Young Calorie Counters

I was 12 and my family are all skinny, and my auntie said "wow you've put on some weight, you've a lot of puppy fat to lose" since then I was careful about what I ate.  It doesnt take much really.

I first added the word "fat" to my vocabulary when I was 10. I was living in Italy at the time, and the kids were much meaner there than at the school in NY I had come from. One boy called me fat all the time. Then, when I was 12, I went back to visit the school, and another boy said, in Italian, "Oh, I see the elephant has decided to visit!" They thought I couldn't understand, but I did.

I wasn't even an overweight kid, I was just a lot more muscular than the other Italian girls at my school.

I didn't start trying to do anything about my weight until this year though, when I realized I had gained a lot. At 5'9" and 155 pounds, I decided to get back to my regular weight a year ago, which had been 130. I'm there and super happy now... so HAH!

I still want to go back to Italy, find those boys, and kick them in the balls. =)

Nothing made me "notice it" becase i was fat all my life, but i know the exact moment i found out how easy it was to lose weight. I was home alone and i was doing my homework and my tummy started grumbling but i didin't want to go downstairs until i was completly finished because i get easily sidetracked, when i finished i went downstairs and opened the fridge and saw some leftover pie my mom had left for me, and right next to eat were some grapes, chose the grapes and went back upstairs. :D yay

I remember the exact moment when my weight became a realization.

I was on a PRE-SCHOOL bus and a little boy leaned over and whispered "Are you pregnant?"

....

Yeah. That's how long I've been this way.

I was really young, maybe 6 or 8, and had to wear a dress for a violin concert (we played Mary Had a Little Lamb, and I never learned much more than that...) My brother and three boys told me I looked pregnant.

Come on, I was little, I had a tummy! But I do remember bawling my eyes out over it, sucking in my stomach in in the shower and thinking "If I looked like this, I'd be ok with it."

Skipped my first meal in the sixth grade, only ate a sandwhich a day for a few months, and it was never a full blown eating disorder. I started going to the gym in fifth grade, and made DAMN sure that I had at least a 4-pack by seventh (which I've kept, thank you very much)

I grew two inches, gained 10 lbs., obsessed over them and lost 7 of them.

South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, binging and purging... yeah, it's been a great ride.

I think I'll stick to veganism and running from now on.

The vicious cries of "Fatso" in elementary school probably had something to do with it. :D

Despite that, I never really noticed my weight- I'm told I fluctuated pretty, er, heavily through the intervening years.  But in 8th grade, I hit a breaking point, and chose to take weight training instead of P.E.  I STILL didn't really notice whether I lost weight or not.  Only years later did it really register.  Since then, though, I've been fairly health-conscious even if I don't always listen to that consciousness. :D

Oh, and added to that, I think the Bowflex commercials I saw during 5am Pokemon watching (before it really got popular in America) had something to do with my eventual decision to take Weight training.

I wish to God that I had someone to sort of guide me through all that.  I'm deeply screwed up because of all those issues, but not as screwed up as I could have been- Providence did grant that I never really, seriously saw myself as 'Fat'- I looked in the mirror and just saw me, somehow, magically, managed to avoid the plagues of self-hate that so many live with.  Now that I'm in a position to have kids myself, I'm totally dedicated to giving them options and a place to go if they end up the same sort of problems- that, and with making physical activity and healthy eating just a part of life from the start (not forcing it on anyone- I imagine that might end up even worse than my own plight!)

When a doctor I worked with told me "It must be terrible to be that young and so overweight . . ." I was 21 and I was wearing a size 14.

I remember being 12/13 and weighing 117...


For some reason I feel like I was smaller then, but I was only 5'2" and that's 15 more pounds than I am now at 5'5".


I binged my way up to 155 when I was 15, though.  It was awful.

I got teased a lot in.. 2nd grade I think...?

I did gymnastics and I was a dancer when I was little - I think my BMI was actually below the average... But people still teased me... My limbs were really thin but I had a bit of fat on my belly ( well, yeah.. I was 7 or 8 - I was just a little kid)

I REALLY noticed that I was actually getting to the point of being "kinda fat" at the age of 13 or 14 (fat = being just slightly bigger than most of the girls my age)

I got bullied a lot and ended up binging and gaining until I weighed almost twice as much as before. It finally slowed down when I was 16.5, at around 170 pounds.
My highest weight was just over 190 pounds, this year...

I've managed to lose 24 pounds so far

Original Post by palipride47:

I noticed it when my family (who are Arab and puts lots of emphasis on weight) started telling me that I needed to lose weight in order to be pretty and be attractive to a man (They told me this at age 11).

They (my aunt and my grandfather whom I live with) put me on a really strict diet and I dropped 30 pounds, but grew to resent them and started binge eating on sweets to piss them off (like I would eat 10 Little Debbie's at once or a half gallon of ice cream).

Now I'm 180 and can't control my bingeing. It's funny because when I was little, my mom and dad was poor so I went hungry alot (like days without food, and I used to eat the most). My family used to say I was beautiful back then. They started calling me fat when I was 8 (when I got put in foster care and started getting regular meals), and I've never felt beautiful since. My family ties my beauty to my weight so I've never heard them call me pretty or anything else but fat. They also make fun of me behind my back, talking about my weight to their friends and other relatives. And they wonder why I despise them. 

 

(Isn't it just fantastic that I actually had to starve to fit my family's definition of beautiful . I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way)

 I'm arab too, its crazy how obsessed they are with weight. After a big family gathering the first thing they talk about who had gained and lost. Most of my aunts openly talk about how they only eat on the weekends :S

I noticed when I was 10, nobody ever called me fat or anything but I knew I was fat. I weighed 135 lbs, and that is not healthy for a little girl. Finally when I turned 11 years old I got sick of myself and got really healthy, searching for healthy foods and tips and all that stuff, thats when I finally noticed I was getting smaller. Now today I am 13 years old and I weigh 90 lbs (No, i'm not underweight) and I try to eat healthy.

[I'm going to start excercise more today and stick to it! Wish me luuck~]

I must've been 5 or 6. I remember being at daycare and standing in front of the full-length mirror in the dress-up area, scrutinizing my figure. I would constantly compare myself to my classmates, both male AND female, trying to figure out if they were skinnier or fatter than me. I was a painfully shy kid, and bullied constantly for reasons I still can't figure out, so that didn't help my self-esteem issues. My mom would always tell me to suck in my stomach, from a very young age, because she thought it stuck out. A "friend" told me in 8th grade that "You'd be really pretty if you just got rid of your tummy." When I came back from studying abroad about a year and a half ago, a friend said, "Wow, you've lost a lot of weight! You always had a little pooch, but you've gotten rid of it now." This was after I had developed an ED and hadn't eaten more than 500 cals/day (usually much less than that) for the past six months. Funny thing is, even though I had been going to a gym and eating pretty healthily since middle school, I had never really tried to do anything about my weight until about two years ago. I was never fat. Never. I was really underweight as a kid (product of being born very premature, I guess) and my BMI levelled out right at the bottom of the range after puberty. But for whatever reason, I always, always, always thought I was fat and ugly. I'm still working on my body dysmorphic issues, but I'm proud to say I've FINALLY recovered physically from my ED and am at a healthy weight again. And I'm determined to stay there.