I recognise myself in a lot of the above commentary.
I’ve spent most of my life around the top end of a healthy BMI, I naturally have big muscular thighs and a big arse and as long as I work out my upper body/shoulders/arms I can look pretty decent (if I lapse in exercise I can quickly look very pear shaped even without gaining much). However, I have an older sister who has always been very tall and slender and as a kid/teen whenever someone commented on my sisters ‘supermodel’ proportions or her long legs it always felt like they were calling me fat or stumpy by omission (perhaps not totally rational but who is at 14-15?) looking back at photos I can see I was a perfectly healthy looking child/adolescent and as a mother I would have no concerns about a child with similar proportions/body composition.
I have piled on (and subsequently lost, with sustained effort!) 3-4 stone 3 times, 2 pregnancies over a decade apart and when my mother died and I spent a year self medicating depression with sugar. All three times I was able to maintain that loss for 5-10 years until the next big event disrupted my healthy habits (especially once I figured out that hormonal contraceptive in all forms was terrible for both my body and mind).
This time around I gained weight due to a perfect storm of events (I married an alcoholic and absorbed some of his drinking habits, thankfully without developing the actual addiction, a year spent living in the children’s hospital, eating cafeteria chips, covid ending all my usual physical activities gym/swim/teaching dance/cycling for transport, and another family bereavement, this one dramatic and unexpected) plus the added challenge of perimenopause.
I had found peace with being a big arsed, big thighed gal (much easier after the 90s ‘heroin chic’ thing went out of style) but peri/gaining weight via booze had given me a gut - a gut AND an arse made me look inflated all-the-way around, like a bumper car, so I have been avoiding socialising in order to avoid photos. Getting back somewhere towards my usual isn’t about vanity, it’s about reclaiming who I was 5 years ago, including my physical fitness and mobility, 3-4 extra stones is terrible for my knees and that becomes a negative cycle of not doing the physical stuff I enjoy most (dancing and cycling) because it hurts my knees, but then gaining more weight because I’m not active enough.
I’m not at all worried about the doom-sayers who claim we’ll pile it all back on again - even if they turn out to be correct we’ll be no different to the millions of people who lost significant weight via Slimming World or WeightWatchers or Slimfast or gastric sleeve surgery or plain old calorie counting and failed to keep it off long term - not being certain whether the loss is maintainable or not isn’t a reason to not try at all.
Oh! And @Xiaoxiong I did the same as you! Filled out the initial form for Zava with my weight at 13st (a guess) thinking I was not-quite-obese but the joint pain would qualify me for the lower starting BMI (for people with comorbidities) and when I took my feet-on-the-scales photo for their doctor to review I found I was actually 13st 4, a BMI of 30.1 😬
(the heaviest I’ve ever been at a first weigh in was 14st 1lb after the birth of my firstborn, who was 12 days overdue and a whopper at 9st 9lbs. My mobility was incredibly compromised at the end of that pregnancy and I was only in my early twenties so I deffo don’t want my now middle-aged, non-pregnant weight to get up towards 15 stone again. That baby is now the age I was when he was born and he’s 6ft 3 of wiry muscle, like a human whippet 😂)