Well my weight gain came from not exercising as well as body image issues. I was covering my body and not realizing I was gaining weight until my clothes were super tight. I wasn't out, even to myself, while I was gaining the weight, but then I came out and just kept gaining. A bit was medications that made me crave carbs, which I am now off of, but I think a lot was I was just stressed to a huge degree.

However, for the weight loss portion the gender considerations have been huge. As a masculine genderqueer, I wanted to lose all the weight in my stomach and chest. Which, thankfully, the chest weight is going fast. But there's also a reality that as someone who is not on T I will never achieve exactly what I want. So it's a lot of looking for exercises that will achieve the upper body I want without having T... but it's also that I want to still look muscular - so it also has to do with getting my fat to distribute differently based on muscle mass. So far it's going well but I'm nervous I'm getting way too feminine of hips...

I would like to look more androgynous but most people don't really understand that. As for what I would ideally want to look like, I would prefer a male (if feminine) body. But I know I can never realistically ever achieve that (without drastic surgery) and I think it's mentally holding me back. I naively hope that losing a lot of weight will help me look more like that but I know I never will. My fear is that I'll forever be stuck with a huge chest and the most giant hips known to humanity and that I'll never look the way I feel I should (and thus, always be very unhappy).

I hate having that kind of mental/emotional roadblock. I know a lot of weight loss is mental, and I do hypnosis to reinforce that, but every time I try to use the mantra of envisioning myself as I would like to look, it only depresses rather than motivates me. u__u

I can relate to this so much. I don't think I need to change my body with surgery per se because I do feel very "both or neither" about gender somehow, in a way that I have trouble articulating... but I want to have the most ambiguous, andro appearance I can. I'd probably play sometimes a little to one side or the other... but I hate being stuck in this hourglass.

I've always been underweight and small, for a plethora of reasons. I was born premature, I was never taught healthy eating, I lived in a stressful environment as a kid with no real security...

In high school, I always ended up wearing very large and aggressive clothes, inevitably to hide my chest and to push against the grain and make up for the supposed weakness and frailty of myself and my body. Oh, and I hate people.

Anyway... I am on testosterone, which has done a lot of the work with my self image. I may have been small, but I still had more feminine of a shape than I wanted. Gaining muscle before now seemed impossible and not worth it. But now I have been treated for over a year, and I have extreme motivation for looking the best I can be. I feel like now that I'm read the right way, I can really go the length to own my body.

Even if I will never look the way I ultimately want to. I'm way too short for that (5'4") and will never be able to afford surgery, let alone have a suitable bottom surgery option for probably as long as I live. It would've been easy to be born the right way, so I could struggle with sexuality and genderqueerness alone.

So now I'm trying to gain muscle and definition, and hopefully a healthy body weight for a change.

My therapist wants me to get down to the healthy BMI for my height. 30ish pounds to go. My scale broke, so I need something a bit more accurate.

Hi Ren...and welcome. Best of luck with using my fitness pal....its a great tool!
I started this group, but haven't posted much since. My partner had heart failure in mid-July & my attention has been shifted into caregiving. Health is stable now.
How's everyone doing?

Oh man, AF, I am so sorry to hear about your partner's heart troubles. I hope you two are doing well and that things are on the upswing.

Oh no, I didn't know that! I hope everything is all right. Good for you in being there for her and still keeping active as well. Hope she is doing well.

I would like to look more androgynous but most people don't really understand that. As for what I would ideally want to look like, I would prefer a male (if feminine) body. But I know I can never realistically ever achieve that (without drastic surgery) and I think it's mentally holding me back. I naively hope that losing a lot of weight will help me look more like that but I know I never will. My fear is that I'll forever be stuck with a huge chest and the most giant hips known to humanity and that I'll never look the way I feel I should (and thus, always be very unhappy).

I hate having that kind of mental/emotional roadblock. I know a lot of weight loss is mental, and I do hypnosis to reinforce that, but every time I try to use the mantra of envisioning myself as I would like to look, it only depresses rather than motivates me. u__u

I can relate to this so much. I don't think I need to change my body with surgery per se because I do feel very "both or neither" about gender somehow, in a way that I have trouble articulating... but I want to have the most ambiguous, andro appearance I can. I'd probably play sometimes a little to one side or the other... but I hate being stuck in this hourglass.

I feel you on this one. I'm very comfortable going back and forth, or being right in the middle. I've always just thought of myself as a very feminine man who could become a very stealthy drag-queen with ease.

But, when I was very heavy, if I dressed towards the male side, I tended just to look frumpy and people automatically assumed I was just a butch lesbian. Now that I'm smaller, if I dress masculinely, people just assume I'm into fashion - correct, but not the whole story.