Is "Phantom Fat" A thing?

It all depends on how much fat you’re carrying at how much you’ve lost. The more fat the more you need to lose to make it visible where somebody with low body fat loses 5 pounds it will show easily and somebody with high body fat 5 pounds won’t even make a difference visually

jseams1234 wrote: »

Yes, it's a thing - most people just look like smaller versions of what they started at for a long while. This happens to men quite a bit too; men often think they have a "muscular base" that only has to be revealed by losing some fat - but they learn that they aren't quite as muscular as they thought. It's that "base" that gives much of the desirable shape that many find as a positive aesthetic.

Anyhow, at a certain point - usually the very last thing, areas like the belly, thighs, and other problematic areas will reduce and the visible changes will become much more apparent.

correct. This is why it’s important to weight train when dieting down. For sure most men under estimate how much muscle they have and exacerbate the issue while losing muscle while dieting down. The latter can be mitigated by weight training however the common response is that you won’t be gaining muscle however maintaining muscle will go a long way to help not be just a smaller version of your former self.

One reason many main fail to get lean is they do see how little muscle they have when dieting down and hate getting smaller and stop short of their goal.

It can be a question of your self-perception seeing yourself as still fat long after the weight has gone. I lost 50+ lbs. several years ago. I still have times when I look at my legs or belly and think "Oh, how fat I am." But then I'll see a photo of myself or see myself in a store window and be amazed at how thin I actually am.

It is fairly common to have some body dysmorphia after a significant weight loss. We tend to "see" ourselves a certain way. Our brains interpret the signals our eyes send, and even when looking right at the mirror and actually SEEING one thing with our eyes, sometimes our brains interpret what we used to be.

Another completely different thing can happen from other people after weight loss. When I first lost weight down to a healthy level, some friends were worried I was losing "too much" or developing an eating disorder.... because I was using MFP to keep track of calories. It is true my face looked a LOT different after weight loss. It wasn't huge amounts of saggy skin or really gaunt, just a lot different from the person I had become over the previous 30 years of slowly increasing my mass.

I gained some weight back in 2020 when COVID restrictions changed our lives. I struggled with that for about two years before getting it back off. When it came off the second time, nobody made any comments about it being "too much" or getting "too thin." I am at the low end of my maintenance range which is a healthy weight that's just a little bit into the upper half of the healthy BMI range. As an adult male, I think that's fine. Even I sometimes see something in the mirror that's not real.

Then, for some reason, I was talking with a friend about such issues. I found an old picture I created from two pictures of my face. One was from a few years before I got SERIOUS about losing weight - I had been trying halfheartedly for a couple years before that. The other was from several months after I had completed my loss into maintenance. It's funny because now I wouldn't recognize the person in the older picture as myself. It surprised my friend, too, and she thought that was surprising because she saw me routinely during those years and that person wasn't in her memory.

If you can find any old "before" pictures, it's worth a search to have a look so you can have another tool to internalize your success. It was a picture someone took of me on a river trip that really caused me to get serious about weight loss, and it was worth it.