Excellent question.

There are so many things that have happened and choices that I made and I believe all of them together put me where I am now. My mom is very overweight and has been since as far back as I can remember.....a lot of my family members are. I grew up around a "need to diet" mentality. I actually remember when I was 11, I fasted (literally NO FOOD) for 2 weeks and NOBODY noticed that I wasnt eating. Now, I was not a big child....probably around 100 lbs at that time. How do you "not notice" that your child hasnt eaten in 2 WEEKS??? I now think that my mom probably knew but because of her "diet mentality" and her own body image, she didnt interfere. I remember one day at my grandparents house, everybody was getting on the scale (our own personal WW program I guess) and at the time I was probably 110 or something. I was a teenager. My grandpa had a fit over how much I weighed -- I stopped the lecture by saying that I never intended to gain anymore wieght --HAHAHA !!! I look back at pictures of me in HS, I was really thin but back then I always felt HUGE! I guess growing up with all the negative body images and constant dieting, I felt like I must be big too. There is another post on here about distorted body images - i can relate to both ends (feeling huge when you're skinny, and feeling "normal" when you're overweight). Anyway, I got pregnant toward the end of high school (my sr. year) and went up to 199 lbs -- I remember thinking that being pregnant gave me a reason to be able to eat whatever I wanted. My dad called me "chunky" throughout my pregnancy. I also started getting "off hand" remerks from acquaintances "youre looking uh.....'healthy' " I dismissed it all --I was just pregnant---afterward, I was horrified to find that all 75 of those "gained" pounds werent "just the baby"!! I got back to 145 or so - I think depression had a lot to do with that (my baby was born with heart problems and died after surgery -- I thought my life was over, I had changed all my plans (college etc) because I was going to be a mom and now I didnt have a baby and best of all, I was in an mentally detrimental marriage that I saw no way out of).
One divorce, a new marriage and 2 children later I look back and see that I set myself up for a lot of "emotional eating" - I was doing what my mom had done. My life hadnt been what I needed it to be so I had been filling the "holes" with food. That's pretty bad but, my body was dealing with it -- I was 165 and able to do anything I wanted - no problem right??
yeah right --- then comes the insulin resistance...... 30 lb weight gain in 3 months sent me racing to an endocrinologist -- he was (thankfilly) into the LC research but it took me another year and 20 more pounds (all while STARVING myself on low fat high carb diets) to convince me to make these changes in my life. I feel so much better -- I can control those cravings because I know what is causing them. Unfortunately, for the 12 years before I found out about LC, I was subconsciously doing to my daughter what my mom had done to me --- she's almost 14, 135 lbs.....and has a lot of the unhealthy, guilt causing, eating habits that I had for so long. I have to break this cycle. The first thing I want to do is take a wrecking ball to the FDA's food pyramid !!!!!!!
Good luck to all of you and God Bless !