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Regarding before and after pics

Though I admire those who have lost considerable amount of weight, I have seen some of the before and after and the after is somewhat frightening. Yes, you are really thin, but the before actually looked better with some fat. And yes, I understand each individual looks at fat differently and the need to lose weight becomes paramount. But then it becomes an obsession and the after pics look somewhat sickly. And do you notice our skin colour? When we were chubby we were rosier, but when we are thin, we look pale skinned. The purpose of this post is not to upset anyone, but rather to find out if anyone thinks that the “before” pic of some look better.

Answer

Something to keep in mind is that most people don’t wait for their weight to stabilize before posting photos like that. Weight loss can be hard on the body, especially when it’s relatively fast, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be recovered from while maintaining the new weight. Often within even a month or two, the remaining body fat will begin to redistribute in a more typical pattern (I feel like one can see this particularly in many people’s faces, which can look a bit gaunt during active loss) and the skin will start to adjust to its diminished size. This is of course a different thing than people who genuinely end up underweight in a medical sense, but there too our perception of what constitutes normal/healthy can be badly skewed by the environments we’re in, and it’s possible that the person deliberately set the photo up to look as “thin” as possible and it’s not entirely representative of how they’d appear in person.