bathing, transportation and all because she is content to accept this as her life. She's lucky though because my father is a saint. I am a single mom and if something happens to me, that's it! Not ready to throw in the towel at 39. I WILL NOT ENTER 40 AS THIS SAME PERSON!!

My 'Why' ... this is something I read through a few pages and looked at people's 'why's and honestly, I really thought about this as to why i wanted to lose weight. There are many reasons.

- To feel better about myself
- To get healthier
- To not feel like a failure as a person
- To keep up and play with my nephews and nieces
- To be able to bend over without being so wide legged
- To prove that I can do it
- To prove everyone wrong

Those are my reasoning's why I want to lose the weight. Notice my first two are the most important to me as being 470 lbs is not healthy at all and with my medications I don't think I will ever be off them so I need to manage them with my weight. I need to gain control of this before I spiral out of control and my biggest fear is reality.

I want to live the healthy lifestyle (vegan) because of my obese mother, not encouraged enough to lose weight, my sister, who believes skinny is good and often suffers from depression, my dad who has this violence desire (just desire thank God) towards the animals and the whole Plus-size industry who makes people think that to be obese is good despite all the depressions, illnesses and so on, then on the other hand the same companies try to sell you products that are for losing weight (because let's be truthful, obese doesn't mean you're happy with what you eat).. I would go on and on, but I think that most people would think that I am aggressive or radical, though I really have no hate towards people or their lifestyle, but the diet and obese industry. Anyway, I guess my biggest inspiration to live healthy is my family!

Amazing post... I have a lot of whys but here are the main ones.

1. I want to be comfortable with myself when I look in the mirror.
2. I want the endurance that is above average. I want to excel when I go out with friends on physical adventures.
3. I want to stay in regular clothing stores. My weight was getting to the point where it was a real possibility that I wouldn't be able to fit into anything my favorite stores offered.
4. I didn't like the way people looked at me when I walked into a restaurant or clothing store and I was around slender friends.
5. My health.
6. Encouraging others. If I can do it so can you.
7. The CHALLENGE!! I love to see how much better I can become each week

Extremely cool-- thank you for posting this thread!

My why is that at age 61, plastic surgery pretty much head-to-toe is my only hope of looking beautiful again, because I am 61 years old. I have endured excruciating poverty my entire adult life. So I enter contests, sweepstakes and free online lotteries desperately hoping for a win. I cannot look good at ANY weight without plastic surgery-- menopause redistributed my weight even though my weight didn't change, and turned me into a matronly blob.

But I know that I must be at my best weight FOR plastic surgery, because if I lose or gain after plastic surgery it would ruin the results.

So I need to lose probably between 5 and 9 pounds. I am @ 121 pounds @ 5' 3 1/2." I plan to begin my diet within the next several days. I will fine-tune my goal to an exact number on the scale when I see that I am at the optimum weight for plastic surgery.

The marvelous, wondrous, wonderful thing about dieting is that you are in complete control of choosing and reaching that magic number in that scale. Except for that, and coloring our hair, what else can we control about how age destroys our looks? EXCEPT for thousands and thouands of $$$$$$ worth of plastic surgery?