What experience ultimately convinced you it was time to make a change?

These stories are more poignant than I was expecting. I have a lot of respect for you all. I have two reasons. The first is losing a childhood friend to a stroke last year and refusing to take my relatively healthy but obese body for granted any longer. The second is that I'm finishing my masters this semester and going out into the job market. I don't want my weight to be a detrimental factor while I'm looking for a job.

I'm not overweight but i realised i hadn't been looking after my health enough and needed to take better care of my internal heath when i was unable to keep up with my 2yo niece dancing to the wiggles

I honestly don't think I had an exact trigger. I didn't have a "final straw" moment despite being overweight most of my life and experiencing all of the bullying in school people here have mentioned, seeing how awful I looked in photos, knowing the health risks especially as I aged, my father being diagnosed with diabetes, my aunt suffering from thyroid issues, etc. And I guess I am very grateful I didn't have a terrible health experience as a wake-up call because I very well could have let it go that far. I just woke up one day in 2014 and decided to do a teatox (yourtea.com), and at the same time, I was feeling so good and so energetic that I decided to just start working out too and changing my diet and food tracking. I guess my "trigger" was finally feeling good, which was rare for me. I have struggled on and off with depression and panic attacks (as well as social anxiety at times) my entire life, and for a small period of time I felt myself come out of it - about a year after a devastating break-up when I was finally single after 13 years and finally focused on myself for once - and decided to use that new found energy and seize the moment before it went away and I lost the motivation again.

I know this sounds silly but the more time I spent on Instagram and food blogs (I've always had a passion for cooking), the more I became inspired to do this. I think the motivation was always there but I was very unsure how to go about executing it and just having that "pick up and start" moment; I felt so overwhelmed every time I thought about losing weight because I have more to lose than the average person. It's not just "the last 10 pounds" for me. But anyway, I was following lots of healthy food bloggers (Oh She Glows, for example), body coaches, fitness trainers... they were all giving me ideas for what foods I should be eating (a lot of trainers post photos of what they eat throughout the day which I found very helpful!), what exercises I could or should be doing, etc. I then started reading a lot more about diet and exercise on other sources. I think as my knowledge of fitness and health increased, so too did my desire to execute a healthier lifestyle. It made it less scary to have an idea of what I was doing before I was doing it, if that makes any sense. And then a couple months later I was seeing a nutritionist, which helped even more.

I've barely lost 20lbs in the last four months, and I have lost and gained the same one or two pounds so many times despite being so consistent... so it's been very slow and frustrating, but I am still as dedicated as I was when I first started, despite all the hurdles.

Being diagnosed with insulin resistance.

I've lost 66 pounds and just got the okay on Monday to come off the Metformin.