Currently down about 120lbs after 8 years of going up and down. Net loss is 200lbs, given I had some regains over the years. Now, I’m down from 300lbs to 178lbs and ever since I passed 185lbs, I’ve had a lot more oppurtunities with women.
It feels weird, not gonna lie, it just sorta happened out of nowhere. A lot more women smile at me, talk to me, and look at me more. The attention I started getting just feels like a glimpse really. Not massive amounts, but noticably more. I’m still 10lbs away from being done entirely, as I do still look a bit husky at 178lbs.
Though, it’s not just women, but people in general have been treating me better, even strangers. I will finally reach normal weight for the first time ever in the next couple weeks (173lbs according to my BMI) and I can’t be more excited to finally see it!
For those who lost weight, what was it like for you? Did people start treating you differently?
Congratulations!
Did you use the new drugs to lose so much?
Rude.
Why does it matter?
Skinny people see being fat as a moral failure and thus losing weight through any means other than starving yourself and exercising 24/7 is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, most skinny people just eat until their full and aren’t hitting the gym, it’s just their default.
But, on the other hand, most fat people have lost and regained weight tons of times, so when they see someone losing weight without starving themselves and hitting the gym, they get jealous.
That’s the bit people don’t understand. Fat people on diets are starving and constantly uncomfortable. It’s a 24/7 attack on willpower (and it doesn’t magically go away when you hit goal weight). The weight will almost certainly come back, because willpower is a finite thing, and it’s more and more demoralizing each time.
Skinny people don’t have to think about it.
When fat people can lose weight without thinking about it, everyone else feels threatened.
It’s the same reason everything else sucks. Literally everything needs to be gatekept.
Why can’t education be cheaper, or loans forgiven? Because they had to suffer, and so do you.
How would it possibly be fair to somebody who died of cancer because they couldn’t afford care and then someone else just gets care for free? That’s not fair! They gotta pay!
Why can’t we have access to abortions? Because some other dude was responsible for an unexpected pregnancy and got stuck in a loveless marriage raising a bastard they didn’t want, and now you do too.
Nothing can be easier or improved as long as other people had to have it worse.
Same shit, different story. “I did it so you have to have it as bad or worse”. It’s jealousy, all the way down. I blame the church.
That’s not how losing weight works. You don’t need to starve yourself, you need to stay in calorie deficit (doesn’t equal starving and you may actually feel less starved than usually if you start adding better filling food to your diet). You don’t need to workout 24/7 (generally working out is not neccessary at all), doing proper strength training will help with losing weight (because building new muscles requires a lot on energy which increases BMR) and with looking better overall. But proper strength training doesn’t require you to workout 24/7, you just need like 50 minutes 4 times a week in order to hit most of the muscle groups twice (i.e. doing upper/lower split) to keep stimulus going (which start the building of new muscle fibers which increases BMR). And strength training is nothing like weightloss show nonsense — which is «doing a gazillion reps of light weights while sweating a pool and being out of breath with pain in your muscles and having to deal with devastating recovery» — you need to lift weights with consistent techique in 3-6 rep range, 2 sets and just be close to failure during last rep of each set. It will get you needed levels of muscle stimulus, you will not experience pain while working out, it will not make you uncomfortably wet from sweating and recovery will be fast and fine.
Because they tried to lose weight like it’s goalpost via starving and working out 24/7 rather than building sustainable habits in eating and working out that will make you lose weight and stay in healthy weight range as an effect. When you don’t have those habits, you get fat.
Maybe they do. But that doesn’t really matter. A huge percent of people that lost weight with drugs like Ozempic also regain their weight in a span of two years after they stop taking it. Because none of these people actually builded healthy habits that lead to weightloss, they just took a drug that mimics a hormone of “feeling full”. And as they don’t have those habits but still remember the eating habits that they had before GLP-1 (and while taking the drug, there is no conscious change happening, so habits don’t really change, you just stop overeating due to GLP-1), they are likely to get fat again.
Weightloss is really not that hard if you don’t fall into social media bullshit and keep things rational and somewhat up to current science. People often fall for keto/carnivore/vegan¹/highreps/highcardio and other unreasonable ways to lose weight. imo the hard part is to stay consistent in calorie tracking but only for some time, after that it’s just starts being some sort of second nature and you start to eyeball stuff for calories without thinking about it.
¹Being vegan is reasonable from moral standpoint but doesn’t mean much in weightloss.
I hate to gatekeep, especially after my last comment…but how fat have you been?
Losing weight is not complicated or hard. I never said it was. I said it’s a 24/7 challenge of willpower that doesn’t go away when you hit target weight.
The biggest chunk of that willpower is spent against fighting the lack of (or insensitivity to) the hormone that makes them feel full in the first place…a problem that can now be countered medically.
It’s not surprising, then, that when they stop taking the medicine, they start feeling hungry, and when they are hungry, they would eat.
It paints a picture that there are actual physiological barriers to losing weight…physical barriers that probably didn’t mean much before the current food landscape. Now calorie-dense foods are cheap, readily available, shelf-stable, physically addicting, and completely devoid of actual nutrition.
That physically addicting part is really the worst of it. You can’t just not eat. You have to succumb to hunger eventually.
Telling a fat person to lose weight is no different than telling an alcoholic to cut back to no more than 3 drinks a day, forever. Is that impossible or unreasonable, for someone else has never experienced alcoholism? Sure. Absolutely. Is it something you can realistically expect from an alcoholic? No, that’s crazy…nothing against alcoholics, but we know and understand now that it’s addiction and there are physiological barriers, and telling people that the cure is to just cut back is batshit insane.
Likewise, you can’t just stop eating. You have to face a trigger, multiple times a day, every day. It’s incredibly exhausting.
Can you guys remove the negative filter and consider not everyone wants to belittle you hurt you or take something from you?
Have you considered the question can come empathy, interest in solutions, basic curiosity?
That’s a great summary, very pithy.
Yes, tho I think there’s also a bit of the commerce zero-sum thinking to blame too. Like: “if my competitor gets a free advantage, that puts me at a relative disadvantage.”
There is something to this but I might have described it differently.
Being obese is seen as a moral failure, and struggling to lose it is a virtue. Drugs are seen as a cheat because you haven’t atoned for the moral failure by suffering, therefore you have not earned the right to be treated differently.
Curious and showing my interest to op’s story. But apparently this is interpreted negativily.
Same reason as the title, (in)validation.
Simply curiosity, no need to look for mean reasons.
Why would it be mean? It’s part of who we are, for better and worse. Shying away won’t make the feeling disappear, but we can come to terms with it.