Yeah I know BMI can be unreliable when it comes to determining whether you’re actually overweight or not which is why I omitted mention of it. So I just leave it to you to decide if your health is effected by excess fat, by your own judgement. The best way IIRC is hydrostatic weighing, but obviously not everyone’s gonna have had that done.
I have a glandular problem.
Specifically, my salivary glands open up when I see a pizza. I’m willing to attribute 80% of my huskiness to bad behavior (no self-control in the kitchen, general disinclination to work out for the sake of fitness, chosen occupation is stressful and sedentary). But even in the Army when I was in great physical condition and could run 7 minute miles until you told me to stop, I had belly lard that simply wouldn’t go away. I come from fat people, my kids are fat people. And even when I was fit I was fat. I ain’t taking the blame for that.
I am overweight according to the charts. But as I am a weightlifter, my body fat percentage is rather lower than average. So I am overweight, but not fat. I do not know if this affects my health as badly as fat does.
So it is 100% me.
Regards,
Shodan
I have lost about 80 lb over the last 15 years and, while I am still technically overweight, my doctor advised to stop. So I did.
The MetLife charts say I should lose 50 pounds, but judging by life experience, my body would be happiest and most attractive 30-40 pounds down from where I am now.
I voted 30% my fault, 70% not my fault.
I say this because I see other people eating all kinds of crap that I would never dream of indulging in. Also, I do about 20 miles a week of recreational walking, in addition to housework and running after a 3yo. I do not deserve to be as overweight as I am.
So why am I?
What’s my fault:
Aside from the walking, my preferred leisure activities all involve sitting on my ass
I elect not to do more strenuous exercise
I have periods in my life when I eat bread and drink alcohol, even though I know I shouldn’t
When I was pregnant, I kept cookies and breakfast cereal in the house. Massive weight gain ensued
What’s not my fault:
I have had Hashimoto’s disease since I was 13
I have PCOS with insulin resistance. This means that when I eat carbohydrates my insulin spikes, my blood sugar plummets, and I get hypoglycemic. Which means I have to eat something to get my blood sugar back up, whether I’m actually running a calorie deficit or not. This led to a lifelong obsession with never letting myself get hungry, because getting hungry equals getting faint and dizzy and unable to make decisions and when you’re an adult, that shit is dangerous. Only in the past two years was I diagnosed as hypoglycemic, and taught how to control it.
Basically, I could lose weight, but what I have to go through to do it makes it not worth it. I go through periods of my life when I cut grains, alcohol, and added sugars out of my diet completely, and lose a little weight over the course of a couple-three months (like ten pounds). Then the holidays come around and I gain it back.
A person can do anything, but a person can’t do everything, and after a lot of trying and exercising and fiddling with my diet, I have come to the conclusion that being thin isn’t one of my priorities.
Right now it’s about 50-50. I was overweight before, but I was recently taking some medicine which had weight gain as one of its side effects. It’s gradually coming off.
All me. I know this because I lost a lot of weight a few years back, and all it took was eating less and exercising (over a little over a year’s time).
But I’m lazy and I don’t eat the way I should, so I gained a lot of it back. I figure if I get sufficiently motivated (and I really should), I can lose it again.
That would be me.
I sometimes get under weight after 2 or 3 week backpacking trips. It’s a lot of exercise and I don’t carry excess food. It weighs down my back pack. I carry Mountain House pouches. The Scrambled Eggs with Bacon is really good.
I try to gain weight back after getting home.
Mostly me: I’m dead lazy and love food, especially fatty/salty/sugary food.
However, my current weight is at the top of my personal year long 15-20-lb wave; in large part because it’s February. I *hate *Februaries.
I have SAD, and it literally drags me under a rock and beats me to death by this time of year. I go from being somewhat anxious and high-strung to thinking seriously about jumping off bridges when the smallest thing doesn’t go exactly according to plan. The cold, the lack of light, the lack of energy, the depression&anxiety (I eat my feelings along with everything else) just wipes out any progress I make during the rest of the year.
But I’m pretty lucky; the rest of the year, I try to stay somewhat active, try to eat smallish portions and actually consume a vegetable or fruit every once in a while, and everything sheds right back off by about the beginning of June every year, and I’m fine again until mid-January.
I figure if I had the motivation (or the funds to offshore my motivation) I’d be better in the winter as well, but I don’t care enough yet to marshal my resources that much.
I’m not now. I’m actually underweight. But when I was, it was all me. I wanted to be thin, but I didn’t want to quit eating the stuff I liked. So I would be miserable, looking for the best way to lose weight quickly, when the best way for me was to eat smaller portions. I still have cake and ice cream and everything I want, just not so much of it.
I’m just fat. And it’s because God hates me. 
So I voted for 100% not my fault. Like most things in my life.
I voted 90% me. 10% out of my hands.
I am 51 - I don’t burn fat as easily as I did when I was younger.
Am I overweight? IMO - yes. I am 5’3" and right now weigh anywhere between 127-130lbs on most mornings. I am in great shape aside from these extra 10lbs. I have good endurance, some muscle tone (mainly in my legs), and I’m not on any prescriptions meds. I feel better when I’m under 120lb. I’m trying to lose 10-12lbs of fat - not water, not muscle…fat. The weight is coming off slowly…too slowly. I could get there faster if I cut back to one glass of wine per night instead of two, increased cardio and cut back on those occasional sugary treats. My diet otherwise is healthy, as are my food proportions. It’s totally frustrating. Through my work I was able to do a complete body/health assessment about a month ago. Everything came back just great, but I feel heavy at this weight. I know that it’s not about the number on the scale (for the most part), but we each have that weight that we feel completely comfortable in. For me that’s between 116-120, but it’s harder to maintain that now.
100% me.
I wasn’t active enough and I indulged in too many treats.
Paying attention to what I eat for the last six months and doing more walking has taken 50lb off, and I’ve learned two things: I lose weight fairly easily so I can’t blame my metabolism, and I often under eat rather than over eat, so it’s the quality of what I was eating that was to blame, not the quantity.
I’m no longer considered overweight on the BMI scale but my body fat percentage is still too high so there’s more work to be done.
I’m in the same boat, with PCOS and hypoglycemia. I’ve lost 80 lbs twice now, and put it back on 3x as fast as it came off. And not because of indulgence or bad habits, but because I was tired of keeping up the 24/7 vigilant, brutal lifestyle of fighting against my body. My life was no different emotionally when I weighed less, and I still had physical problems that were not due to my weight and did not get better because I weighed less. And after losing so much and plateauing so hard, I was still considered a land whale by anyone’s standards (size 22) so I stopped seeing the point in being so unhappy with my lifestyle.
Now I just focus on keeping up with exercise, keeping my skin healthy (I have cystic acne because I am a bad person), being a good family member and friend, and being ok with myself. And every so often I buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and eat it by myself at night because I figure if everyone else assumes I am doing that every day, I might as well get to do it once in a while.
I’m the other person who voted above(?) 50/50, at 40 me/60 other.
By “quality” do you mean actual bulk size of the food? Because while you may feel like you are undereating, by eating calore-dense, nutrient-sparse foods, which may not seem like much actual food, is actually providing more calories than a healthy, fiber-rich diet with more roughage that takes up space in the stomach.
I voted “100% me.”
As I said in the other thread, I’m not overweight. But I have been. And now I’m not.
I made the change downwards happen by consciously altering my behavior while going against the slow but inexorable tide of ever-increasing age.
Since my behavior caused the decrease, it must have also been the cause of the increase that came before. QED.
I’m not going to claim that everybody has the same steepness of hill to climb to overcome their overweightness. But whether or not they climb vigorously enough to do the job is up to them.
I have it too. Proactiv plus tretinoin keeps it under control most of the time. I have a breakout at the end of every other cycle, no matter what. Ohhhh welllll.
I’ve been logging my diet in MFP , and one of the things I had to get used to early on was that, by dropping the high-kilojoule snacks and meals from my diet, I only had a fairly small appetite and sometimes found it hard to reach my minimum daily kilojoule consumption goal.
I was fat, but not because I was sitting down to huge servings. It’s because I paid no attention to the sugar and fat content of my food.
The same size portions with healthier ingredients would fill me up, but then I’d have a kilojoule deficit that I needed to make up so I didn’t show my weight loss by making my body think I was starving. It took a while to learn to eat enough kilojoules once the poor quality foods were mostly shunted out of my diet.