Question For People Who Lost a Lot of Weight and Regained It

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the last few months, I have heard a lot of stories online about people who dieted and lost some boss amount of weight, only to regain pretty much all of it. Sometimes even more than they lost. In fact, it seems a lot of people go through this process repeatedly.

If there are any such people here, my question is this:

There must have been a point when you started to regain where you realized that you were backsliding. For example, if you lost 50 pounds and then re-gained 10. At that point, why didn’t you go back into “diet mode,” so to speak? I mean, clearly you had what it takes to lose 50 pounds so why didn’t you go through the same process to lose 10 pounds?

Thank you for your thoughts.

2

I don’t know if you consider 30 pounds a ‘‘lot of weight,’’ but having gained and lost roughly that amount of weight a few times, I can speak to this experience. Depression was a huge factor… it’s very difficult to care about weight loss when you are just trying to make it through the day. Last year I gained a lot of weight because I switched to a medication that made me hungry at every waking moment of the day and I fell into a deep depression that lasted for, oh, a year (I was also unemployed.) I became suicidal and almost went inpatient. Times like that, weight loss seems to diminish in priority. I knew I was gaining weight but food was really the only pleasurable thing I had in life, and I was just trying to find reasons to live.

I would also get sick after about four months of consistent weight loss. Nausea, dizziness, feeling too weak to get through workouts. I’d miss class or work. I would injure myself at the gym. You think, ''Eating more nutritiously and exercising is supposed to make me feel good. But I feel like total shit. What’s the point?" Ever single time I have tried to lose weight I have felt like shit after 3-4 months. And it wasn’t because I was eating too little or anything like that. I track everything I eat including my macros and my iron intake and all of it was perfect and on track for slow, sustainable weight loss. I couldn’t tell you why I feel that way.

It’s completely true that you can teach yourself new habits, but the neuronal pathways in your brain that lead to bad habits can never be erased. All it really takes is for something to trigger your old environment and you’re back in the bad habit rut - and those habits are significantly more reinforced than the new ones. They are so reinforced that you may not even realize what’s happening for quite some time, because it’s completely automatic. Starting today, I could engage in healthy habits for the rest of my life and it would take about 30 years before they were anything close to being as ingrained as my unhealthy habits.

A few months ago I stopped taking that medication and switched to a different one, and the difference was staggering. I had no idea the medication was making me that depressed. Within about two weeks most of my depression symptoms went away… and have stayed gone for months, which has never happened in my life. I’m still hungry all the time, but starting a couple of weeks ago I got my shit together again, and I’m losing weight again. I’ve already started to adjust to eating less food. I’m trying to focus on the behaviors more than the weight loss itself (tracking my calories every day, no matter what I eat that day. It keeps you honest and you can see things going off the rails a lot more easily.)

Obviously I’m worried I’m going to feel sick again or something else is going to come and blindside me again. What can I do? Just do the best I can to prevent it from happening again by doing things a little differently this time around.

3

I got pregnant, and I felt nauseated anytime I went too long without eating. Yeah, I knew I was backsliding, but I was also hungry all the time, exhausted, and growing a baby, so I wasn’t really comfortable dieting, either. When my daughter was a few months old I tried going back to my weight-loss eating habits, and every time I did my milk supply dropped. I’m trying to find a sweet spot where I can lose the baby weight without affecting my supply, but if I can’t I’m stuck for a little while. The sleep deprivation also isn’t helping, as I only seem to be able to lose weight when I’m pretty well rested.
Also, there are a lot of things that affect my ability to maintain a nutritious, low-calorie diet, namely low stress, plenty of sleep, and plenty of exercise, and I am getting none of them at the moment.

4

I lost 80 lbs on a low-carb diet back in 2002. I stuck to it fine until I got pregnant, then I blew up like a balloon, something like 50 or 60 lbs. I lost 16 lbs after giving birth but then I gained 40 more in the first year. I didn’t even notice gaining that, to be honest. My little girl had a lot of issues for the first year of her life and I was in such a fog I didn’t notice anything else.

Then my daughter and I joined a gym and I lost 40 of those gained pounds. I loved the gym but when my SO was deported I had to cut out the gym. We had very little money for food so I started eating mostly filler. Rice, cheap noodles, stuff like that. THEN I started taking three different meds that cause weight gain so 30 pounds have been gained. I walk every day and most days I do something else like dancing or hooping but I never notice any weight loss other than the fluctuating monthly weight loss/gain most women see.

I feel like it’s a constant battle. I have an untreated hypothyroid condition so I have low energy and constant MAD cravings for carbs. I always have, but it’s gotten so bad over the past few years it’s hard to lose even on a strict diet. I started doing “My Plate” a few months ago and I always choose lower fat and calorie options. It’s a healthy way of living but even just sticking to it strictly I only manage to maintain. I had the greatest success on that low carb diet and managed to maintain over a year before I got pregnant, but a good, healthy low carb diet is expensive.

5

I lost about 65 pounds and kept it off for about 8-9 months before I started to gain some back. Around the time I reached my goal weight, my dad had a traumatic brain injury, exacerbating a pre-existing neurological disorder. He had tons of medical bills, therapy bills, and I needed to find a permanent home that would meet his needs, which is very expensive. He didn’t have any income except SSDI and his only assets were a family farm we’ve had for 9 generations that I desperately wanted to save. So, I took care of him, all the bills, and was working to make a farm that’d been a family home forever rentable, which was a ton of work.

Meanwhile the business I started was failing, mostly because of exogenous reasons but me being distracted didn’t help. So I was laying people off, which is stressful, and knew that on top of all my other financial stress I wouldn’t have my principal income within a year’s time.

The last straw was when I was actually feeling pretty good in spite of the stress, and my doctor and I agreed to go off the SSRI I had been taking for 6 months. I went off as proscribed but still had a really severe SSRI discontinuation reaction. It only lasted a few days, since I went right back on the medication, but it was kind of the last straw for me.

I couldn’t force myself to care about eating healthy for 2-3 months and put on 10 to 15 pounds. I actually DID catch myself and stopped gaining weight and lost it over a period of about 6 months. But only because I got a high paying job and over the next couple months got things settled with my family. There was a very clear path to normalcy finally.

If things had gone on the way they had there’s no way I would have said, “ok, Fuzzy Dunlop, let’s get our priorities right here, weight is what really matters,” even though objectively it’s not that hard. I mean, I maintained my weight flawlessly during the most stressful time.

6

The simplest way to put it is that I could no longer subsist on the number of calories I had been subsisting on. A portion size that had previously left me feeling just a little short of satiated suddenly left me feeling painfully undernourished.

I caught myself very early in the weight gain process; to be exact, it was when my weight went up from 108 lbs. to 110 lbs. As soon as I saw the numbers drifting up rather than down, I buckled right down and created a detailed diet and exercise plan for myself. I scheduled two workouts a day (about 45 minutes of cardio in the morning and a little over an hour of weight training in the evening), and combined it with a detailed meal plan in which I accounted for every calorie, as well as a bit of supplementation.

Looking back, that actually exacerbated the problem, because the twice daily workouts just served to further stimulate my appetite. What ended up happening is I would go over on my allotted calories most days because I got too hungry to focus on anything else.

7

I lost about 40 lbs, kept it off for about two years, then gained it all back plus some. Mine was triggered by a severe trapeze injury that left me unable to walk for a couple of months. It happened in July, I wasn’t cleared for resuming physical activity until March. So I basically lost the entire active, healthy lifestyle I had cultivated and got depressed, which I dealt with by emotional eating. Also I lost a major relationship at the time, which added to the depression.

I knew I was gaining weight, but didn’t really care. I went from hanging out with a super-active crowd to a not-so-active one. After a year I resumed trapeze, and I could still do it at higher weights (plus, I think the strength aspect of it kept me toned even while fat, so I never really felt gross fat, if that makes sense - I was still working out a lot, I just ate way too much). It wasn’t until I hit 180 that circus started being a problem and made me realize, “Whoa now - you should start focusing on your health if you want to keep doing the things you love.” Anyway, I eventually addressed the depression with some counseling and started getting back in the habit of mindful eating.

8

I’m a low-energy person with a long history of depression and anxiety, plus a sweet tooth and the appetite of a lumberjack. I was a very active kid until I kind of lost my energy when I was around 12. I didn’t get fat until my early twenties, mainly due to lack of opportunity. Before that, I always wondered how people got fat. Don’t they see it happening? Then it happened to me. Yup, I saw it happening. I also felt powerless against it (as I felt powerless against a lot of things). There was some compulsive eating in there.

I tried going on official diets, but it always seemed like such a huge, insurmountable thing. After yo-yo-ing a little bit, I realized that it would be better to just stay how I was unless I was prepared really do it. Finally, when I was in nursing school, I decided that I would deal with it once and for all after graduation. The day after I graduated, I took before pictures. I had hated school so much, I felt so energized to be out! I did portion control, avoided empty calories, and walked a lot. I lost about 50 lbs in maybe eight months, which was still 50 lbs heavier than I wanted to be. Then…loss of momentum, because it’s something I have to really work hard at all the time. Stress at work. The holiday season, followed by dreary winter. Once I loosened the restraints, the drive to eat everything came back, as always. At first, it was just a little regain, which is not the end of the world, right? I would get back on track in the Spring. Ha. By then, I had gained back enough to start feeling hopeless and lumpy again.

It was a couple of years before I felt ready to really try again. It seems to go in cycles of 2-3 years. This time, I did the same things and lost about 25 lbs before hitting holidays and cold weather. Again, “It’s only temporary” followed by bingeing.

In 2008, my mom died. I was the one taking care of everything. Normally, I will eat when under stress, but this was big enough to make me lose my appetite for a while I decided that I should run with that. I was feeling very energetic and driven, getting shit done and making Mom proud. After I lost the first 15 lbs, I took up running. A month or so after that, I started lifting weights. I got down to the lowest I had been in over ten years, about 35 lbs above what I consider ideal, and was fitter than I have ever been. I thought I had finally made it. I didn’t feel like eating junk any more. When I got stressed, my instinct was to go walk or run rather than eat cookies. Then I got tired again and moving was hard. And holidays. And winter. And my stupid job. And realizing that, no matter how good I was, Mom wasn’t coming coming back. And being pissed at myself that the one stage of grief that I had always thought was bullshit, Bargaining, had been the one to suck me in. So, fuck it all. And I had gained most, maybe all, of it back before I found out that my thyroid had gone wonky.

I maintained the higher weight for a while, but then gained even more this past spring, partly due to a back injury and moving farther from work so it is less practical to ride my bike (and yes, I had been riding a bike to work through all the previous weight fluctuations!). I reached my highest weight ever in the spring: ten lbs higher than my previous high. I have been jumping through insurance hoops since early last year to get weight loss surgery. I was down 15 lbs from my high when I started my pre-op liquid diet on November 8. I had lap-band surgery on November 14, and I am down another 18.5 lbs. Since I am at my highest momentum this late in the year, I have a less stressful job now, I have gotten better at winter, and I have a tool to keep me from eating all the food, I have high hopes this time.

9

How short are you, that at 110 you felt like you had to lose weight?

10

For me, it was a combination of health issues and mild depression. I couldn’t exercise like I used to, but I didn’t cut back on the calories. The weight came back on. And then it got to be a vicious cycle. I didn’t care, I went off the Weight Watchers plan, I ate because it made me feel better, etc.

Now I’m back on Weight Watchers and I’m gonna stay. I’ve dropped 23 pounds, have another 27 to go to get back where I was. Then another 20 past that wouldn’t hurt me in the slightest.

11

pats Clothahump on the back

12

I lost about 35 pounds and then regained it all. The problem was that the diet was so draining and hard, I didn’t want to do it again even though I knew I could. I knew that in order to stay that weight I would have to stay on the diet forever and that was just too much for me to do. The only reason I was able to stay on the diet as long as I did was I knew at some point I was going off of it and would be able to eat again.

13

Back in 2008, I lost around 50 pounds on a very strict commercial diet. It took me more than six months, and it was the big thing in my life at that time. I still had another 50 pounds to lose, but that was all I could do, I was so starved for real food. Over the course of a year, I kept the weight off and even lost a couple more pounds. I walked every day and made it to the gym occasionally.

After the year passed, I figured I was fairly safe, so long as I didn’t go on a binge, but life intervened. I had an incredibly stressful temp job, I got wildly sick, my dad started acting out in bizarre, hostile ways (we later learned was the first noticeable symptoms of Alzheimers), and I fell into a bout of severe depression (as in, I was constantly battling thoughts of “I should be dead. I know how to do it. I should just get it over with, and then I won’t hurt anymore.”)

Under those circumstances, the best and most reliable self-medication I had was the comfort of eating, especially eating at my favorite handful of restaurants where the staff knew and liked me. The weight didn’t really creep back up. It jumped over the course of a week or two by ten to fifteen pounds, held steady for six months, and then jumped again, until a year later, I was back at the top of my range.

I’m now wavering about 10 pounds below the top of my range. I struggle with depression constantly, and I’ve made the decision to look into weight loss surgery because I know I have too many obstacles to do it on my own, and I can’t risk not losing the weight. I know I can diet for a set amount of time, but what I need is a permanent restriction of what and how much I eat that can’t be gotten around when I’m not feeling well.

14

I lost 80 lbs on Atkins in about 2003. I kept it up for a couple years but then I started being a little maniacal about money so I could buy a house. I refused to spend any significant amount of money on food. Then I got my house I was actually broke and didn’t have money to spend on food. I didn’t have a fridge or an oven for a while. I got into bad habits, mostly shopping at Aldi for pre-boxed junk and not spending any time preparing food.

It took me about 6 years to put back the 80 lbs, then a couple years to put on 10 more (in which time I quit smoking too). I was pretty active during this time, getting a black belt in Kenpo and going to the gym on occasion. I think I started walking more.

But I’m insulin resistant and my body just turns carbs in to fat and holds on to the fat, so no matter what amount of exercise I was doing was not enough to combat the fat being piled on by the low quality food I was eating.

I suffered some impressive depression a few years back too, and totally lost my appetite. I wasn’t interested in eating at all, so when I found something that I could manage to eat, I’d stick with it. Pop Tarts and PB&J are not very kind to the body of someone who’s insulin resistant.

Finally I got right with myself and made a decision not to be idle anymore. Any free time should be spent at the gym and preparing food. I started with the gym and it became a regular habit after a year and a half. I actually gained weight in this time. Eventually I added back low carb and quickly lost 60 lbs. I’ve found ways to make it less expensive too (eggs eggs eggs).

TLDR: It was a conscious decision to stop my healthy lifestyle because I didn’t feel it jibed with my penny-pinching lifestyle. I knew I was going to gain weight back and I did. Then instead of going back to the healthy stuff, I let it go too long.

15

Well, I am 5’3", but to say that I felt like I had to lose weight isn’t entirely accurate. What happened was that I had been either losing or maintaining my weight for several years. When I started to gain again, I just thought I needed to watch myself a bit more closely to make sure that I didn’t continue along that trajectory.

ETA: Not sure if I made it clear, but my efforts to watch myself a bit more closely failed miserably. I gained weight at a rate of 2-3 lbs. each month for the next year.

16

My story is much like others in this thread. 3 times I have lost 30-40 lbs, kept it off for a couple years, then had a major disruption in my life; cross country move with career change twice, once a career change alone to a position that required many more hours per week plus my husband taking a job that kept him out of town every other week. It is not terribly difficult during quiet times for me to get stuck into a serious lifestyle change, exercising daily and really watching everything I buy, prepare and eat. Generally as long as there are no major life upsets I can keep it off, but stop paying attention for a few months and the pounds comes racing back on.

17

I was always a very very skinny child (possibly the result of my mother not feeding me properly/seriously nervous child) when I was in my early 20s I was hospitalised for suspected anorexia, it was determined that I was not anorexic, I gained a lot of weight while I was in there - although I don’t know how much.

Ever since then I’ve had a problem maintaining a consistent weight. 20something years ago I got into the aerobics craze and got my weight down to 12 stones (168lbs), Over the next 10 years (due to a chronic back problem) I regained everything and then some and at one point was over 18 stones (252lbs).

I was referred to a dietician and followed her suggested diet for a month and gained about 5lbs.

A few years ago I dug out my old aerobics videos and started doing them again, and I went down to about 14 stones (196lbs), I didn’t diet at all, although I did increase my protein intake and I did gain a fair bit of muscle mass.

I’m not sure what I weigh at the moment, health problems have crept up on me, and my Depression has me under a dark cloud, so I’m not getting much exercise, but I’ve maintained the dress size I went down to when I was 14 stones.

Any time I’ve put weight on, it crept on gradually over a period of months, and I didn’t really notice it until my clothes got so tight I had to buy bigger clothes (when I lost weight I’d notice that my clothes were becoming too baggy), I have noticed that every time I pick up the exercise it takes less time to get in shape - first time took me about 8 months, most recent about 2 months.

I still eat a ‘high’ protein diet, and try to walk [instead of driving] where possible, so I’ve stuck to my healthy eating habits (well healthy-ish)

18

I’m noticing a common theme here - depression. That can pretty much throw a wrench into any of the best laid plans.

19

Lost 45 pounds, have regained about 30 of it back. My story’s similar to everyone else’s: a mixture of personal health issues (including a brief inpatient admission for pneumonia-triggered asthma, which necessitated high doses of corticosteroids to control), various health crises with my elderly parents, an increasing workload in my department, and the threat of losing my job caused me to take my focus away from carefully watching my diet and obsessively exercising. Now that things have calmed down in my personal life, I’m trying to rebuild the habits which lead to that earlier weight loss, but I don’t know if I’m going to succeed. Putting my physical well being first means putting my job second, and I don’t know if I can afford to safely do that. It sucks, but that’s life.

20

I was flabby up until I started college, when I started working out and doing jiu-jitsu. I got into solid shape pretty quickly, which I maintained reasonably well until a few months ago. What happened? I went from working in a scene shop (manual labor, lots of exercise) to a desk job (sitting on chair). At the same time, I started developing a card game and doing some lighting design work, the two of which sucked up all of my free time outside of work, leaving no time to get to the gym. I’ve gotten noticeably flabbier as a result. It’s not particularly surprising, and also not particularly worrying. I’ll have more free time starting in January, and I imagine that I’ll have no trouble getting back in shape then.