yeah, i’m four months in and that reddit post just landed. the clothes thing is so strange. i lost fifty pounds, which objectively is a win, but there’s this moment in the dressing room where i’m looking at my body and it’s like… is that still me? skin sags different, my breasts are smaller (still nursing occasionally at night, which the semaglutide seems fine with, but the redistribution is wild), and my thighs have this new geometry that doesn’t feel mine yet. the hunger part? fine. the body recognition thing, that’s the mindfuck nobody warns you about. it’s not depression, it’s disorientation. my husband asked if i’m okay and i’m like “yes but also my ribs are visible and i don’t know what to do with that information.” wondering if it hits different because the weight came off so fast. my brain didn’t get time to adjust before it changed again. anyone else dealing with that weird dysphoria even when the scale is winning?
one thing nobody flagged: there’s actual research on proprioceptive lag after rapid weight loss. your brain’s body schema (the internal map of where your limbs are in space) updates way slower than the body changes. bariatric patients deal with this hard, bumping into doorframes, misjudging chair widths, reaching for clothes that don’t fit anymore. 50 lb in 4 mos is bariatric-surgery pace, so the mismatch tracks. the nursing piece is its own variable too. prolactin shifts fat distribution in ways that don’t follow the usual weight loss pattern, so the “new geometry” might partly be hormonal redistribution layered on top of the loss. ymmv.
edit: realized I said that wrong
the bariatric pace thing checks out, but the nursing variable might be doing more heavy lifting than the lag alone. ngl prolactin redistribution is slower to resolve than the weight loss itself, so that new geometry could take a couple more months to feel normal. sounds like a cop-out but honestly it’s better than spiraling on ‘something’s wrong with me.’ having language for the piece makes the disorientation less scary
prolactin angle is interesting but the piece nobody’s named yet is the lymphatic load. when you drop weight that fast, the lymph system is moving a ton of interstitial fluid out of fat depots that just shrank, and the redistribution looks weird for weeks because the fluid clearance lags the fat loss by a real margin. there’s stuff in the bariatric literature about post-op patients describing exactly this, the “my body looks different in the mirror today than yesterday” thing, and a chunk of it is fluid shifts not actual tissue change. a manual lymphatic drainage massage every couple weeks made a noticeable difference for a friend of mine post-bariatric, ymmv obviously. the other piece i’d add, breast tissue post-nursing has its own timeline that has nothing to do with sema. my second weaned at 14 months and the “where did they go” feeling didn’t stabilize for like 4-5 months after full weaning, regardless of weight. so if you’re still nursing at night you’re getting both effects stacked, weight redistribution AND ongoing prolactin shifts, and untangling which is which is basically impossible until you fully wean. caveat my window is week 18 sema compounded, no nursing overlap (my kids are older), so i’m theorizing on the nursing piece from my own postpartum memory not from a sema context. the lymph thing i’m more confident on bc it’s pretty well documented in rapid-loss populations generally. one thing that helped me with the body recognition piece, separate from any of this, was tracking waistband fit weekly instead of measurements or scale. the geometry change shows up there before your brain catches up visually. weirdly grounding to have a non-mirror data point that says yes the change is real and yes it’s progressing.