I was [overweight] because...

I ate more than my body needed.

Wow ~ I feel like I have lived the same life as all of you!! I think a big reason I began overeating as a child was believe it or not....anxiety. There was a lot of yelling in my household and when I isolated myself from that i found comfort in food. I had alot of friends and was quite active but I never really "excelled" in any organized sports I took part in. Was the tallest girl in class and developed early (I was almost as tall as the teacher in Grade 5).
Unwanted 'male' attention at a young age caused me to "hate" my curves and puberty etc. Then an abusive relationship as a teen and college came along. Then several horrible starvation diets where I would lose a bunch in 3 months, then gain it all back plus some in 2 months. Any stressful life event has caused me to overeat so while food is my greatest "comfort" it has also caused me the greatest DISCOMFORT in all my life because I absolutely HATE how being fat feels.
Thank you all for your posts....I didn't realize how many of us lived such parallel lives....

First reason I am sure. It might be wrong.

1. I had to quit the one thing I loved the most: Riding.

Really, my childhood was a horse barn where I would go every afternoon and have lessons. (Or about every afternoon.) I had to clean stalls. Take care of a horse..Walk out to paster to GET the said horse. Once I quit (we moved away) That life style went out of the window.

Edit: Weekends was getting up, crack of dawn, and going out to feed the horses before the move. Just needed to add that.

2. I was diginosed with Tourette's then put on medication. Let's just say...It didn't work out too well. That with a new life of..not much excerise, starting High school in a pulbic school (was home schooled), and my mom deadly sick..I turned to the only friend I had at the time: Food.

I put on weight and couldn't understand why. Then through the years more weight came on until I was in the upper 230's and couldn't ignore it.

inbetween all of that, I went in and out of depressions where I just...ATE!

So..really lame reasons.

1. I was fed since I was an infant foods that I was not supposed to eat until later. I had a sneaky grandma.

2. My own mother served huge portions every day.

3. Everything we ate had a side dish that consisted of a giant pile of white rice. Now I can't imagine eating white rice every day.

4. I was bought candy and chips at least 5 days of the week.

5. My grandfather had a grocery store and he regaled me by letting me take all the candy I wanted in a bag,

6. I was not interested in sports when I was young and my family was not proactive in getting me involved in any physical activity.

7. My parents worked and I had to spend the days among elderly people who babysat me and who were not very active physically.

8. As a result of spending so much time around adults, I actually found kids boring and therefore hardly played with them.

9. I took medications for asthma.

10. I was put in a weight loss program at 14 with no tools to internalize the changes I had to adjust to and I had a father who would get mad if I only lost a pound. Girls in school would still bully me because I would never look thin enough with my large frame. I was also called a lesbian, junkie Satanist and had stuff thrown at me.

11. Mother gave up trying to get me to lose weight because I had a meltdown and just decided me to eat whatever i wanted.

12. Then I took medications for depression, etc. for no good reason other than I lived in a small, religious town where nothing fun happened and I was stuck co-existing with 2 co-dependent, melodramatic parents and a family that I was not attached to in any way but made me feel like an alien visitor. I took those medications for 8 years and I became a Leviathan.

13. Parents separated while I was away in college, they would not send me money and I survived on food stamps and this girl named Tina who was pregnant and would drag me with her to eat pizza with her boyfriend. Or my best friend's late-night lo-mein noodles from a bag with a glass of pepsi and other kinds of cheap and starchy foods. Sometimes we wouldn't have a source of water in the dorm to cook so we had to eat out. My nutrition was not the best at this period, either.

That pretty much sums up my first 23 years.

when I say my dad got upset at me during the weight-loss programs was if I didn't lose more than a pound PER WEEK

1. I was fed since I was an infant foods that I was not supposed to eat until later. I had a sneaky grandma.

2. My own mother served huge portions every day.

3. Everything we ate had a side dish that consisted of a giant pile of white rice. Now I can't imagine eating white rice every day.

4. I was bought candy and chips at least 5 days of the week.

5. My grandfather had a grocery store and he regaled me by letting me take all the candy I wanted in a bag,

6. I was not interested in sports when I was young and my family was not proactive in getting me involved in any physical activity.

7. My parents worked and I had to spend the days among elderly people who babysat me and who were not very active physically.

8. As a result of spending so much time around adults, I actually found kids boring and therefore hardly played with them.

9. I took medications for asthma.

10. I was put in a weight loss program at 14 with no tools to internalize the changes I had to adjust to and I had a father who would get mad if I only lost a pound. Girls in school would still bully me because I would never look thin enough with my large frame. I was also called a lesbian, junkie Satanist and had stuff thrown at me.

11. Mother gave up trying to get me to lose weight because I had a meltdown and just decided me to eat whatever i wanted.

12. Then I took medications for depression, etc. for no good reason other than I lived in a small, religious town where nothing fun happened and I was stuck co-existing with 2 co-dependent, melodramatic parents and a family that I was not attached to in any way but made me feel like an alien visitor. I took those medications for 8 years and I became a Leviathan.

13. Parents separated while I was away in college, they would not send me money and I survived on food stamps and this girl named Tina who was pregnant and would drag me with her to eat pizza with her boyfriend. Or my best friend's late-night lo-mein noodles from a bag with a glass of pepsi and other kinds of cheap and starchy foods. Sometimes we wouldn't have a source of water in the dorm to cook so we had to eat out. My nutrition was not the best at this period, either.

That pretty much sums up my first 23 years.

when I say my dad got upset at me during the weight-loss programs was if I didn't lose more than a pound PER WEEK

And I'm STILL overweight but nothing so major as before, thank God

1 - I was always very thin as a kid/teen. I had a single mom, and we were poor and all that but my mom was (almost obsessively) committed to eating healthy and never kept any junk in the house. We always ate balanced meals comprised of whole foods, very little processed stuff. It was never about weight or dieting, always about nutrition. This was good but the meals were often BORING and repetitive. There's not a lot of room for experimenting with different cuisines when you can't afford all the special ingredients.

2 - As a teen I had somehow managed to build up a pretty gnarly guilt complex around food for which self denial was the answer (mind over matter, if others have to starve I should know what it feels like to wait a few hours and manage to tough it out.) This was a way to have power and feel morally superior. I became a vegetarian out of guilt and this fed right into the denial habit. If restaurants or cafeterias didn't have options for me, I'd have nothing or something very inadequate. (Note: I was never anorexic. It was never about body image. I was never trying to lose weight. I always ATE but often very little throughout the day until dinner time.)

3 - When I moved out on my own I had the freedom to get away from the boring meals I was used to at home and treat myself to anything I wanted. Large slices of pizza were $1 each in the city I lived, so 2 of those was an obvious lunch or dinner option. This was the beginning of a pattern but it would be a couple years until it really caught up to me.

4 - I was struggling to eat *enough* to actually pay attention to my body and eat when I needed food instead of resenting my appetite and willing it away. Allowing myself more pricey, richer foods was a way to take pleasure in eating instead of hating and resenting it. I just went a little overboard with larger and fattier cuts of meat, butter, cheese, nachos, etc. Unfortunately this blended in with old habits so instead of having a more varied diet I found myself still struggling to make myself cook during the day, then gorging on rich meals in the evening, when I felt completey starving, to make up it.

5 - On top of that, in an effort to be more social I ended up drinking more beer. I also moved to a city with much poorer restaurant options, and stopped riding my bike because the roads and drivers there were scary.

6 - My strategy for making sure I'd eat lunch and not have that crash was to allow myself to eat whatever was at hand or appealed to me. Lunch was most easily found at restaurants. When I lived out west that was usually sushi or banh mi sandwiches, but when I moved out east the options were worse and it was often burgers or poutine.

7 - Slow and steady this contributed to the spare 30-40 lbs I'm trying to work on now... The back and forth between indulgence and denial is the problem I'm trying to face. I'm still working on this lunch thing - how to keep my blood sugar steady and feel full after meals without having to reach for the high fat, high carb foods that are so immediately satisfying. How to not just revert back to the denial thing because that was extremely unhealthy, both physically and mentally... plus, it is the source of cravings.

Why does it feel so hard to find a healthy balance with food? It's nuts. It's so easy in theory, I understand completely what I need to do, I like and even PREFER healthy food (even when I'm eating a giant dinner to make up for that crash, that's usually a more or less reasonably balanced meal.) This timing thing is my real challenge.

1. I relied on sports to keep me fit and didn't change my eating habits after I quit swimming. I swam 5 days a week for 3-5 hours straight. I ate what I wanted when I wanted and didn't gain weight. I mean big breakfast, big lunch, cheese fries right after breakfast and still had dinner.

2. I suffered from depression in high school: My first love broke my heart yadah yadah blah blah hooplah...It was hard. 40 pounds of ice cream, pizza, pasta and soda hard.

3. COLLEGE: No explanation needed.

4. No "real" knowledge of nutrition.

1) I was overweight until the age of 13, when I had enough of that crap and started working out, eating less, joined two sports teams, etc. Within a year I was down almost 100 pounds and felt great. Then, I turned 16 and started working my first job (fast food). So...

2) Eating fast food daily, sometimes for all of my meals. Yeah. Subway, Taco Bell, McDonald's, no matter how you slice or adjust it, is not good for you and is high in calories.

3) Had to quit sports due to the job, and eventually made excuses to stop exercising entirely. Overtime or no, I just "didn't have time"...

4) But I had enough time to master all of my video games over and over, and troll the Internet (which is a series of tubes, haha).

5) Oh, and heartbreak from family deaths, depression, breakups, stress at work, etc. etc. brought out my love for Little Debbie and Ben and Jerry's. can't tell you how many nights I bought a whole pint of [insert ice cream flavor here] and ate the whole damn thing.

But all of these things I'm changing now

1. I like food
2. I don't like exercise.
That about sums it up.

I ate too much and sat on my *kitten*.