Failure stories for a change!

The real failures aren't on MFP or even trying anymore. those of us who still ahe weightloss as goal and haven't acheived it YET, are still here trying.

Denise (who's started and quit dieting more times than shoudl be legal)

Nobody's perfect...but what would be the point of a "failure" story?

I can tell you that I've quit Weight Watchers after 5 months of constantly feeling like I was starving and resenting the hell out of all the fruits and veggies that had zero point values to them. It seemed like I would always be munching on a carrot / apple / lettuce leaf and thinking to myself, "I could be eating a burger right now, but I'm not. I could be losing weight, but I'm not because I'm always eating. This food is supposed to be healthy, but I hate it". It wasn't helping at all. So I've stopped it and come here. As you can see by my sig, it's working out rather better

My biggest failure story: Getting sucked into MFP all day and not accomplishing anything. Crap...that happened again today

hahahaha meeeeeeee too

my first gain was last month. i gained 4 pounds and i was like f it!! but i still ate well and realized i changed alot of bad habbits and actually prefer to eat better things. After a few days of poor me i got re motivated and am back on track ready to kick *kitten*!

My biggest failure story: Getting sucked into MFP all day and not accomplishing anything. Crap...that happened again today

This happens to me too.. ahhh...

I'll say that before MFP, I deluded myself into thinking I was eating healthy for years. After all, I rarely eat out, I never eat fast food, I eat mostly vegetarian and my GF and I cook ALL of our own meals. That means I didn't have to contend w/ processed foods and fast food--and that I knew every food source that I was eating. This led to a very slow net gain of five pounds or so every year, for the past 4-5 years. So slow in fact, that never realized it until stepping in front of the mirror and being honest with myself.

What I learned from MFP was portion control--the idea of eating food to reach a daily energy (kcal) and overall nutritional goal. I now find it a foreign concept that I used to eat a half-wok of stir fry, or half skillet of carne asada, or an entire half of a pork tenderloin, etc. Everyone has various failures and success stories, but MFP (and the MFP community) provide so many individual tools and resources for a healthy lifestyle that if you stick with it--I mean REALLY stick with it (5 Cal piece of gum? LOG IT! A couple leaves of spinach on your sandwich? LOG IT!)--you can't help but succeed.

I have been on MFP for awhile and have never really lost any weight, however MFP stays in the back of my mind. I will stay off for a few days, not counting etc., but I do come back to it. I jsut have to make my mind up to do it and stick with it. I do make more of an effort to try stay on track, especially lately - upped my exercise, etc. and I read the sucess stories enough too for more motivation

I failed at both Weight Watchers (lost 80, then re-gained 40) and Medifast (lost 50, then re-gained 80). I'm hoping MFP will be the program I succeed at.

I think the fact that we are here IS our failure story....we don't wanna re-hash that...we wanna move forward with success stories!

We do good when we decide that failure is not an option. If I don't meet a goal, I change it. I refuse to fail.

Personally I think this is a pretty good thread idea, because at this point there's sort of an idea that the same stuff works for everybody, and I have come away disenchanted more than a couple times when I've asked for help figuring out why I couldn't lose weight doing what seemed to be 90% of things right. First I wasn't eating enough, then I was eating too much, or people would pick out the very small amount of unhealthy food I was eating and point to that as a reason, but then I hear in other threads how you don't have to be perfect all the time, just good. Well, here I am, and all the motivation in the world from success stories hasn't helped me. Personally I'd think that a few more "this is me, I can't lose the weight, I'm still trying but wtf?" stories would at least form a sense of camaraderie, and potentially help point out common problems. So yeah, I like this thread!

ETA my failure story: I came back from a master's program abroad which involved a dissertation, which led to underexercising and unhealthy/stress eating. I come back home and decide to lose the weight. I tried a couple times before finding MFP, and lost about 8 pounds (of the 40ish i'd gained over the course of the last two years, especially 4 of those months). I came to MFP, started in November, lost five pounds, gained it back over Thanksgiving/Christmas season, started back on MFP on January 1st. I ran a mile every day, I ate, well too low of calories, but mostly healthy. and lost the 5 pounds again in the first two weeks of January. Then I stopped. So, I increased my calories, gradually, until I was eating 1400 a day (I'm 5'4" and 160). I burned out on the running in February, but I restarted a few weeks later, also incorporating other forms of exercise, including resistance. Then I decided my metabolism might be messed up, so I ate at my tdee (1700) for two weeks to try to repair it. Then I went back down to 1400 (BMR), and really worked out regularly. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then worse than nothing. Suddenly I have started to gain back, and now I've regained back the 5 pounds. I am at zero lost and at a loss of what to do, so I just keep doing what I'm doing, weigh myself as little as possible, and hope that when I do weigh myself, the scale will have moved down, not up.

Weeeeeeell 2 years ago after my divorce I went from 330 to 245 (on purpose). I met the girl of my dreams and I am now at 305ish... I quit what I started and now I am paying for it again, although this time I am in love and happy. Last year I tried again but slipped 2 discs and never got back on the horse until recently.

Saying this just deepens my resolve for the day. Thank you for posting this topic

When I got married, some 11 years ago, I weighed about 185 lbs, give or take. I didn't really pay attention to it, as I had been thin for years (I lost about 70 lbs when I was in my 20s and had nothing but time on my hands, being an overweight single guy). So, after going through the roller coaster once, I just sort of forgot about healthy eating. Then I was diagnosed with Graves' disease and hyperthyroidism, and my weight dropped to 160 (which is seriously underweight for me at 6'3"). After getting that under control, I did what anyone would do. I overate. Constantly. I blamed it on life, stress, the wife, the kid, my dog, my job, everything but what the real issue was...myself.

So I went from 185 to almost 275, and wouldn't have even changed that had I not had a rude awakening. I decided to run to the mailbox. All of 100 ft away from my house. By the time I got there I was winded and had to walk back. Now I'm back to a "normal" weight, and working to my ideal weight again.

What people have to understand is that without failure, there is no such thing as success. If we didn't fail, we wouldn't need to lose/gain/maintain our weight.

Personally I think this is a pretty good thread idea, because at this point there's sort of an idea that the same stuff works for everybody, and I have come away disenchanted more than a couple times when I've asked for help figuring out why I couldn't lose weight doing what seemed to be 90% of things right. First I wasn't eating enough, then I was eating too much, or people would pick out the very small amount of unhealthy food I was eating and point to that as a reason, but then I hear in other threads how you don't have to be perfect all the time, just good. Well, here I am, and all the motivation in the world from success stories hasn't helped me. Personally I'd think that a few more "this is me, I can't lose the weight, I'm still trying but wtf?" stories would at least form a sense of camaraderie, and potentially help point out common problems. So yeah, I like this thread!

I agree with you completely that people (here, and elsewhere) treat nutrition like more of a science than it actually is. Health is also such a subjective thing: it's possible for people at higher weights to be and feel happier than people who are closer to the "correct" weight for their height.

My failure story is this. I used to weigh in the mid-300s. Like most teenagers, I ate like a teenager, but a family history of obesity meant that every soda or slice of pizza went straight to my hips. I lost 75 lbs. on my own--largely through the kind of starvation diet that I wouldn't recommend to anyone, after I tried just about everything else out there with very limited results--and kept it off through a healthier diet and lots of exercise. But I could not lose additional weight without going down to starvation again. (Fewer than 1000 calories per day, and at least an hour of intense exercise.) So this past fall, I had Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery. I've lost another 70 lbs. I feel pretty good, but it's basically like living during a famine all of the time now. I still have to exercise a lot more (and hour of bike riding and another half hour of high intensity aerobics) and eat a lot less (fewer than 1200 calories per day) than my BMR would dictate. Fortunately, the part of my stomach that generates hunger hormones has been cut out, so I can do it without feeling like I'm going to murder someone. But I think a lot of people make a mistake when they say that success is just a matter of counting calories and getting up off the couch. Before my surgery--and to some extent, after it--losing weight has been at least a part-time job. I do it because I don't want to die at the age of 50, like all of my other relatives, but I can see why people struggle. It's a lot of time to put into something that other people achieve effortlessly. I'm a graduate student, and have a much more flexible schedule than other people. And I would never, ever attach moral blame to someone who couldn't do it. I've seen a lot of people who've lost weight on here do exactly that ("Like, OMG, all you have to do is exercise! Get up off your butt!") and it's disgusting and tone deaf.

My failure, luckily, wasn't with the body weight. It was a failure to advance. I did decide that while being lazy I was going to continue eating as my new habit (MFP) dictated. A little over a month ago my wife had a medical procedure that comes with some emotional difficulty. So for the following week I skipped the gym and took our daughter to the park and tried to keep her out of her mothers hair. That wasn't a problem, and was actually rather fun. The problem came from day care. Baby girl had been in a house with one other kid for day care for the previous year, so there weren't too many germs running around.

Well The week prior to the wifes procedure we switched her over to a local day care that more resembles a learning center. Wonderful facility except for the fact that kids get sick, and a lot of kids together are going to share a lot of germs. I got sick, the wife got sick, I got sick again..bla...bla...bla.

Yes it is an excuse, I could have pushed through on several occasions and worked out, but I chose not to for various reasons, and then i would catch another cold. I was also distracted by gearing up for the shooting season (competition, not hunting). New state, new club, new gear...took a few days to get all organized so I could jump into the match calendar.

My equipment is now fitted, my calendar is decided, I am no longer sick (minus some alergies I didn't know about before moving here), the wife is ready to get back to the gym herself and I am wanting; needing to get going again. It is shocking how tired one can feel after being out of the gym for what seams like such a short ammount of time.

Luckily I didn't gain anything back during my break but dang, I still have 54 pounds to go!!