To the anon of "This story is a mix of thin privilege and hourglass-shape privilege.". To me it sounds like you have lipedema. It is a condition generally confused with regular obesity, and most doctors don't know about it at all. Please go get it checked because it is a serious condition.

Asked by

hideko69

Armchair diagnoses are really problematic. Also, what do you mean by “regular obesity”? Because after talking with several healthcare professionals, and reading scads and scads of medical research on the subject, there are all sorts of variations on fatness – fatness that comes from normal fat-storing processes, fatness that comes as a side effect (and often symptom of) insulin resistance-related conditions including type II diabetes and PCOS, fatness that comes from altered hormonal states like thyroid disorders, fatness that comes from lower metabolic rates, and the largest group of all, fatness that has no obvious ‘cause.’

It’s like saying someone who’s really tall must have issues with HGH levels, or someone who’s really short must have suffered malnutrition in childhood…too simplistic and often wrong. Body size (height including weight) is multivariate, highly hereditary (70% - 80%) and in the long-term and without drastic measures (all other things being equal) largely unchangeable.*

I know you were probably trying to be helpful, but it’s really, really hard to know what’s the 'cause’ of fatness even for trained doctors (even if there is an abnormality that caused it – it could very well be normal for that person), and especially difficult from a single post on the internet.



*Citations.

-ATL