If anything whatsoever gave me a better understanding of what trans people claim they are going through -- and some of them probably are going through it, though I suspect some of them use "gender dysphoria" as a convenient cover story for a fetish -- it's having become twice as heavy as I was at age eighteen.
I get that people naturally gain a little weight as we get older, and women in particular might pack on a little extra fat when we make babies. This, however, is beyond ridiculous. We're talking a fifty-pound weight gain that stuck around after each pregnancy (I had two) and then, after I failed at weight loss in '12, another thirty or so because third time's the charm.
I mention the trans thing again because (1) as something I discuss often here, it is a useful reference and (2) dysphoria and dysmorphia happen in many different ways, "I was not supposed to be born this sex" being only one of them and probably not even the most common. Now, I don't know the difference between dysphoria and dysmorphia, and I'm not online as I write this. One of these days I'll do some reading up and probably write a boring essay here explaining that whole thing. Meanwhile, whichever one I'm experiencing, I haven't been at a normal BMI since I was twenty-one. And yet, it is always a little startling to look at full-body photos of me, or at my reflection in a full-length mirror. My poor daughter learned early to not step up too closely behind Mommy if I didn't know she was there because I still hadn't come to terms with my ass being huge. (Sorry, kiddo!)
You notice Being Fat in the oddest places. Did you know the little automatic roller-upper thingies for the seat belts in automobiles aren't designed for big people? If you are big and you use a seat belt, you get used to it being extended most of the time because it's been pulled out too far to "bounce" back. And then there are bedsheets. These days the fitted sheets can tend to have deep pockets, which annoys some people, but I remember a time when they didn't have those and I had to buy special stretchy clips to keep my fucking bed made. I was too heavy and kept pulling things out of whack when I rolled over. (Do not even get me started about sex. That was good for an entire bed-remaking.) And then there are public restrooms. Apparently no one has notified public-restroom designers that fat women have to spread our legs wider to wipe ourselves. This usually means bashing one knee against the feminine-hygiene trash can, which is usually helpfully bolted to the wall of the stall. At knee level. [bong] Ow.
It might not be so bad if I were one of those women who managed to become Beautiful Fat. No such fucking luck. I looked odd when I was in normal BMI range and I look even odder now. I will never be one of those plus-size lingerie or bikini models. I don't mind, considering, but it would have been nice to have had an additional career option these past few years. If nothing else, I could have become an influencer and then made a living at crying over hateful comments because when you're pretty, you get more sympathy for that.
(Not all the sympathy, I realize. Haters gonna hate, as the woman wrote. My point is the numbers are very different when one is an Uglo-American. It's like we've committed the legal offense of Existing Without Permission.)
(Seriously, if you're gonna skip the previous parenthetical statement and just scream at me... don't. Go away.)
(I wouldn't be so pre-emptively defensive about this, but you would not believe the bullshit I've gone through in more than twenty-five years every time I speak from experience. The "Not All Whoevers" thing is NOT new, and neither are snowflakes throwing a shit fit in the same vein. I even once pissed off a famous low-carb recipe author by talking about my social experiences as an introvert. "Oh, so you think extroverts don't have problems?" Buh-bye, crazy lady. And that was more than ten years ago!)
(Apparently, I have a pattern with pissing off authors. Okay, last parenthetical paragraph for this essay. Sorry.)
It would probably be tempting for some people to taunt me at this juncture with, "Oh, we see... so your outside doesn't match your inside?" I would fucking hope not, since my liver is supposed to be inside my body and my skin is not supposed to look like my liver, but since we're on the subject? "Outside not matching inside" comes closer to the reality for fat people than it does for sex-confused people. See, my skeletal frame is still inside this fat suit and is literally, mostly hidden from the world. Same goes for my muscles. Did you know everyone has a six-pack? Yup. Even people who weigh 500 pounds. Know how you make the six-pack visible? Not through exercise. You have to metabolically "burn off" the fat layer covering it. We can quibble over whether it is actually healthy for women's six-packs to be visible, but they certainly should not be buried about a foot deep under a blubber layer. There is no evolutionary scenario that makes this healthy. It just doesn't kill us fast enough to keep us from reproducing.
And actually, unless you get as far as the aforementioned 500 pounds and up, being fat in and of itself isn't usually what kills you. Usually the reason obesity is linked with greater mortality rates is because some third thing is causing both the fatness and the dying. This is related to the reason obesity is so strongly linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. But there still isn't any healthy scenario for your six-pack hiding about a foot deep under a blubber layer. Sorry. I really am. I wish I didn't need to say that.
I learned about the pitfalls of quack diets and weight-loss drugs fairly early on. I say "quack diet" instead of "fad diet" because a diet being popular doesn't determine whether it's safe and effective, but some "diets" are still really bad for you. And I was in my twenties when the fen/phen drug regimen was a thing. I came close to trying it, but was still telling myself I wasn't all that bad (I wasn't, compared to later) and then the news started coming out about the poor health effects it was causing. Other than a brief flirtation with Slim-Fast, which I dropped when my wasband observed how much sugar was in the shakes, I didn't bother much with changing my eating back then. I'd seen enough people trying that and winding up doing something stupid to understand that I didn't understand enough yet to tinker with how I ate. I wouldn't have said it in so many words, but that's where I was at the time. The side-effects of Olestra, a fake fat whose popularity lasted about as long as the popularity for the alli diet plan and for similar reasons, further put me off doing anything drastic.
Round about 1999 I started hearing about Atkins because for some reason, this diet that had been around since the 1970s in various versions had suddenly become popular again. I am not one to let people tell me what to think about anything if I am curious enough about the thing. I bought the book in 2003 and read it. And I'd had just enough human metabolism in high-school honors biology to understand what the good doctor was getting at, and I got really, really excited. Also sad, because he had just passed away.
Over the years since, I have explored not only different methods of low-carb eating but also related dietary things like Dr. Weston Price's work and people's various self-experiments with "ancestral" or "Paleo" eating. I ran into a lot of silliness there (and I knew about Jordan Peterson before most of you did), but I also witnessed some pretty interesting breakthroughs. The end result is that when I finally set myself to do something about my problem, I think I'll be pretty well equipped to get it done. I might even write about my progress here.
But one of the things I learned during all that is what happens when you've lost a whole lot of weight and you had stretch marks before you began. It does not look like the official diet-plan before-and-after photos. You wind up with a lot of loose skin. Doubly so if you are aging. There is about as much bullshit going around about post-weight-loss loose skin as there is about gender and, as with gender, most of said bullshit coming from the sex class that never experiences pregnancy and therefore does experience far less than half the stretch marks.
Happily, one advance in plastic surgery I can wholly get behind is removal of excess skin after weight loss. Some of the surgeons out there are getting really good at it now, with quite natural-looking results, including the bellybutton being where it is supposed to be and not looking weird or gross.
Unhappily, insurance plans will cover gender quackery all fucking day long, but none of them cover post-weight-loss skin surgery except for one bit of butchery where they cut off your tummy apron and leave you with a weird scar.
I hate being fat.
Part of the Forever Diet is having “fat days” and “good days”. Fat days are just basically waking up and “feeling fat” and the whole day is spent with avoiding mirrors and windows that reflect and adjusting the waistband of the too tight for no reason article of clothing you put on that morning.
Ironically fat days are spent feeling like a “loser” when the English language is all backwards because the last thing you are on a fat day is a loser.
Regular size people have bad hair days. So do Forever Diet people of course, with lots of days being a fat day and a bad hair day rolled together which creates the basic “ugly day” which is spent trying to find a rock that’s big enough to crawl under. A good day can abruptly change to a fat day when you pass that plate glass window that makes you want to throw the rock at it and shatter your reflection forever, which gets us right back where we started, on the Forever Diet, even knowing tomorrow will be a “fresh start”.
I really think you are onto something with comparing this to gender dysphoria, and the wrong body feeling, especially the pain. The forever psychic pain.