When did you get fat?
 

I was always a very skinny child right up until age 7 or 8 when I quickly got fat, almost overnight. Same thing happened to my brother and sister to a slightly lesser extent and at slightly higher ages.

Did I suddenly lose all my willpower at age 7? Did my brother and sister suddenly decide to become gluttons and sloths as well?

We were eating the same food before and after, doing the same sorts of things. Nothing really changed except the fat.

I'm beginning to think that something happened hormonally at those ages which triggered a shift from skinny to obesity. Either induced by diet or genetics or both.

So was your weight gain sudden or slow? At what age did it happen?

Me too, around 7-8 and then I lost it all at about 14-15.
I do remember one summer after vacation bible school and coming home starving and my mother feeding us Chef-boy-r-D canned spaghetti and meatballs a lot. She was also buying these Minnie sized frozen pizzas with hardly anything on it. I also remember a bag of Chips A'hoy cookies in the pantry. So, tons of carbs!!

Me too. I was skinny up until about 2nd grade when suddenly I just got fat. So that was about 7 years old. I have really tried to remember what I could've ate to suddenly start putting so much weight on but by the time I was in 6th grade I was 197lbs. I honestly didn't eat that much.

My hair also went from blonde to brown in that time so I'm pretty certain hormones played a role.

But I also think that I ate a lot of processed foods. My mom wasn't around and I was a latchkey kid. So the food I did eat was crap.

Born 9 pounds 6 ounces and basically downhill from there.

Honorary mention to my middle school years, where recurring dietician appointments leading to strict low fat low calorie diet, plus puberty, saw me go from about 20lb overweight to about 80lb overweight in the space of just a few years.

I got a little pudgy in my teens, but that was 80's teen pudgy, so not all that. Most of my fattening occurred in my mid 20's, during my first extended period of psychosis.

I was never overweight until my second pregnancy at age 27. I lost that extra weight, but I gradually started putting on weight around age 30, and I was later diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I also think my dad's death when I was 31 helped to start the spiral, and it's been a struggle since then.

About 17. Lots of disruptions in the house. Put my baking skills to use making breads and cakes and cookies everyday after HS, then eating them all. Had to make a new batch everyday.

I was a little above average weight until I hit puberty then OMG, I've been battlin' my weight my entire life...

I was normal weight until ~11, slightly underweight during my 6" growth spirt at 12 and started gaining with puberty. I was chubby (late 1960s-early 70s chubby AKA not Twiggy) until ~18, but knowing what I know now about my Lean Body Mass, I was still "normal" weight but didn't know it. But the dieting from 15 onward screwed up my metabolism. I wonder if I would have stayed "normal" if I hadn't ever started cutting calories.

I was pretty scrawny as a kid, then comfortably slim until I got into my 30s, met my husband and we made every evening a special occasion dinner—I loved to cook for him. We did a lot of eating. The weight crept up, but it had gotten way out of control when I took notice. Since then I have yo-yo’d. Hopefully this is the last time.

Middle age and working. Believed the conventional wisdom of the then 'food pyramid' biased on carbohydrates, sweets and soft drinks are OK. People always bringing in fattening foods like pizza and going out for fast-food lunches daily. It sneaks up on you, then you discover your clothes don't fit and It's best to never get fat in the first place then have to diet :(

Saved by Dr Atkins book I got in the used book store for $1 -- they had lots of copies back then, it was considered a fad diet LOL

Looking back, I started gaining in my late 20's and 30's. I am now 67. I was normal weight throughout my childhood and highschool. Gained about 20 pounds in college. I always thought I should have been thinner, but I was normal weight until college and into marriage number one. I lost weight on one of those hospital programs that you drank protein and stayed there until I remarried.....then I began to gain steadily....from 160 after marriage number one to eventually 267. This was slowly, over a period of 20-30 years, when I hit the top and finally began to lose it with Atkins. I had done Atkins years ago, and knew it would work for me. I have done well and done badly over the years. Right now I am again focused on losing and hope I can make it back down to around 150 or 160. If you look at those "Ideal Weight Charts" I should weight between 123 and 132. I doubt I will eVER reach that weight again. I weighed 130-35 in high school and felt thin. If I make it to 150 I will be happy. :wave: :wave: :wave:

I also think that my job, and the fact that I ate out most days played a big role in my gain. Lots of sitting at my job and not much exercise.

Back to back pregnancies did it for me...still trying to lose that baby weight (that was 28 years ago)! LOL

I was a chubby kid, but when I hit puberty, I was in "eat anything and not gain" mode. It was fabulous.

Once I matured, got married, and got a job, I got sedentary and took on habits that started packing on the pounds. The wife and her family had horrendous (almost gluttonous) eating habits, and I took to them like a duck to water...and I've been paying the price ever since.

Back in my late 30s or early 40s (I'm mid 50s now), I realized that I was in horrible condition, so I started following Atkins to the letter, and I dropped 85 pounds. Started working out, building muscle, and doing interval exercise. I thought I was the shit back then, and I guess I figured that I could pick up the bad behavior and not suffer the effects. But no...the pounds crept back on.

I still think Atkins was a brilliant guy, and I curse the day he died and his company turned into a total money-grubbing commercial enterprise. I see so-called gurus and experts saying good things, and I try to pick out any valuable information I can, but so many just seem to exist to sell products and confuse the issue for profit. Or slip into pseudoscientific claptrap, causing me to doubt any insight they might actually provide. But that's another soapbox, and perhaps I'll start a topic on it some time.

My radar is always alert to extremely obese people--and equally sensitive to thin or petite people (women particularly). The question is Why? both ways. Surely genetics are involved. In a flock of ten kids on any playground, there will be one or two "fat" ones. Do they eat differently from their peers? I doubt it.

That's why standards like BMI are so discouraging. Many people can never meet the goal, or sustain the goal, no matter how hard they try. That applies also to things like counting calories, intensifying exercise, and switching from one "diet" to the next. Mother Nature fights back.

To your question: When did you get fat?

Episode One: Normal-size adolescent, pear-shaped, on the chubby side. Was privileged to be given an exchange student scholarship to New Zealand. The experience was wonderful. But the combination of stress (cortisol?) and menu (lots of lamb, and butter, and cream) caused me to gain thirty pounds in eight months. When I came home and returned to regular diet (well, modified to remove starchy stuff, as advised by my mom), I went back to my previous normal size in a short time.

Episode Two: Young married person, looking to stay as attractive as possible. Tried stuff like the Stillman Diet (all meat!), Weight Watchers, early Atkins. Everything works for a while. I started running, and eventually ran a full marathon. Achieved my lowest weight ever, but not necessarily the healthiest.

Episode Three: Mid-career. Tired of cooking. Tired of trying. Nosedive into the Fast Food Diet: Colonel Sanders, Arthur Treacher's, Papa John's, and all the other gurus of grisly cuisine you can think of. Scream Weight? 192 lbs.

With the help of a doctor and drugs that turned out to be extremely dangerous, I lost 50lbs in a year, and continued on a low-fat/low-calorie routine until I could hardly stand it. Also MAJOR exercise.

Episode Four: Atkins Round Two. This time seriously. To be continued!!

In short, if your body is disposed to put on weight for whatever reason, it will. You can't be complacent. You can't give up. You have to find an eating lifestyle you enjoy. Punishment doesn't work. But low-carb for life? Could be.