What made me start this WOE? One word.. Diabetes!! When my doctor told me I had diabetes and immediately put me on medicine I FINALLY got serious about weight loss... Not that I am glad I am a diabetic but glad something snap... I am not on medicine anymore and I feel great!!

Juls

I decided to finally loose weight last november. Me and my family had recently got back from a weekend trip to vegas and took some photos. When I looked at the photos of me I finally realized how fat I was. My stomach was huge!!! I felt sorry for myself for awhile and then realized something had to change. Now I'm half way to my goal and those photos are what keep me going!!!!

When I got to my all-time high of 170-ish and my size 16 pants were difficult to button I decided to do something about it. This was around 1997. I started changing my bad eating habits one meal at a time (this was in my LF days) and started walking. I lost down into the 120's over a 2-year period, just eating better (although I did go through the mantra "a growling stomach is good, a growling stomach is good...." due to my low-fat eating) and a huge increase in exercise.

In 1999 I went to Europe for a week and started a weight-gain trend that leveled off around 135-140 pounds. I joined e-Diets and starved on a 1300 calorie diet to try and get back down into the 120's, unsuccessfully. Then two years ago I was at a technology conference out of town and suffering during all the long seminars and workshops because my size 8 jeans were too tight and it was downright uncomfortable to sit all day. The first evening there I found a bookstore, bought DANDR, and started to read it there in the hotel room. That was it for me. When I got back home I got rid of the carbs and loaded up on the right foods.

It took me two tries though, to get it right. When I lost the weight the first time around I foolishly thought I was "done" with the diet, went back to my old eating habits, and the jeans got too tight again. Last summer I started again, realizing that this isn't a diet, but a WOL.

I have been BIG since junior high. I have gained and lost at least a thousand pounds in my lifetime. I went from one extreme to another trying to maintain my weight while I was in the Navy. I was a member of the enemies camp for over five years after reading and following Dr Neil Banards book, Food for Life, which convinced me to try a path that led me to be a vegan for 3 years and a vegetarian for 2 more. I did lose over 100lbs as a vegan and maintained it as a vegetarian over the entire span BUT, and thats a big BUT. I was often hungry and never completely lost my cravings for meat. Additionally I seemed to have lost a lot of the strength and muscle tone I had previously had. Since I had tried the vegetarian thing strictly from a health standpoint and not an animal rights standpoint I didn’t think twice when I fell in love with and married a non-vegetarian. It was only a matter of months before I was eating the combination of a high fat and high carb typical American diet that she ate. Within one year of giving up the very strict vegetarian lifestyle I had been living I gained the 100 pounds back. Thirty pounds or a few months later I was unable to weigh myself because my scale and most other public scales only went to 300lbs. At this point I pretty much just gave up and tricked myself into thinking I was always going to be big because every time I tried to go back to my “Healthy Vegan” style of living I just did not have the willpower to stick with it when I was hungry most of the time. I did manage to quit smoking during this time and thought that an incredible healthy accomplishment. I continued to eat and eat and gain and gain until one day when I went in to donate blood and they refused to take my blood because my blood pressure was 184 over 110. I easily convinced myself that it was just an unlucky reading and my BP really was just a little high. Well when I went to try and donate blood every eight weeks for the next year my BP would either be way too high or just under the required diastolic pressure of 100 to allow me to give blood. This depressed me but I honestly thought I was trapped, forever doomed to be way overweight because I just couldn’t force myself to go back to eating tiny little meals or only eating vegetables. In the mean time had I watched several of my friends lose weight over the years on the Atkins program but refused to give it a serious look because I just knew it had to be unhealthy to eat only meat and cheese from the teachings and beliefs I had learned as a vegetarian. It wasn’t until two of my friends went on Atkins under a Doctors care and lost 60lbs each that I started doing some serious research into it and BOY was I an uneducated idiot all along. Ironically a lot of the principles Dr Atkins followers talked about actually made perfect sense. As a vegetarian I had avoided processed foods opting for whole foods and green vegitables and here this “nut” Dr Atkins, whom I had ridiculed, had a following that was saying some of the same exact things on the Atkins website about a lot of food products that I had read in the vegan books over the years. Well to make a long story short one night I was feeling particularly depressed and did that one thing I should do more often and prayed to a higher power (God in my case) and asked for guidance in reducing my weight and living a better life so that I could be around to see my five year old son graduate from school. The following weekend my wife says to me that she is thinking about trying the South Beach Diet that her friend has lost weight on. Knowing from my research this was also a low carb diet I decided I would try the Atkins Program at the same time and went out and bought the Atkins book and read it then started following the program. Within the first week I could tell the difference in my energy levels and I started walking and I wanted to be up and doing things after I got home from work besides just eating dinner and taking a nap in the recliner. So far its been two months and everything is going great for me I have lost more than 4 inches around my waist and around my hips and 2 inches around my chest. Because I did not search out a scale which measured over 300lbs before I started the program I cant tell you exactly how much weight I have lost but I now weigh 320 and I my friends and family can only guess that my weight was well over 350 before I started but you are welcome to judge for yourself in my before and after pics.

I know this has been a long winded story but I hope that my words will help someone else who has given up and felt powerless like I did to at least do the research themselves before they blindly believe that low carb eating is unhealthy or that that the only key to weight loss is moderation. This may be the key for some, but its certainly not the situation that one key fits every lock in the world.

I have only been a member of this website for a couple of weeks but I want to thank you all for the support you have unknowingly given me already.

Joe

I was sitting at work... wearing a pair of pants that I've been wearning for about 18 months.. and I went to the bathroom and when I undid them I noticed pink lines impressed into my skin at the seem of the zipper and snap.. and it was extreamly uncomfortable!

I realised when walking back to my desk that I didn't have room to pinch them off my skin at the thigh.

That night I went home and looked in the mirror and saw that my stomach was huge.. I had a bigger stomach that my pregnant best friend! Sooo depressing.

So, a few days later I bought DANDR and 22lbs is history!

Much more energy and overall good feeling then I've had since I was 10 yrs old!!

Carina

I got tired of being fat. I've been overweight since I was 10, with a few single years of losing (then regaining).

I don't want to die an early death from obesity or diabetes.

Easy enough.

M

When nothing in my closet fit except for 3 pairs of work pants, and a few tops. I always gain below the waist, so when my shirts were getting tight I knew it was time to do something. Also I haven't been able to wear my wedding ring for 3 months.

I have had problems with weight since I was 16. I probably was pretty normal, but in my family, there was pressure to lose weight. If I weighed now what I weighed when I was 16 I would be thrilled. BTW, I am about the same height now as I was then.

I have a few odd motivations. First, I don't like how I look. I am busty and I hope that some loss will help in that region. I am short, so even being a little overweight makes you look heavier, I am convinced.

I've looked at some of the moms my kids go to school with. As far as weight goes, I'm kind of in the middle, but again, shortness I think makes it worse. I adore my son and I think he deserves a healthy, better looking mom. For some reason, I don't want to embarass him. The funny thing is, that I am not the heaviest one around, yet I feel this way. And, he has said nothing to make me think that I am embarassing him, either.

My husband could care less how I look. He is tall and skinny. It is very easy for him to lose weight. He cut out sugar and dropped 10 lbs. I rarely ate sugar and it made no difference in my weight. It's the carbs that seem to make the biggest difference.

There is this funny underlying sexual component to the whole thing. The only person I want to please is my husband, but I can't help thinking that I will attact the attention of men. (How humble of me.) However, I do have a C-cup figure. I'm not saying I'll have to fight them off, or that I would ever be unfaithful, but I don't want to deal with it. However, I have to get over that -- it's being scared. |

I also have a developmentally disabled daughter. She doesn't care how I look (she's non-verbal). But, I have to be healthy to care for her. I have had some muscle problems due to lifting her. I am hoping that by getting my weight down, I will also exercise more.

I am also tired of clothing problems. I cannot afford new clothes just because I don't fit in the old ones. I just can't afford it.

Lots of reasons, in a nut-shell. I am probably pretty screwed up. Have a field day analyzing me.

I was at my sister's house for Christmas dinner, like every christmas. My brother, who has always been over weight was sitting across from me. He looked at me and said "so how does it feel to be fat." I knew he was right. I had done Atkins twice before. I would lose the weight and then go back to my old way of eating. Which was basically self defeating. His remark hit hard. I decided it was time to do something about my weight gain. That was two years ago. I will never go back to eating like I use to. It's Atkin's for life for me.

In summer 2003 my boyfriend's parents started Atkins and lost 20 pounds each. In January 2004 my mom started Atkins and started losing weight (and she had been on diets ever since I could remember, never having much success). In February 2004 my boyfriend's chiropractor recommended he eat low carb as it might help with some of the problems he's been having (though he is by no means overweight). Since so many people we knew were eating low carb I decided I would give it a try since that way I would be able to help my boyfriend stick with it and my mom wouldn't have to buy tempting foods when I came to visit.

In the few months that I've been eating low carb I have lost weight and begun to feel healthier than I ever have in the past.

Wow...surprised with the turnout in this thread. Let's hear some more!

i was tired of being the FAT lady at every function we went to or always having to wear the same fat clothes because nothing else fit

We took the picture for our family Christmas card, and I looked at it on the 19 inch computer monitor and was HORRIFIED! I made DH take another pic with me holding my little guy in front of me so that nobody in the family would see how awful I looked.

This was "rock bottom." I'd been doing low-fat, low-cal since DS#2 was born in 1/2002, but it just wasn't working. I exercised like a madwoman, and still nothing. Thank God for a nice friend who suggested low-carbing. I was beginning to lose hope that I'd ever feel healthy again and was so depressed. My cortisol was WAY above normal range and I was so stressed.

Thank God I found this way of eating!!!!

A lot of the comments before me are reasons that I decided to finally do something about my weight and start LCing (pictures, DH and kids) but one particular thing really stands out - my youngest son's birthday party. My middle son bumped into me and knocked me off balance and my brother in law said to him "you should be a hockey player" my son asked him why and my BIL answered "well, if you can knock HER off balance you could be a great defenceman". I laughed it off, pretended that it didn't bother me but I was CRUSHED. I've actually got tears in my eyes right now thinking about that and it was 7 months ago. I've been the fattest at family gatherings on my husband's side since we met - that's including his mother and grandmother - ALL the relatives, both my husbands' brothers' wives are slim, etc. I'm just tired of always being the fattest at school functions, with friends, at work.... I'm ashamed to admit that when my younger sister was pregnant last year and gained a huge amount of weight (and hasn't lost it - he's 18 months old now) I was actually HAPPY/RELIEVED that I wasn't the fattest anymore I'm ashamed of myself for that.

BUT, doing good and working hard at this. Next step is to do more exercise!!! Right now just walking a lot but I want to get back to the gym or at least use my treadmill at home and do my Pilates videos and other workout videos that I have at home.

Take care, everybody, and thanks for the thread Toddzilla!

N.