A few months ago in Osaka, a Japanese friend I hadn’t seen for a while asked if I had put on weight. After considering a variety of responses, I did what any 40-year-old narcissist would do — I denied it.

“Are you sure?” she said in Japanese, with a smile. “You look fatter.”

“What do you mean, ‘fatter’? I’m the same.”

“But your face, it looks fatter. I’m sure. Your arms, too.”

Honestly, I couldn’t say if this was true because I always put monitoring my weight on a bathroom scale in the same category as getting a perm and plucking my eyebrows. I noticed that some of my pants were getting a bit snug, but that can happen after many washings. If my belly protruded a tad more than usual, that could easily be attributed to water retention caused by the high-sodium Japanese diet. But two weeks later, another acquaintance, also Japanese and female, said almost exactly the same thing: “Chotto futtota?” (Have you become a little fatter?)

This was getting tiresome. Since coming to Japan earlier this year to teach English, I found that certain features of my appearance attracted more attention than they did back home. In a land of (what some Japanese disparagingly call) big faces, small noses, boring black hair, little eyes and short legs, my “small face,” “tall nose,” wavy brown hair, round blue eyes and long legs made me quite the exotic specimen. I was single and an active participant in the dating market, but this obsession with my gut was throwing me off my game.