i think it did get eaten, because this doesn’t sound familiar lol. 

hon, skinny people have NO IDEA what normal people weigh. i’ve actually talked to other fat people about this before, because it’s ridiculous. most of us have heard a skinny person in media refer to 200lbs as ~disgustingly fat~ as if it was just unimaginable for a person to weigh 200lbs. 

here, allow me to use this illustration i just found online. see this guy?

this is the same man in both photos, and guess what? he weighs 200lbs in both photos. how can that be? it’s really simple: muscle is more dense than fat. someone with a lot of muscle mass is going to be heavy. and besides, his ‘before’ photo might be chubby, but he’s not unimaginably huge. he looks pretty normal to me.

but again, slender people just have no idea what the realistic numbers of peoples’ weight are. i read these romance novels about huge badass vampire warriors, and they’re all supposed to be like 6′6″ and utterly jacked, just enormous with muscles, and you know how much the (petite woman) author described them as weighing? 240lbs. 

reality check: this is Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, aka The Mountain from Game of Thrones. he’s 6′9″ and one of the strongest men in the world. you wanna guess how much he weighs? go on, guess.

you’re wrong. he weighs 425lbs. 

now, he might be a couple inches taller than those fictional vampires, but let’s compare those numbers. 240lbs vs 425lbs. the disparity between what petite people think big people weigh vs what big people actually weigh is two hundred pounds. just think about that for a minute.

now, okay, you’re not talking about huge, buff men, you’re talking about yourself, and you’re probably a reasonably petite girl. obviously it’s a little more sensitive to parade female bodies around and exclaiming over how much they weigh so i’d rather not do that, but i can use myself as example, dubiously feminine as i am.

first of all, i’m fat. that’s indisputable. but i also have a lot of muscle mass due to my testosterone levels, and between those two things, nobody seems to have any idea how much i weigh just by looking at me. i gained a lot of weigh from extended antibiotic use several years ago and presently i weigh 300lbs, but even at my doctor’s office where i’m a regular and they have plenty of other big patients, the person who weighs me almost always starts the scale measurements around 200lbs and slowly nudges it up higher and higher, like they’re not expecting it.

one time i wrote my weight down on a form for a sleep study, and i actually lied a little bit because that’s when i was gaining weight and felt awful about it, and the male technician who was hooking me to the wires (and therefore saw me sitting in my pajamas) literally called in through the intercom to ask me about the number i put down because he thought it must be a mistake. and he wasn’t even terribly skinny himself, but he saw me and thought the weight i wrote down (which was low by ~10lbs) was so ridiculously incorrect he spoke through the intercom to ask me about it.

all of this is to say that most people have no idea how much real, living humans weigh, and our culture is seriously skewed towards thinking that we either do or should weigh far less than we do. we’re so terrified of being fat we can’t even be accurate about how much muscle weighs. we’re so terrified of being fat that we treat numbers that mean absolutely nothing by themselves (remember the guy who weighed the same both chubby and ripped?) as if they’re urban myths to be whispered about in horrified tones. 

legend has it that this monster weighed two hundred pounds! *ghost noises*

reality check: people all around you weigh 200lbs and more and you don’t even notice. 

reality check: nobody notices how much YOU weigh. nobody can actually tell if you weigh 120 or 140 or 160. you could go out, lift some weights, gain 10lbs of muscle mass, and people would compliment you on how fit you look despite the fact that you gained 10lbs.

ultimate reality check: the numbers we ascribe to our size and attractiveness are not only utterly meaningless, they are actively, nightmarishly harmful. we put random numbers on clothes and then ascribe units of value to which number fits your unique body. we force people to stand on magic platforms that spit out a meaningless number and put so much importance on making that number lower and lower that people literally kill themselves trying to get the lowest number possible. 

stop for a minute and think about how crazy all of this is.

imagine walking up to a human that you love, forcing them to stand on a scale, and telling them that because they weigh 10lbs more than you think they should, you hate them. imagine walking up to a human you love with a measuring tape, measuring their waist, and telling them that it’s an inch bigger than you want it to be, so you’re very disappointed in them and you want them to go hungry to shrink their body. imagine how much it would hurt that person, imagine how unfair it would be, imagine how cruel it would be.

now ask why it’s okay to do that to yourself.