A few people I know who have lost weight and stayed cool did it because they made it NOT about the weight loss.

The whole “lifestyle” thing essentially.

Basically making the losing the weight into a side-effect of something else.

Like having goal of being able to run a marathon and taking actions for THAT instead. I think that is the only sane way to lose weight is having it be an effect of something else.

I'm scared I won't be able to eat yummy food again so I can maintain the new body

Comrade I eat so much junk food it isn't even funny. Losing or maintaining your preferred weight isn't really about what food you eat, it's just about knowing how many calories are in that food and not eating too much.

Ditto on the lifestyle change framing that's already been stated.

I'll feel guilty abandoning the HAES cause and the fat community.

I don't think "abandoning" is super accurate here. Losing weight doesn't mean you have to stop being an advocate, after all. The decision to do so (or not!) is your business and your business alone. Put yourself first, you're worth it.

It's your body, you can change it how you can and should feel good about that so long as it isn't causing you greater harm (the latter would be how I'd categorize an ED, for example). Same goes for someone that wants to gain weight or muscle or change body "types", like going from big a muscular to smaller or vice versa, etc. Society itself is toxic about our bodies and I'm sorry it (and your father) impacted you negatively.

I'll touch on your fears:

• You might not succeed but that's okay. It's not easy to change our bodies! They're resistant to change. Also things can happen that prevent whatever strategy a person wants to take. Maybe you decide to do a particular exercise bc every day but then get injured, for example. This is all okay. It's okay to qualify your goal, to work towards it but be okay if everything doesn't go according to plan on your ideal timeline.

• People have different metabolisms so it's hard to generalize about what maintaining a body situation looks like, but generally speaking if your methodology is a concrete and healthy lifestyle change then maintenance is just continuing to do the same thing. I'll give a simple example: eating more veggies (not extreme, just more!) is a surefire way to cut calories in a healthy way and over time your body will start to crave them and your mind will start to expect more of them in your meals. This is a sustainable habit and you eventually won't have to think about it deliberately, let alone worry.

• It's okay to yo-yo, our bodies do this with the seasons and as we live life. Maybe you get an injury and have to be sedentary for a few months and gain a few pounds. No biggie. Maybe some initial weight loss was water weight and a few salty meals make you "gain" it back. Maybe you have a tough few weeks and breaking your diet helped you cope. None of these things are abnormal or unacceptable. The important thing is to forgive yourself (there's nothing to forgive!) and feel okay to resume the new habits if you want to. Most people have to make repeat attempts at changing a habit.

• You won't lose your empathy or knowledge and suddenly become body-shaming, no need to worry about this. If your changes are healthy (better food and exercise) you'll probably just have more energy and feel a bit better overall (at least from endorphins from exercising).

• Yeah other people complimenting your "new looks" is gonna happen and be both annoying and affirming. There's definitely an emotional contradiction there! I don't really have advice for that, it's gonna be confusing.

• You can definitely still eat tasty food. This will happen in two ways: (1) you should adopt a diet that isn't about cutting out all of the food you like. If the food is caloric, just have less of it and have a lighter (veggie heavy) meal later to offset. (2) As you find new meals as part of your diet, you'll start to crave those instead. Some of your previous favorites might even start to feel unappealing as your tastes habituate.

• More people being attracted to you might happen. Being perceived can suck or at least bring up conflicting feelings.

I don't think you have any reason to feel guilty. You have concrete reasons to lose weight, there's absolutely nothing wrong with making a decision to improve your life based on the actual circumstances you live in. I don't know what else to say to assuade your fears, but I think if you've made your decision there's no telling how you'll feel after a few months of commitment. If as you say your weight isn't an issue for most things outside of weight limited activities, the worst that could happen is you return to the current situation, and you aren't any worse off for trying.

Something I noticed reading through your post is how much your weight anxiety stems from external sources: my dad made me feel bad, my grandma made me feel bad, I worry what my friends are thinking about my weight now or will think about it in the future. I’m not seeing much in terms of you wanting to lose weight to make yourself happy. You even said, you didn’t see an issue with your weight outside of activities with weight limits.

If your weight loss motivation is just about appeasing others, then it’s not going to be successful. Appeasing others like that is a losing formula because you’ll always have the voice in the back of your head saying “but what if I’m really not satisfying them?” That’s why your mom kept starting and not finishing fad diets, it wasn’t about her it was about your dad. And let me tell you a secret about judgy people: no matter what you do, no matter how much you improve, they’ll find something to judge you over. If you have people that are toxic in your life like that, the solution isn’t appeasing them, it’s cutting toxic people out of your life.

As far as your particular fear about getting to eat yummy food: I know someone who’s been skinny their entire life. Their key is, on weekdays they eat light for breakfast and lunch, dinner is something along the lines of plain baked boneless skinless chicken breast, steamed veggies, whole grain rice, in small portions. Weekends though, they eat whatever they want. The key isn’t going cold turkey on everything richer than leek soup, it’s quantity and portion control.

I related to a lot of this, especially

I felt perceived and observed, it opened up my mind to the fear that people were thinking negative things about my weight the whole time and only felt comfortable enough to talk about it because it was going down. The panic slowed down my progress and I gained the weight back.

This happens for me most with my mother, and I take it into consideration with choosing the clothes I wear to her house.

I gained almost triple what was "normal" during my pregnancy and struggled for years with different diets and approaches. I've been at a healthy BMI for almost seven years now, but getting there took almost ten years and several attitude/lifestyle shifts. None of these are new ideas, you have almost certainly heard all this before, but this is what worked for me.

Here's what changed:

• measuring things with a scale - this quickly became maddening and I absolutely did not stick with it for very long, but it was long enough to show me that I was wildly undercounting calories and so were all my friends and family.
• weigh myself at the same time of day every day for a while - this helped me realize that my menstrual cycle adds 5-8 pounds every month, regardless of my activity or diet, but that sticking to my routine would make them disappear again by day 2-3 of the cycle. No more "omg I gained weight this week?!?!" freakouts, because I know it's coming, and it's temporary.
• doing anything is better than nothing - even if I only do 5 minutes of walking or calisthenics or whatever, that's better than nothing, and often once I started doing a thing with mental permission to quit after 5 minutes, it was much easier to stick with it longer.
• make activity fun - I get bored easily, and it has to be a truly gripping book or podcast to get me through 15 minutes on a treadmill or elliptical. I found a little shelf thing that straps onto the display/control area and holds a laptop, and it genuinely changed my life - even sweating and miserable on the elliptical, I can fuck around with Civ for hours. Whatever your favorite guilty pleasure fuckoff pastime is, find a way to incorporate that into exercising, and suddenly it's a healthy way to spend a few hours.

Your doctor sounds like she could be a great resource! What do you think about talking to her about your concerns?

I made another comment about internal motivation elsewhere on this post but I'll also say this to your fear about people thinking negatively about your fatness based on positive comments towards you losing weight. I wouldn't be so quick to connect those two - i, at least, don't really even have thoughts about what size people are, but I might congratulate someone on losing weight because it's something That I think they would like, like encouragement, because it's not an easy thing. So just getting positive comments doesn't mean people actively had negative feelings towards your weight before hand

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I'm not an expert and speak only from personal experience. I dropped 50 lbs over a couple of years and then gained 25 lbs back over the next three.

It was a weird experience from a self-perception standpoint; after a while at the lower weight, old photos of me at the higher weight seemed less like "me", which was a bit disconcerting. The pros more than made up for the cons, though, because it was a lifestyle change that just physically felt really great. Running and jumping was easier, my skin was clearer, I took up cycling, I got so used to eating less that I would occasionally have to eat a bit more at the end of the day just to hit a calorie minimum(!), just good stuff all around that was absolutely worth the calorie tracking and Apple Watch ring closing.

Then COVID happened and made my schedule so unpredictable that the exercise became less constant, snacks became more available, and healthy solo meals became McDonald's for the family. Regaining the weight has been a bit of a bummer, and I definitely perceive things that I didn't before losing the weight: I can feel the puffiness in my face and recognize my lack of muscle definition.

I have zero regrets about going through all of it, though. It's a really empowering feeling to take charge of your body and make it the way you want it by stubborn determination, and I know that if I really want to, I can get back to the lower weight by being extra stubborn and doing what worked before. Being at a lower weight for a while also helped me discover more things that my body feels good doing, and I've kept those as part of my life even after regaining half the weight I lost.

I don't feel like a failure; I feel like I did something for myself and learned a lot.

That feels like the key for you: make sure you're ultimately doing this for yourself. If nobody else in the world had any opinions about your weight, positive or negative, now or in the future, would you still want to change your body? If so, just go for it and deal with your concerns if and when they come up. There's no such thing as failure here, no letting anyone else "win", just you doing what you want to do with your body.

I yo-yo a lot, and I can't keep weight off unless I regiment myself to only eat so many calories in a day. I have a problem with binging, and counting calories helps my moderate my eating. Even when I fail, I never regret trying. Because even when I fail I just end up where I started, so I'm not any worse for the wear. And let me tell you, no diet has kept me from eating something yummy, I just might end up saving some of it for the next day.

So I say there's no harm in trying (in a healthy way), may as well give it a shot.

I think you have good reasons for wanting to lose weight beyond subconscious prejudice, so I think you shouldn't feel guilty about it at all. I'll go over a few of the fears here because I think I might be able to speak on them a little, though I don't have any experience with losing weight myself.

I'm scared that I won't succeed

I think this is a situation where you can kind of take comfort in the fat community. It's not a "failure" or "success", it's just different states of being. And yeah, you might not manage to reach this other state you want for various reasons, but it's not a failure, any more than losing a game would be a failure. It can be disappointing and that's totally valid, but it's not something that would reflect on you at all. I doubt anyone would be really all that angry at you for not being able to use a bounce house, and any friends that would hurt you just for being fat can fuck off.

I'm scared that I will but will forever have to obsess over my weight and eating habits like my mom

I think this one is a bit more complicated, and I don't have any experience with this, but I'll try to take a shot here. I think the difference in motivations is a huge factor. You're doing this for mostly utilitarian reasons, and while you might have a small undercurrent of social influence in it, just like your mom might have a small undercurrent of utilitarian use (people being nicer to her, because we live in hellworld ), altogether given your knowledge of and solidarity with the fat movement this seems unlikely, because I'm going to assume those unhealthy obsessive behaviors are probably rooted in a fundamental fear of being fat. If you don't have that, or are actively working on uprooting that from your brain, then that seems very unlikely to happen to you.

I'm scared it'll yo-yo back and forth, or I'll just gain it all again (so why even start)

Well, this might seem silly, but if your goal is to do it for travel to a fatphobic country, and for a bouncy house, than... It might not matter. You could just save those things for your "slim" moments. Again I have no experience here but it seems to me that anyone who would legitimately judge you for "backsliding" into something that isn't even inherently bad is a dick. Human bodies just seem like something that change a lot so, if nothing else, embracing it to stick it to people who disagree seems like it could be satisfying.

I'm scared my personality will change, and I'll get cocky like the other fit people who lost a lot of weight and get to brag about it

I honestly think the fact your worried about this makes this unlikely. I've always assumed the reason you see that is because the people most able to be fit (with the resources to do so) are going to be really privileged and also not have much else going on in their heads. There are many fit comrades that don't act like this, think about all the revolutionaries that probably had to condition themselves for physical combat. You don't really see them bragging about it every time someone interviews them.

I'm scared of how I will be perceived during or even after the journey, comments like "homhom lost so much weight it looks good" make me feel like people will be relying on me to keep the weight off, opening up the possibility of being a failure

This is probably a form of confrontation all of us would prefer to avoid, but I would confront people on that if they do that shit, if you can. Maybe just a snide comment about "Oh, so I didn't look good before?" (tell them they're lying if they say yes) to shut them down and hopefully stop yourself (and others around) from internalizing that shit.

I'm scared I won't be able to eat yummy food again so I can maintain the new body

I think this fits with the yo-yoing thing a bit. If you kind of embrace the changing nature of human bodies this seems like it would just be a whateverburger, though I understand that's hard to do with all the shit thrown at us constantly in media and culture.

I'm scared more people will be attracted to me <- I don't get this one, I think it's also about perception

No, no, that makes sense to me. As a AMAB person (I don't like using birth categorizations but I don't know how else to describe it succinctly) I don't get objectified all that much, but the stories I've heard and accounts I've seen are pretty horrific. I think this is a legitimate concern, and I (if I can play armchair psychologist a bit) assume it would also be heightened by a fear of "abandoning" the fat community, sort of a horrific one-two punch of fears.

If I could suggest it, I would look into a lot of different punk dressing and presentation styles. You don't have to be fat to be look subversive, or avoid being conventionally attractive. I've heard of at least one style of dress that involves purposely wearing ill-fitting clothes (Unrelated but I've also heard it's conveniently very good for trans women because trans women and cis women both look ill-fitting in it, lol)

I think if you are femme, you can only lose looks-wise. Either hated or belittled, harassed either way.

Health and weight are very tricky. I am no health expert, but it's about calories intake on the one hand, but also about your metabolism on the other hand. My experience is that learning to cook helped me keep a very decent weight while not being physically very active. There is a plateau to learning to cook where you struggle with setbacks until it sets in. In my exp, as long as it's made from scratch as much as possible, homemade food is pretty much always better than ready made (except if you like only do carbs or meat). Becoming vegan or cutting down on meat and diary might also help. Legumes are pretty nutritious and absorb flavors very well. Figuring out spice combinations is a bit tricky but once you have got it, it's frankly amazing to have a good lentil curry dish that tastes really nice for cheap and not a huge time investment.

about becoming chauvinist by losing weight: I think nobody would shame trans women about getting FFS as long as they don't become binarists or shit on non-passing trans people (which seems to be the exception rather than the rule), which i think is somewhat similar to your concerns. Like in a perfect society, we wouldn't feel forced to confirm to this or that standard, but nobody can seriously expect of individuals to defy all norms all the time at once and to the utmost. If you feel too much distress by social norms on weight, adopting to fit them to some degree is acceptable as long as you remain critical of them and don't enforce them on others, even if your health is already good. You also demonstrate consciousness about these issues, which is the best guard against chauvinism imo (besides being directly affected by it obv)