Body image stuff.

[wildeabandon]

In the gym today, one of the personal trainers who I had a few sessions with earlier in the year came up to me and commented that I'd lost weight.

This has left me feeling a bit funny. Because I'm not going to the gym to lose weight - I'm going there to get healthier and stronger, and because I enjoy it. If she'd commented that my shoulders were looking broader, or my arms more muscular, then I'd have been unmitigatedly pleased.

But now it's a bit awkward in my head, because on some level, even though it's not why I go to the gym, even though I like being simultaneously fat and athletic, part of me was pleased too. The part of me that thinks, "Well, I'm always going to be a short guy, but if I were short and slender, I'd be more attractive to more people."

I would like that part to shut up, and slightly I'm worried that if (and it's quite possible, albeit far from certain) I continue to lose weight, it'll just get louder, and then I'll start getting tempted to change my diet and make it go faster, and then bad things happen.

I don't think this is actually likely, but it is a bit annoying that a well-meaning comment can lead to such angst.

Comments

Interesting twist

[jamesofengland.livejournal.com]

As you know, I'm pretty into "fat is a feminist issue" stuff. There's a near robotic impulse to trot out the pat cliches that go with that. I was formulating a reply in my head as I went through the post. Until the penultimate sentence, when all concern for malign societal influence et. al. left my head.

If you're at risk of no longer desiring to produce delicious food, you simply have to stop going to the gym. No ifs, no buts. It may be a small risk, but this is clearly an area where the precautionary principle should operate. Would swimming be OK? Might you be able to go to the gym safely if you picked a new and different gym and were consciously rude to the staff and fellow gym users, thus making "compliments" less likely?

In other thoughts (and it would perhaps be better if you thought of this as being a separate post), although obviously I'm far from an expert in what makes short chaps appealing, I'd have thought that becoming elfin would be a negative step in gender terms; that it might make more people attracted to you, but some of them for the wrong reasons, while almost all of the people to whom you would be less attractive would be "correctly" attracted, if that makes sense.

My last basis for concern is a more idiosyncratic one; your username combined with the idea of you as terribly boyish brings out "love that dare not speak its name" squick in me. My sense is that your social circles are too mainstream for the coincidence to be terribly problematic, and there are good people in the age play community, but it has always seemed to be a social sphere that engenders unhappiness and angst.

[fjm]

Have you actually weighed yourself?

In my experience people are so locked into "weight loss = looks good" that they reverse it to "Looks good, therefore must have lost weight."

Since I began working out seriously five years ago, I've put on two stones, yet regular as clockwork, people say to me "You look good, have you lost weight?"

Some of it's proportion--built up shoulders mean my bust doesn't look as absurd and I have the rib cage to support it (30HH cup down to 34G in two years); and some of it makes my waist (actually up an inch) look smaller.

[wildeabandon]

Have you actually weighed yourself?

Yes, although I probably shouldn't; and I can tell from the fit of my clothes that I'm smaller.

[damerell]

I suggest a preemptive programme of nice dinners. Can't be too careful!