If you are 100kgs or over, how did you get there?

[JustCiri]

It's a very genuine question I am curious about looking at all the various posts about weight loss and MJ.
I am genuinely curious to know about how do people get to that sort of weight and any piece of advice from their own experience. I used to be very lean but I am 2 stones heavier now but still in 60-70kgs range and trying to lose weight. I am from an ethnicity which doesn't gains much weight so even this weight is lots for me.

Congratulations on your weight loss, it must be so hard but you should be very proud. I went through a phase of being constantly hungry but started eating more proteins and it seems to get bit better now.

Stress

Everyone has a reason. Or do you consider some people have only excuses?

My post is totally non judgemental and at no point did I say anything about making excuses.

I used to be 136kg, surprisingly I was still pretty fit at that weight. I used to walk a lot, go to exercise classes ad hoc, ran around after my 1 year old. I was that size solely due to the amount I ate, takeaways, full binge and purge cycles, sitting and munching a load of sweets and chocolate in front of the TV in the evenings. I am 70kgs now which is a bmi of 24. I don't move much more than I did then (I've always been active) but I don't eat a lot and avoid sugar as much as possible. My nan used to call sugar white death, I don't think she was wrong.

If anything, this post will help others to understand about the issues people face leading to weight gain which isn't as simple as just eating and exercising.

If you're genuinely interested OP and not just goading, there's a whole trend on tiktok and insta reels of people making videos about this very topic, covering what they would eat in a typical day if significantly overweight (and sometimes with an 'after' of what they eat while losing/having lost) weight and the upshot is it's frighteningly easy to eat a huge amount calories in a day especially if you have a lot of processed/takeaway/ready made food or a sweet tooth, and for a small sedentary woman if you eat very palatable food you can take in at least double your needed intake without even feeling that full or satisfied. On the one hand, it's elementary chemistry, take in more than you burn, you'll have excess, but on the other (in the real world, not MN land when you're supposed to feel stuffed after a sniff of lettuce leaf), 3000 cals doesn't even seem like a huge amount of food and can feel like a sensible enough diet for someone who has a lot else going on in your life, such as...

A typical day of one of those videos is something like cereal or a pastry for breakfast plus a takeaway coffee, protein bar or cereal bar as a mid morning snack, sandwich with a can of pop and crisps for lunch, couple of biscuits or handful of sweets in the afternoon, and a supermarket pizza with salad and dressing for dinner (plus snaffle leftovers from the kids tea), couple of glasses of wine and/or half a tub of Ben and Jerry's on the sofa in the evening. No-one would think that's an absolutely obscene days eating (MN batshittery aside) and indeed it isn't but if you make the higher calorie choices e.g. full sugar coke not diet, creamy mayo dressing, latte coffee with flavoured syrup) it could easily top 3000 cals or even more. If you eat that much consistently everyday you will gain weight unless you're enormously tall and muscley and/or very physically active. And of course it's a bit of a vicious cycle where once already overweight you can feel locked out of a lot of physical activity and/or stressed and distressed by your body and not very inclined to nourish it with whole foods etc. Or you can feel great, TBH that kind of diet is very delicious and very easy so even if you're a good cook and enjoy fruit and veg and so forth it's not always very easy to give all the processed hyper palatable stuff up...

I’m not anymore, in the normal bmi (just!) but a combo of I basically ate my feelings and ate to deal with trauma combined with pcos and just loving carbs, I could eat literally bowls of pasta, a ridiculous number of sandwiches etc

PCOS and emotional eating - had several bereavements a lot earlier than most people do.

I’ve been 137kg at my heaviest - it was a mixture of moving to a new city, no routine, everything was within a five minute walk from the flat, weirdo canal rapist at the time stopped me running and cycling out on the trails and my new, sedentary job kept me 50-odd hours a week and gave me enough money for takeouts and junk food. Moved to the countryside, started exercising and cooking healthily again and dropped the weight.

I’ve gone back up recently - pregnant, hypermobile so had to stop working out as much, major house renovation and can’t cook for the last couple of months, had to stop preworkouts/caffeine/all stimulants and so constantly hungry, way more sedentary, new job holding me 70hrs+ a week - shot from 87kg up to 135kg again over the pregnancy. It’ll come off during maternity leave.

Ethnicity will have something to do with it though. I’m 6ft and from hefty German peasant stock. I went too far and lost down to 76kg and was passing out when I tried to exercise, ate less than 700cals a day, you could see all my ribs, my periods messed up…I looked emaciated and spindly. At 84-87kg, I look more ‘normal’.

So your ‘heftier build’ is still at least 10kg lighter than my ‘dangerously underweight’ one. So it’s always going to be easier for me to break the 100kg barrier than for you to.

I was 140kg a year ago. I got there because I was actually a greedy so and so, with no comprehension of food being fuel. I ate too much, the wrong stuff and drank too much too. For years. The heavier I got, the harder it was to exercise and the more weight would go on. I stopped trying.
I’m now 88kg. I’m running a half marathon in 5 weeks time and my relationship with food is a million miles away.
what I will say is this - be very very careful judging people for being heavy. It is so easy to end up there.

an eating disorder

If I'm bored, lonely, stressed, I reach for the carbs.

I'm disabled and I think I try to eat my grief for the things I didn't get in my life because of my disability.

Stress, ASD undiagnosed, childhood trauma, poverty, grief, more stress, and caring for others before myself for decades, turning to alcohol for escape which piled on even more weight.

Was 122kg now slowly losing, down to 116kg. Was pre-diabetic, my blood sugars now in normal range. For some people weight is the weight of what they have been through. Healing takes time.

Depression. Comfort eating. Trauma response.

It's remarkably easy to get fat.

Mounjaro is the only reason it's improving. I'm nearly 6 stone down with another 4 stone to go.

I gained 20kg over three years or so.

Slight overeating every day - like PP mentioned, a sugary coffee here, a takeout there…

Using the car much, much more after having twins. I was no longer pushing 30kg of babies, pram and kit up and down a hill 2-3 times a day.

Have now lost most of it.

Stress - the body makes you want to eat to cope, plus learnt eating as a coping strategy from my mum
Sleep deprivation - baby/child with long term health issues, broken nights for 7 years, so ate to maintain energy while having to work and study
Husband - his main love language is cooking and feeding so years of trying to have smaller portions is actively challenged
Undiagnosed ADHD - so going with my body’s signals to eat to keep going was never not going to happen due to food noise.

I used to be really healthy and mounjaro has been invaluable in helping me turn things around to recover a bit of self esteem and start getting fit again

And yet 3rd world poverty is not similar to UK poverty.

Few Brits are obliged to live with lslcnof access to clean water, untreated diseases due to lack of health care, malnourishment, lack of access to a range of foodstuffs and so on.

Totally incomparable. Like comparing my working class granny's life with that of the Queen.

By being 6ft tall, lifting weights, then getting injured and being unable to exercise. My activity level had successfully covered up for my post baby carb/sugar addiction (thanks gestational diabetes!) but as soon as I stopped moving weight piled on.
I doubt I’ll ever be down at 69kgs again but I plan to get as much weight off as possible and I’m 12.5kg down so far.

PCOS and depression. PCOS makes me constantly crave carbs and sugar, the depression made me want to end myself. Hard to care about your carb and booze intake (booze was my main source of calories for many years) when the biggest battle your fighting is not stepping in front of a train or just getting up in the morning.

Happily I'm on top of both these days. It's been a long road (mounjaro being part of the journey too).

I haven't got to that weight but I've been close.

I have a big appetite...to be honest I could quite easily become morbidly obese. I don't actually eat rubbish or upfs...I love really good high quality food...but that can still make you overweight/obese. If I really am enjoying a particular food, then I find it hard to stop.

I am on weight loss injections now.

Where do you get the idea that people who have lived traumatised and in poverty, when in a situation which over supply of calories, can’t become obese?

Laziness. In my case. Teamed with prevalence of junk food in the UK (I'm an immigrant from a 'slim' country) and non-judgement of fat people here (the opposite to my country).

I was always slim. Immigrated to the UK, lots of new things/occupations here, no time/inclination to cook. Started relying on processed junk food and genuinely loved it. Pizza's, burgers, etc - what's not to like. Gained some weight.

Then married and had a baby after a while. (Ex)H was also a big man, loved eating lots and loved junk. Same as me. So we did. My weight went up to 111kg (starting was 59kg), I'm 1.8m height.

There are a lot of fat people in the UK, so I didn't feel exceptional in any way. No one said a word to me or treated me badly because of my weight. There were plenty of clothing in my size in the shops. Also, I was 26 then, young and didn't feel any effects on my health yet. All those things meant zero motivation to lose the weight.

Until one day I snapped. Saw myself in the mirror, with fat rolls lulling everywhere, squeezing myself into size 20 jeans. Double chin, grey skin, bingo wings, touching thighs, sweat. And I wasn't even 30 yet.

Started calorie counting, went down to 55kg in less than a year, and have been maintaining it for the past 10 years, I'm 37 now.

In my case, there were no mental issues, stress, health issues, meds or similar. I knew what healthy food was, I knew what I had to eat, I just couldn't be arsed and junk tasted so good. I was greedy and lazy. It's my personal experience, people and their stories differ, of course.

I was in a very physical job that I had to leave.
And antipsychotics.

An accident that caused disability, grief and stress. 109kg at my heaviest but around 75kg now.