beautifully written, babe! maybe a couple of details I would have left out, lol... but otherwise great.

exactly - the new normal. i have made a few attempts to eat "normal" and get my daily calories below 4,000 and i was just miserable! i was just so hungry all the time.

i stepped on the scale today (this is not an april fool's joke!) for the first time in a month, and it said 330 - the number has never so high before, which wasn't really a surprise, but i kind of expect it to, like, level out, you know?

this is so true, and this is why it feels like there is no return to being skinny, for me... when it gets hard to walk any distance, or up a flight of stairs, it just makes me want to go sit on the couch!

when i started to measure the calories i was consuming, i tried to reign in my appetite for a few days, to get under 4,000 calories a day... omg, it felt like a punishment! i wondered how could anyone live that way??? lol

great tip! em is trying to get me to do yoga with her... i am a little reluctant, but yeah i can really feel the tightness after sitting in front of my computer for hours.

what you have written there resonates so much with me. my mobility has just started to decline in the last little while, though i am a fair bit smaller than you are.

your comment about "vice" really caught my attention, and it made me think, am i using food and overeating as a vice? i can see i am leaning into it, in a kind of hedonistic way, to derive pleasure... so yes, probably it has become a vice!

this was a big issue i noticed, even after a gain of just 50-70 lbs... it really demotivated me when i tried going back to the gym. not just being lazy, but being unable to perform at exercises like i had before... which just drove me to being more lazy, lol!

so true! an interesting impact of my walking this week has been an increased appetite. tracking my activity and eating on fatsecret.com is showing that i am still consuming more calories than i am burning, by a long shot, lol!

the exercise might be helping my breathing a little, but i find my hips are getting sore, so i think i need to take some days off between walks.

toronto, where we live, has quite an active lgbtq community (our pride parade is one of the largest in the world, i believe, as an example), and we have found a few local groups online (though facebook, which is kind of... ugh...), which also have in-person meet-ups (when there aren't pandemics, lol), which has been great. met some very helpful, kind, and positive people and couples there.

one of the surprises - and i don't know why i expected anything different, tbh - was that even within this tiny sub-community, people get judgemental about one another. it's not different than the feedist community, or any other, i suppose, so i don't know why it bugs me. still, to have one trans person judge another's decisions on how they feel they need to transition, or to have or nothave a particular surgery really surprised me (and tbh, angered me) .

still, must not let the rotten apples ruin it for everyone else, right?

always remember that you can choose to be kind.

that was the part of the gain that was the biggest adjustment for me - from being fit to having a gut, that initial transition into being softer and starting to jiggle.

i waffled a few times, or panicked maybe - and thought "omg, i have to lose this weight." looking back i am pretty glad i didn't... because once i gave myself that time to adjust (and i had a supportive gf, too, which helped when i felt self-conscious) it was really very nice.

by comparison, the extra 100 lbs since that point has not been as big of a shock, mentally, as that first gain from 150 to 200 or maybe 220 lbs.

my advice is just to enjoy what you're doing rather than focus on the weight. make it fun. and remember, some days you might think "i must be crazy!" but when that happens, just relax, give it a day or two, and that mood will probably pass.

enjoy your journey!