As far as the love thing, I was really just saying this girl is a little wacked out if she actually thinks all of her guy friends are secretly in love with her. Or she is just playing things up in her mind to take the sting of her perceived rejection away.

I've also had guys tell me they do like me but they're embarrassed to be seen with me.

Not relating this to the original post, but I totally agree. When I embarked on my weight loss journey I was excited for the self esteem I would gain from losing weight, etc. I knew that would change (or I assumed it would) but WOW I didn't expect for everything else to come up to the surface. It is hard to realize and accept how much you hid behind your weight. I had no idea what I was about to uncover, and how much more I really had to work on. Losing weight did increase my self esteem, but it didn't make me a perfect match for men, nor even yield me more response from men, but it sure showed me how much more inside of me I needed to fix and value to realize I was better than any of the men I was attracting.. I am babbling now.... I would never change any of this for the world, but had I have known what I was going to uncover I may have been scared too.

I think any person, regardless of weight has "mind set back" on whether someone they're interested in will be interested back in them in more than just a platonic way.

I both agree and disagree with the op. In high school and uni I had a good number of male friends, but I don't believe any had interest in me. I understand too the weird self -esteem issues / over-confidence thing she has going on too.
I have gotten so much more attention since losing some weight. But my confidence and self -assurance has also risen. I am happier. I hide less. I can do more things.
I think this is an individual with low self esteem who while seemingly acknowledges how weight negatively affects her life, also uses it as an excuse and crutch (not a judgment here- I have done same). She says basically the only reason hordes of male friends aren't completely in love with her is weight. But I am willing she wants to, but doesn't really want to find out if that is the case. What if she loses the weight but is still alone? My bet is she is dealing with a whole lot more than extra weight. It goes to the core question of being loveable and worthy or not..which is tied to shame and fear and what better way to numb those feelings than with food.

Hello you all. This is an article copied from the link below in which a woman talks about the social stigma of losing 100 lbs. I have read this multiple times. I'm interested in hearing what some of you think about it.


"I come from a small-ish town in Oklahoma where we’ve never met a vegetable we couldn’t fry and the only thing more super-sized than our portions are the huge church complexes that alternate with fast-food restaurants along our roads.
So it maybe isn’t such a big surprise that by the time I graduated from high school, I weighed 260 pounds. My prom dress was a size 24, and my mother had to help me zip it up, a five-minute ordeal during which we grunted and cursed at one another. My aunt had to custom-make my graduation gown, a huge white tent in which I resembled the Stay-Puft marshmallow man. Still, I left for college in New York City feeling relatively confident. After all, I wasn’t just fat. I was also stylish, managing to alter and combine pieces in a way where they overcame their origins as shapeless sacks designed by people with the gall to decorate plus-size garments with ice-cream cones and slices of pizza. And I was hilarious, *****y and sexually brash, defense mechanisms mastered by fat women and gay men everywhere.
I wasn’t immune — hurtful things would happen on occasion. Groups of rowdy teenagers sometimes yelled insults at me from car windows. I gave my phone number to a nice guy, only to find out when he called that he had a fetish for overweight women, shamelessly telling me that he likes “something to grab onto” during sex. Or someone would approach me out of nowhere on the street and tell me not to worry about how I look; someday — when I’m ready — I’ll lose the weight. And of course, I compared myself endlessly to the impossibly thin women in magazines, just like the average-weight women I knew, to whom I also, by the way, compared myself.
Despite these blows to your self-esteem, for the most part nobody close to you really tells you to your face what they think about your weight. As a result, a fat girl’s worldview is missing vital pieces of information. When you don’t get invited on your friends’ man-catching all-girl outings, or when men who enjoy sleeping with you over and over again fail to want to date you, you can’t quite comprehend that all this is really caused by the way you look.
But then, the summer before my junior year of college, something changed. I made a promise to myself to diet just for one summer, and for the first time I saw results. On a low-carb plan, I started melting away, shrinking inwards. I began to grow collarbones and hipbones, sprouting bony, sharp spots all over my body. By the end of the summer, I was 50 pounds lighter, and within a year I was down to 160 pounds on my 5’11″ frame, a solid size 10.
It’s been six years now that I’ve maintained that weight loss, and it is far and away the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. Not because I’m healthier and will probably live longer, but because I now reap the benefits of a society set up to punish fat people for the unforgivable crime of eating too much.
I hear the fat jokes right out loud now, instead of just a whispering breeze brushing past my ear. Men who used to let the door swing shut in my face now hold it open for me politely and look me up and down as I step past. My own boyfriend, a man I began dating a few months after reaching my goal weight, sees the picture on my driver’s license and admits he probably wouldn’t have gone out with me when I looked like that. I appreciate his honesty. It’s better than the good-intentioned people who gush upon seeing the new me, “You’re so pretty now!” before stammeringly adding, “Not that you weren’t, uh, pretty before.”
Finding yourself suddenly thin after a lifetime of being fat is a bit like stepping into that “Saturday Night Live” sketch where Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white guy and discovers that white people act completely differently when there are no black people around. With no outward sign of my former body type, I became a renegade spy for Team F.A.T.
Of course, I didn’t discover that thin people drink cocktails and dance when fat people get off the bus. But when I lost weight, I was rewarded with membership in a club I never knew existed, where the benefits included better treatment, greater professional success and, above all, a new status as qualified participant in the social world including romantic relationships.
Of course, I lost weight to reap these benefits. But it doesn’t stop me from being angry that I had to lose weight to reap these benefits. Of those who are nice to me now, who would have been rude to me before? Which ones made the cruel jokes? Who can be trusted?
As the years pass, it is easy to forget. I have even, on a few occasions, found myself looking at an overweight person with faint disdain, forgetting those years I struggled with the very same issue. I hope never to gain back the weight I lost. But I have seen another side of people that I cannot forget. And with any luck, I never will.
I hope I always stay fat on the inside."

I don't really agree with the stuff about being treated better because you are thinner. I do acknowledge that there is a certain bias in favor of more attractive people, in terms of what people expect from you and in how they will behave toward you as a result of those expectations. But I think, for the most part, you send signals to people about how you expect to be treated, and that's how they treat you.

Roughly 3 years ago, I was more than 100 lbs heavier than I am now. I was shy and self-conscious and generally tried my best to blend into my surroundings, as though that would distract people from how fat I was. I am convinced now that that is what affected how I was treated, more so than my weight. Since losing the weight, I dress, walk, and speak in a way that gets me noticed, and it's not really conscious on my part. I am simply a million times more confident, more self-aware, and happier now than I was before. I know I can handle anything that comes my way, so I don't shy away from opportunities at work or avoid having to interact with certain people out of fear that they might reject me in some way.

Women who have lost a ton of weight tend to say things like "This guy wants to date me, and he didn't like me before because I was fat, but I'm still the same person I was then." And I just don't think it's true. Maybe I'm the exception, but I don't believe it's possible to go through that kind of transformation, which is every bit as psychological as it is physical, and still be the same person.