Does This Uterus Make My Stomach Look Fat?

^^ I was under the impression this thread was for women with a normal BMI to share what our stomachs look like, so that those women who are still trying to lose weight won't have unrealistic expectations and expect to have a rock hard, flat stomach when they reach their goal weight.

shadow2soul wrote: »

Oh man I don't even want to think about it. Bloat is just plain evil.

I get bloated around ovulation and around my TOM. So annoying. For me it's only 1-3 lbs, but still annoying. Oh and if I happen to eat pizza I look like I am several months pregnant :laugh: (doesn't stop me from eating pizza though)

Hah, yes! Hormones wreak havoc with my GI system too. Ovulation =bloated constipated angry woman. A few days of normalcy, then PMS brings it back. Repeat. I was so horribly bloated last week that I looked 3 mo pregnant and my high waisted leggings were chafing my belly. Leggings for goodness sake! The unhappy skin still hasn’t gone away but at least I’m not hosting a cantaloupe inside my tights anymore.

And speaking of posing doing wonders...I felt like a little Instagram princess here (not that I post these type of pics anywhere but here). Definitely not in that frontal shot, no matter how much I tried to flex

hesn92 wrote: »

^^ I was under the impression this thread was for women with a normal BMI to share what our stomachs look like, so that those women who are still trying to lose weight won't have unrealistic expectations and expect to have a rock hard, flat stomach when they reach their goal weight.

Expanding on that: Periodically we see photo posts, usually from quite young women, worrying because their stomachs don't look as flat as the photoshopped/posed IG-ers, but whose own photos here make it sadly clear that they're lamenting the slight swell of the abdomen that literally just means they have a uterus. It's heartbreaking, to me.

There are lots of reasons to applaud a "this is how real women look" thread.

This thread has helped me a lot as well. After 4 big babies, there’s some loose pouchy skin and fat that is unlikely to disappear any time soon with anything like a normal diet and workout schedule. I’m not 18, I can’t workout 5 hours a day, and that’s the smudgy size of it. I can still be proud of what I achieve, even if it isn’t “Instagram worthy”. And it’s nice to know I’m not the only one like this. A lot of friends make comments about my shape and I think they have a warped idea of what’s going on under my tank top.

Age: 52
BMI or Height/Weight/Bone Structure: 23.7, 5’4”/138 lbs/broad frame
BF%: 23.5
Number of Pregnancies: 0
Primary form of exercise: ex. Walking
Number of years doing aforementioned exercise: 1.25 years

StormFiber wrote: »

As I sit here, praying for my period to return in hopes of having a baby, I hope this post speaks to other young women fighting anorexia. If only I had known that my uterus would rebel against me and stop working as I starved my body….

[Edited by MFP Moderators]

Your profile says you're male :huh:

But any bump of this thread is a good thing :drinker:

@sgriska Do you mind me asking how much weight you've lost? I'm guessing it's much more than the average lady in this thread, thus the variation in your results vs their s. I could tell it was significant from the pic you posted. Great job!

sgriska wrote: »

pinuplove wrote: »

@sgriska Do you kind me asking how much weight you've lost? I'm guessing it's much more than the average lady in this thread, thus the variation in your results vs their s. I could tell it was significant from the pic you posted. Great job!

Thanks so much. 146 lbs.

You look amazing, and you obviously have a lot of strength to stick through it.

Have you seen this thread? It's a different look at the stomach after an approximately 200lb weight loss.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10453193/honest-loose-skin-thoughts-pics

sgriska wrote: »

I have to admit that even this thread, as awesome and necessary as it is, has me double-thinking my own reality: "Obviously my scale cannot be accurate, because the other ladies in the same ballpark as my height/weight have flatter tummies than I do, or if loose skin it's the crepe-papery thin kind..."

Which is to say, this is hard stuff to deal with even when you're consciously aware of the problem and actively, at this very moment, trying to counter it.

I wish I knew what the answer was to post-massive-weight-loss-body-image-issues, but I sure haven't found the magic pill yet that's going to stop me from thinking this way.

You have had a much larger loss than a lot of us. That's a huge game changer in this whole discussion.

I struggle with this also, because my loose skin (after a 90-95 pound loss) isn't all the crepe-papery kind either, but I've noticed something over the years of seeing these threads, and that's that after a certain age, it's really hard for women to get to that crepe-papery stage everywhere without getting to a very low body fat percentage. For some women, that might be an achievable goal, but from most of the research I've read regarding losing large amounts of weight, I don't think it's a sustainable goal for women who've, well, lost very large amounts of weight.

So knowing all this, I try to make my peace with this. I'm 56, I'm not going to have that perfect body, I can work to make mine better, but I also don't want to make this all a struggle by trying to shoot for an unrealistic goal.

Just throwing some rambling thoughts out there for you to chew on!

GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »

sgriska wrote: »

I have to admit that even this thread, as awesome and necessary as it is, has me double-thinking my own reality: "Obviously my scale cannot be accurate, because the other ladies in the same ballpark as my height/weight have flatter tummies than I do, or if loose skin it's the crepe-papery thin kind..."

Which is to say, this is hard stuff to deal with even when you're consciously aware of the problem and actively, at this very moment, trying to counter it.

I wish I knew what the answer was to post-massive-weight-loss-body-image-issues, but I sure haven't found the magic pill yet that's going to stop me from thinking this way.

You have had a much larger loss than a lot of us. That's a huge game changer in this whole discussion.

I struggle with this also, because my loose skin (after a 90-95 pound loss) isn't all the crepe-papery kind either, but I've noticed something over the years of seeing these threads, and that's that after a certain age, it's really hard for women to get to that crepe-papery stage everywhere without getting to a very low body fat percentage. For some women, that might be an achievable goal, but from most of the research I've read regarding losing large amounts of weight, I don't think it's a sustainable goal for women who've, well, lost very large amounts of weight.

So knowing all this, I try to make my peace with this. I'm 56, I'm not going to have that perfect body, I can work to make mine better, but I also don't want to make this all a struggle by trying to shoot for an unrealistic goal.

Just throwing some rambling thoughts out there for you to chew on!

That's interesting, and supports an experience/suspicion I've had as I try to grapple with just what my goal weight should be. My doctor said 140-150, and that she wouldn't want to see me go below 140 because with as broad a frame and build as I have she really didn't think going down to 125 (which had been my goal) would be healthy and sustainable for me. But as I got closer, I still have all this flab, and I keep hearing people saying "if you can only get down to a low enough BF % your skin folds will be paper thin and not a problem anymore," and I've seen people with this kind of really thin loose skin and thought yeah, I could deal with that a lot better than this whole Shar-Pei look I've got going on.

But I have chronic kidney disease, and just as I was hitting 140 I got hit with one of these massive water-weight fluctuations I'm prone to and overnight shot back up to 156. The really weird thing, though, was that this 16 lb gain was virtually "invisible" -- my clothes all still fit, no appreciable edema in my feet/ankles, to my eyes at least my body looked pretty much the same as it did the day before, except.... all the fine, crepey wrinkles on top of my skin folds were gone. So, the water just spread itself out into the very top layer of my skin, and there's plenty of surface area to work with.

And that's when it hit me -- I could totally lose another 15 lbs from 140 down to 125, and it would probably be exactly as "invisible" in terms of changing the overall shape of my body as this 16 lb fluctuation was. Maybe those crepe-paper wrinkles would be a little more widespread, and my neck and lower/outer legs (which are weirdly lean compared to the rest of me) would probably look gaunt and freaky. So, I decided 140-ish was probably a good plan as the doctor suggested and have been hovering around there since.

So, yeah, my own hunch at this point is that the paper-thin skin folds so many places tout as an appropriate goal just really aren't attainable in my case without going all Holocaust-camp emaciated in the rest of my body, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if this isn't the case with a lot of older women who have lost a-lot-more-weight-than-usual.