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earlystart 08:17 AM 09-09-2014
For you to have gained 30 lbs in 3 months you'd have to gain about 2.5 lbs a week. Which is 8,750 extra calories per week than you were consuming before. Which is 1,250 extra calories per day...which is like eating 4 McDonald's cheeseburgers a day above and beyond your normal amount of food (at 300 calories each). So....maybe you had started eating more with all the stress (the stress hormone Cortisol can increase your appetite and you would tend to gain fat in your abdomen). I know you would have noticed eating 5 Snickers bars a day, but if it was just extra servings of your regular meals, and extra snacks and late night munchies, you may not have thought it was that much, but it was. Another possibility is that you haven't gained as much as you think you have (maybe not 30...maybe closer to 15-20?) and/or maybe it took several months to gain all that weight, in which case it would have been less noticeable that you were eating more. If you have in fact gained 30 lbs in 3 months and seriously don't see yourself having eaten 1,250 extra calories a day, then I would actually go to a doctor and ask what's going on (maybe low thyroid hormones).

But to answer your question, I had gained about 10 lbs over 2 months when I got really stressed out and depressed a couple months after opening my daycare, but it was very obvious that I was overeating, so I wasn't at all surprised. When I was preparing to open my daycare, the stress was immense though for a good 3 months, but if anything I lost weight from all the hectic running around getting things done. And when I first started working as a preschool teacher several years ago, I consistently gained weight every year from being around food all the time (like 5-10 lbs a year until I started dieting/exercising).

I think at this point, even if the stress is gone, you will need to go out of your way to get the extra weight off, it's not just gonna go away from your hormones returning to normal levels. The most effective thing to do these days is use a calorie-counting app on your smart phone (LoseIt or MyFitnessPal) which will help you calculate how many calories to eat a day and you can easily enter food by scanning the barcode on the package or search for it in their database.
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