Alright, I know this might seem like a weird or inconsiderate topic since i know some of the people on here have been looking to loose weight, but I've been thinking about this recently and came to a realization that might be helpful for others.

I've been really concerned about my weight since about puberty or so, down to the point where sometimes I think I might have some sort of an eating disorder or at least tendencies. I tend not to eat much even if I am hungry, feel guilty when I eat something "bad", I often only buy really healthy foods at the grocery store or else I feel like everyone's looking at me, my husband made me quit jogging once and I cried every night secretly for like a month straight because I was so depressed and felt so sure I was just going to gain weight; I don't purge except for once or twice my husband had us eat something terribly bad for us and I just felt so sick at the thought of all the grease in my stomach. I've always been thin but I've always felt like I was overweight even though I know that I am at a healthy BMI (it also doesn't help that my husband would tell me that I am a fat slob and then not allow me to exercise and make me eat awful foods (except for once he had me on what I call the "starvation diet" (roughly 300-400 calories/day) where I lost 10 pounds in two weeks, which is a lot of weight for someone my size to loose)), and now I know that I need to eat more if I want to gain more muscle but I've been having this awful mental block recently where I've been lifting weights and doing cardio and so on but I just can't get myself to eat more food.

It just never made any sense to me how rationally I could know I was at a healthy weight and have to eat more if I want to get more muscular (which is what I want so I can look and feel more manly) but then have that part of me that feels so irrationally overconscious about my weight and then not eat nearly close to my recommended caloric intake. I think I'd be anorexic if that rational part of myself didn't make itself known.

But, I think I figured it out, it's because I am trans. Everything keeps coming back to that. Because I only feel fat on parts of me that have that girly figure, like my chest, hips, thighs, and that little pocket of fat on my stomach that 90% of all the in-shape girls i know have. I have a nice hour-glass figure for a girl, but all those completely natural curves has been giving my male brain the illusion that I am overweight, because men do not have those curves or hold their fat there. That also explains why I started getting conscious about this when I did, because I started getting all curvy once I hit puberty. I felt so much better at my thinnest because I had much smaller hips which seemed more masculine; I always knew it wasn't because of media, etc like it is with some girls because I never wanted to look like a girl, especially a supermodel or actress.

Now... I am going to cook up some venison and not feel bad about it. 

Share your thoughts, has being trans given you an eating disorder of any sort, tendencies, or overly conscious about your size? have you tried to get thinner so you'd look more male, or did the opposite by eating more to hide?

i lost over 20 pounds from the beginning of my freshman year to the beginning of my junior year of high school. i was already on T, i was very self conscious, however, because all the guys my age/height were lighter than me. i had hit/completed female puberty pretty much completely before high school, and had the weight of an average "woman". i was not overweight AT ALL, but i was heavier than them, and it gave me a baby face. so, with 4 months of HS starting, I had a lovely undiagnosed ED to deal with (have finally gotten mostly over it)
but it was definitely trans related

I have the same thing going on where I whine about my fat body, but it's just that it's stored in the wrong spots so everything looks wrong. It's a terrible feeling, because I would have times where I refused to eat for two days in a row because I felt so fat and hopeless.
T, please fix my body and put the fat reserves in the right place :c

I am pretty skinny but I have tried to lose weight in certain areas, even seach threatment for it, because I still got small amount of fat like on my hips or some baby face.. T have helped alot but I still got some and honestly I think im never to get all over it cause I think my hips are pretty wide so even if I got just a small amount of fat it looks like alot more cause of there wideness, this is the problem i got now.

I don't know if I have (or am recovering from) an eating disorder...usually I just say I have "issues with food" as it's vague enough to portray that there is a problem but doesn't specify how much of a problem (mostly because I'm unsure if I do have a problem or not).

I feel that my views of my body used to be great, but that when I started getting involved with the trans community it got much worse. For me, it wasn't strictly an eating problem linked to being trans, but linked to the pressure and discomfort I felt from other trans people.

My therapist has labled me as a food addict.

As a person who is morbidly obese, I've struggled all my life with my weight and before I embarked on this trans journey I had to make sure that I wasn't doing this becuse I'm obese.  I wondered if I would feel better as a female if I just lost the weight and I came to the conclusion of no.   I hated myself as a female and felt ugly as one so I probably over ate to find comfort in myself. Does my weight effect how I feel about my body?  Heck yes!  It has made me body concious and it makes me feel like I will never be able to pass when I do transition.   If I had to find the good in it, I guess it would be that having all of this body fat makes me a little less dyshproic about my chest.  It's not like I look down and my breasts are the only thing sticking out.  Heck my gut sticks out farther.

Before I realised that I was trans I had some pretty messed up ideas about my body.  Once I realised that I was trans I worked out that I hated it and thought I was fat because it wasn't a male body, all the fat was on my thighs etc.  I kept comparing myself to boys in my year, even though I didn't know that I was trans then, even a couple of years before that when I was obsessing about checking my BMI (despite the fact I neither knew my precise height or had any scales), and would decide that I wanted to be where boys my age were supposed to be.

I never managed to skip meals completely apart from when I was at school because of my parents, but ate as little as possible, or just veg and fruit when I had to.  I would feel completely guilty when I ate something slightly bad, and recorded and colour coded everything I ate on an excel spreadsheet.  Running was something I did quite a lot too, and I do miss it, but I had to stop that because I wasn't allowed out of the house for months following a suicide attempt; I really need to get back into that when it warms up.

I sorted my eating out mostly when I got an infected burn on my hand, and it would get reported to my parents by the school nurse if I didn't manage to clear it up over the weekend as her dressings and cream weren't doing anything.  I still get days when I'm utterly disgusted though, but I'm able to realise that its dysphoria doing the talking, and not actual fatness.

Actually Malachite it was your little drawing here: https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,113339.msg863995.html that made me come to this conclusion. I am a visual learner and the little circle and arrows kind of forced my mind to start making the connection.

Quote from: Nygeel on March 11, 2013, 08:55:10 PM
I feel that my views of my body used to be great, but that when I started getting involved with the trans community it got much worse. For me, it wasn't strictly an eating problem linked to being trans, but linked to the pressure and discomfort I felt from other trans people.

Wow that's interesting, are these people outside of Susans?

Just another note- I've had a fun time because until yesterday, the past six years yielded zero height gain for me. My upper legs were way too short (still are, hoping for another growth spurt) and had excess flesh on them, which to me was nightmarish when I looked at the other boys who had stick legs. Height played into my body image issues in respect to weight, as well as the fact that said body is damaged, not strong enough for my liking, and absolutely refuses to work right. Not fun to be betrayed by your own body and randomly find yourself clinging to a banister for dear life because your knees randomly gave out and you don't want to fall and break your neck like that other student who fell down the stairs, or be filled with hatred and rage because your hands find it funny that you want to do something requiring them to function in an organized and coordinated manner.

Quote from: LearnedHand on March 11, 2013, 09:19:12 PM
Actually Malachite it was your little drawing here: https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,113339.msg863995.html that made me come to this conclusion. I am a visual learner and the little circle and arrows kind of forced my mind to start making the connection.

Wow I remember drawing that. It really all  does make sense. I still have that diagram.  Thank's for showing that to me again! 

It's called 'growing up as a girl'. Really. Yes, we ftms may have additional issues due to trying to diet down curves etc. But what you described is typical of Western females in general. Honestly, I don't know anyone born female who doesn't have issues with food. My cousin is a natural size zero. Seriously, born tiny and she 'feels like a pig' if she puts shredded cheese on a salad.

FWIW, if my body shape weren't feminine, I wouldn't have weight issues. I recognize that I'm of a healthy weight, but cannot stand the sight of female fat patterns on my body. T seems forever away, and even then redistribution can take years. Which is why I miss my younger years, being able to eat anything without worrying that I was adding yet another layer of fat where I wanted it to go away. Fat belly? Eh, if I care to I'll exercise and fix it. Fat around hips and legs and chest? Cue meltdown.

Well, I had an issue right as I was going into puberty that I think was trans related. Suddenly, I stopped eating. I was pretty much anorexic. Or heading that way fast. It didn't have to do with curves or anything so much as trying to control my body. Stop puberty. It was a on subconscious, visceral level. I never really developed any discernable 'female fat' other than breasts. So it was more about losing control of my body and I didn't seriously believe I could 'diet' my tits away since I was very thin and they still continued to get bigger and bigger. So, yeah I think as ftms we can definitely develop weird weight loss/eating patterns due to this, whether it's about female curves or not.

But in general, I think it's difficult to separate the normal issues everyone's subject to just growing up as an expected female and trans stuff.  Because how many young girls hate their hips and thighs? How many are dieting out of the hope they'll lose them? Probably all of them. That's not to say trans guys don't experience an added dose of it due to hating gender specific curves. Or that some aren't dieting specifically to look more male. But in general, having weight issues/eating disorders is sort of par for the course for female assigned persons.

QuoteBecause I only feel fat on parts of me that have that girly figure, like my chest, hips, thighs, and that little pocket of fat on my stomach that 90% of all the in-shape girls i know have.

Yes, this, THIS! I remember when I was like 12 and happened to look down at my thighs and realized my thin legs had turned into 'woman's thighs' and I was like "What the f-? When did I get fat?!" Ever since I noticed I had girly fat everywhere. Everybody kept telling me that I'm not fat and I have a nice girl figure, which only made things worse!

The only difference is that I don't have the dicipline to train it off. Girl fat is so stuck that you have to starve yourself to get it off, and I like food too much to do that. So instead, I train and jog just to stay in shape, and hope the hormones will eventually take care of it. *fingers crossed*

Quote from: Mr.X on March 12, 2013, 05:08:59 AM

QuoteBecause I only feel fat on parts of me that have that girly figure, like my chest, hips, thighs, and that little pocket of fat on my stomach that 90% of all the in-shape girls i know have.

Yes, this, THIS! I remember when I was like 12 and happened to look down at my thighs and realized my thin legs had turned into 'woman's thighs' and I was like "What the f-? When did I get fat?!" Ever since I noticed I had girly fat everywhere. Everybody kept telling me that I'm not fat and I have a nice girl figure, which only made things worse!

The only difference is that I don't have the dicipline to train it off. Girl fat is so stuck that you have to starve yourself to get it off, and I like food too much to do that. So instead, I train and jog just to stay in shape, and hope the hormones will eventually take care of it. *fingers crossed*

Yeah, I really don't think it can be trained off. Unless you live in the gym and basically become a female body builder. Female bodies are just meant to have a certain fat percentage.