I Wasn’t Fat Shamed Until After I Lost the Weight

I was not prepared for this

6 min readOct 30, 2022

I’m someone who’s always loved food, and I eat a lot of it.

I’ve never been big enough to attract much scorn, but that’s most likely because I stand at 6’ 3”, which is a height that usually makes a lot of weight seem proportional to the height.

If I’m being really honest, it also helps that I’m a man. I have no experience with being a woman, but I read a lot of stories written by women here on Medium, and I’m led to believe that for a woman, being overweight attracts a lot of extra judgement from friends as well as strangers.

For me, I didn’t attract judgement until I dropped the weight, and once I did, people had something to say.

Being a tall guy with “meat on my bones”, people assumed I was healthy and happy at that size. I’m quite a loud and opinionated person, so people assumed I did what I wanted and was the prime example of balance, joy, and “living my best life.” When I started getting serious with my partner (who’s smoking hot in the conventional sense), people didn’t give it that much thought, either. My partner was the hot one, and I was the “nice” one; it just made sense according to romance mathematics.

People saw what they wanted to see, but if they’d asked how I felt, I’d have been happy to share the many health problems I’d experienced since ballooning my way past a healthy BMI range.

*(I know BMI is outdated, but once I left my range, I felt it pretty much immediately).

I got serious asthma several times a year, which developed into pneumonia two years ago. I had trouble sleeping, had sky-high blood pressure, had a leaky gut for years which led to tons of issues, caught cold symptoms almost monthly, and generally felt a lot more sluggish than I did ten years ago. I wasn’t being judged by others, but my body was sure as hell judging me.