Please tell me that you were kidding in the OP about deleting pictures off people’s cameras; that sounds like a horrible thing to do!
So, uhh, aaron and Glory… how *you *doin’?
MeanOldLady, I’d love to go out for drinks sometimes - I love your posts, you’re hilarious.
I just wanted to be the creepy person on the internet who hits on everybody for a moment. I’ll stop now. In seriousness, if you ever come to the Midwest, where warmth comes to die, I may have to arrange a bourboning. Speaking of bourbon, I think it’s time for breakfast.
Sure. Body dysmorphic disorder is fairly rare, but someone with a certain degree of it can easily engage in delusion or experience genuinely distorted self-perception. Men with muscle dysmorphia can exercise maniacally and look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and still see themselves in a mirror or any reflective surface as ugly, scrawny, puny worthless little weaklings.
I discovered just how skewed my ideas about weight have become when I was watching a marathon of The Honeymooners last year. Although his weight did fluctuate a bit during the course of the series, in many of the episodes, Jackie Gleason didn’t look to me like someone you’d make fat jokes about. Heavy yes, fat enough to cause comment, no.
That’s when it hit home how our vision of what “fat” is has shifted. And yes, I do think that the OP looks heavy in the first photo, and just right in the second.
Maybe I don’t judge others’ standards of weight harshly enough because it would be admitting I’m still a bit of a fatass myself. Or because I don’t want to be skinny-skinny. I just don’t. I want to be skinnier, but I really would like to retain ‘softness’.
Odd.
People are pretty terrible at guessing stuff like that.
I still have to lose 35 pounds, after having lost 45, and everyone I tell that says “Oh, gosh, you can’t lose 35 more pounds.” But I can, and easily; that would get me to the *upper end *of healthy. It’s just that they’re not used to seeing me look thinner. Had I started at teh health yweight and gained 35 pounds, thereby ending up looking the same but from a different direction, everyone would think I was a blimp.
People are easily thrown off by recent changes, weight, even the clothes someone is wearing.
Some people I know are concerned that I might be losing too much weight. :rolleyes:
I’ve still got some moob left, and a pretty visible gut. I could probably lose 30 pounds before it became unreasonable to continue. Don’t know where I’m going to stop. At first I said I’d lose 20, then I said I’d lose 40, then 50 was the magic number, then I thought I’d be done at 60…
I think I’ll stop when I don’t have to hold in my belly anymore.
Then I’ll move on to cutting.
You look great. Congrats. You don’t look obese in the first picture, but you do look overweight. Handsome, but overweight.
The last time I lost significant weight, I had a couple of people tell me they’d rather I didn’t lose anymore because they preferred how I looked carrying the weight. I also prefer someone who has some “softness”. We should be careful though to distinguish between what we find attractive and what is healthy for the individual. We should also be careful to distinguish between “normal” and healthy. If the average BMI was 35 then we’d be right to call someone in that weight range “normal” but it doesn’t make them healthy.
wierdaaron, a lingering gut could be as much to do with posture and fitness as fatness.
There are three components to a (male) blubber gut: what’s inside, what’s outside, and what’s holding it in. Weight loss will lose fatty deposits on your internal organs, reducing volume, and will get rid of the subcutaneous fat wobbling around on your tummy, reducing flabbiness - but only exercise will create the muscle “girdle” needed not to have a sticky-out gut. (Unless you’re actually starving, which isn’t a good idea.)
It is no better to hold up someone carrying enough weight to impact health (which isn’t much) and say we prefer the aesthetic than to hold up anorexic models as symbols of beauty - who are not healthy.
(And on the gut, it can also just be muscle tone - with women, after a baby, its rare to avoid a gut without surgery)
Yeah, I know the difference. I’ve actually got a pretty strong abdominal wall (perhaps from the sit ups, perhaps from holding my stomach in all day), and I can feel the delineation between that and the fats. It’s not just a “ponch” I have, it’s exactly what I had before, just (considerably) less of it.
I just did the math. I lost 25% of my body weight. I’m only 3/4 the man I used to be tear
It was a photo that kicked me onto my weight loss. I couldn’t believe how fat I looked in photos, and there was a disconnect in my mind between fat photo me and fat mirror me. In clothes, fat mirror me was acceptable, though not good. Fat photo me was OH NO!
So I lost 100 pounds. At 5’2" and 130 I’m at the high end of healthy, but I have muscle from working out. I’m mostly a size small in tops and 4-6 in pants and dresses. I looove me! I still have a tummy, though. But whatever.
People always say 2 things to me now: I carried it well when I was fat and I need to stop losing weight now. To both things: fuck off, seriously. I hate hearing those things, and I know it’s well-intentioned, but I don’t take it as a compliment. It’s this weird faux-concern where it’s okay to worry that I’m going to lose too much weight and be “unhealthy,” though the same people never would have said I looked unhealthy when I was morbidly obese.
Anyway, congrats, wierdaaron! You look awesome!
wierdaaron and Glory: Damn. What an improvement! I aspire to be like you two someday. Weight loss is not an easy thing, nor should it be: after all, it took us years to put the weight on. It’s not coming off overnight. Once I wrapped my head around that simple fact, everything else fell into place. Now I’m 38 down and a hell of a long way to go. But just the start is freaking amazing.
People are afraid you’ll keep losing weight until you shrink like a raisin and then disappear entirely. They want you to stay within our plane of existence.
Really, though? More worried that they would have been about diabetes and heart disease when I was way too fat? I mean, I understand that no one wants me to die of too skinny, but c’mon. If you can pit everyone who neglected to tell you you were fat, I’m going to at least shake my fist a bit at everyone who sees a doomsday scenario when they look at a woman who weighs 130 pounds. But I would look like a raisin. You don’t lose 100 pounds without some unsightly excess skin problems. 
As a society yes, but as individuals we can’t change what we find attractive. I wouldn’t tell someone who was obviously proud of their weight loss that I preferred them with love handles though. Personality transcends physical appearance to some extent anyway, if I’m attracted to someone I know it doesn’t change if their weight changes, I just know from my attraction to strangers that I’m not a fan of hip bones, ribs, and small breasts.
I don’t agree with your sentiment, but I’m glad you’re happier with your body now.
It’s none of my business what anyone weighs, and since I know a ton of people who have been deeply hurt by others telling them their weight was unacceptable and that they should change it (most of them have not been able to), I’ll continue keeping my mouth tightly shut about anyone else’s blubber or lack thereof.
I didn’t realize I was super-skinny until I was in my teens. Sometimes your brain just wants you to believe you’re ‘normal’.