I too am addicted to bread, my mum gave me her old bread maker and I made a loaf yesterday and promptly eat half of it. Its ( looks nervously right and left to see if anyone is looking) better than chocolate.

My mum also has a bread addiction. But she's 8.5 stone. I think the bread maker being so easy to use, and making such delicious contributed.

We always had healthy food in the house and no food issues. Except my dad told me I was "porky," lovely adjective there and started off my faddishness.

Thanks in advance!

my folks were healthy eaters and not heavy, so how the heck did i end up like this? who knows. bottom line, there's only one fix but sometimes it helps to resolve my feelings and thoughts about the past before getting on the with the solution.

thanks for writing this.

1 1/3 cups water
2 tablespoons margarine or butter
3 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 3/4 teaspoons bread machine yeast

I just dump all that into the breadmaker and let it run. Takes about three and a half hours.

I agree that your parents rewarding your good grades and not focusing on your food or weight contributed to not being obsessed with food. That is awesome and I bet has a lot to do with the success you're having now.

So--"let's go on an ice cream run!" I still remember that feeling of, "Yess! There are no rules any more!" Going to get fresh-baked doughnuts at the grocery store nearby just because we felt like it.

Anyway, I formed adolescent habits of staying up extraordinarily late, reading and wandering around and munching, munching, munching. I would certainly have porked up immediately if I hadn't been growing so rapidly.

So then, when I stopped growing, and came home from college in the summers and had an ever-stocked, always-available refrigerator, I would in fact pack on, at a guess, ten to fifteen pounds per summer.

So again, I would have ballooned if I hadn't gone and lived in poverty in Europe and walked everywhere as a backpacker for a year, at which point I got down to what is now my goal weight. (BMI of about 21.5-22.0.) Which was a lucky break, since I guess it bought me three or four years.

But if you keep having some sort of hugely bad food habit, eventually you're going to be obese, like it or not. You'll stop growing, or stop having intervals of starvation, or whatever. And then you have to confront the tedious reality that it just takes a loooooooooong time to get back to a point where your weight is not an interesting issue any more, to you or anyone else.

On the other hand, there are few things more fun and empowering-feeling than losing weight successfully. So, getting to keep on succeeding at it for a long period of time--and any time you aren't succeeding, you know what to do, and can basically get back in there and just start succeeding again within a week or so, assuming you have a normal metabolism--is not the worst of all worlds. At least it's something to do, is sort of the way I feel about it.

Anyway, I'll bet that if you had grown up with a lot of food-related baggage from your parents, you would find it a lot harder to just straightforwardly diet and lose weight the way you're finding you can now. So it sounds as if the good your parents did for you, in just being affirming and loving, outweighs whatever harm they did from being clueless about health and weight--not only in terms of The Most Important Things in Life, but even in this specific matter of being able to control your weight, ultimately.

Neat post!

It seems to me you aren't "naturally" fat, as the weight seems to come off pretty easy once you regulate your eating. There haven't been any 10 lb gains along your weight loss journey.

But, and don't tell my family this, I can't eat bread without suffering bloating, acid reflux and general sluggishness. Omitting bread from my diet almost immediately improves my health and accelerates my weight loss.

I still yearn for it though!