Heavy Stuff

The science of fat and the dangers of weight cycling

Foreword: This article talks about disordered eating. If you have a history of disordered eating, consider your safety before reading.

Sweat pours down my face in streams, streaking down from underneath my helmet. Legs pump, pushing against blacktop. My pads creak and groan, creak and groan, as my body moves, and I shoot along the street on my skates, cars zipping past me on my left as I skate in the protected bike lane.

Faster I say to myself, silently, the urgency rising over the pounding of Boys Wanna Be Her in my headphones. Faster. He’s right behind you.

He.

There’s nobody behind me, of course. I’m the only one in the bike lane at eight in the morning on a September Friday in the height of COVID lockdowns.

He’s right behind you. I push myself harder, skate harder, panting my way up the hill.

He.

The Peaches finish raging into the mic, and the song changes. Killing Me Softly cues up, and breathlessly I do my best to croon along with Lauryn Hill’s incredible voice, legs pumping ceaselessly to the beat of the song. Telling me softly with his words / Killing me softly with his song.

He.

There is no he behind me. I flee anyway.

I finally get to my turnaround point. Three miles out, now three miles back. I coast for a moment, the first break I’ve allowed myself as I roll down a hill. Now it’ll be three miles back, starting with the hill I’m rolling down right now.

He’s right behind you.

I keep going. Let’s make it three and a half miles out and three and a half back.

The he I’m running from is me. Well, me/not me. The masculine version of myself. It’s been two months since I realized I was trans. Every time I’m out here skating, it feels like I’m running from him, thirty-five years of him, desperate to escape.

I skate on.

Six miles out and back is my short loop anyway. I was going to have a light day today, since it’s the fifth time I’ve been out skating so far this week. My long loop is eight miles. Seven isn’t that bad.

I lost thirteen and a half pounds in August.

When I weigh myself this month, I’ll be down a little over ten more.

Danger zones

Don’t fucking do what I did.

Seriously. It’s dangerous.

Do not fucking do what I did.

A grim fact that trans folks talk about far, far too rarely is that we’re at dramatically increased risk of getting an eating disorder. How bad is it? Well, for comparison’s sake: about 1.2% of everyone, at any given time, has an eating disorder. Over the course of a lifetime, about 2.8% of everyone will have one.

And according to our best research, 17.6% of the trans population currently has an eating disorder, or has had one within the last year.

I want you to read that again.

Trans people are about fifteen times more likely to have an eating disorder than average.

In the first year of my transition, I did something very dangerous, something I live with the consequences of to this day: I worked out very intensely—6 days a week, most weeks—while cutting my caloric intake to around 1200 calories a day. Each of those skating sessions burned somewhere around 800 calories, meaning I left my body with a scant 400 calories a day to do, you know, everything else a body needs to do.

For my heart to beat. For by brain to crackle. For my kidneys to clean my blood.

A low-calorie diet, accompanied with no more than light exercise, bottoms out around 1200 calories a day, and is dangerous enough that it’s supposed to be supervised by a doctor, and used only in dire need. Even minimal-calorie diets, supervised actively by doctors and only used when someone is in serious and urgent medical need—such as preparing for very specific kinds of surgeries—bottom out at 800 calories a day.

I lived on, functionally, half of that, for five months, while exercising aggressively.

Do. Not. Fucking. Do. What. I. Did.

Like many trans people at the start of our transitions, I started out something called weight cycling, where you’re supposed to lose some weight then gain it back, then lose it again. The idea is pretty simple: lose weight—fat—all over, but disproportionately in the places it’s stored, which at the start of your transition will be clustered around the spots where you don’t really want it. Bellies for transfeminine people, hips and butts for transmasculine. Then, you eat more, deliberately gaining weight back. The idea is that you gain it back in the new spots where you do want it—hips and butts for transfeminine people, and in the torso for transmasculine folks.

To be clear: it doesn’t work this way in reality, because that’s not how fat cells work. The idea that it does work is mostly a bad misrepresentation of bad science by the diet industry, which makes a boatload of money off of you believing that sort of thing, but we’ll get to all that in a minute.

The reality of weight cycling is a lot more grim: pretty bad endocrine disruption, kidney damage, dramatically increased likelihood of developing eating disorders—I could go on. Just about every marker we can find that tracks internal organs in distress goes wild on the sorts of rapid weight loss and weight cycling plans that trans people use routinely—and that’s even in the strongest and fittest athletes in the world.

And you want to know the part that’ll dishearten you the most, if you’re like me and had the sorts of hopes I had? The most dramatic effect that rapid weight loss and weight cycling have is to spur the body to store calories as fat and slow the metabolism in the long term.

In simpler terms? If you do this, your body will put on weight more quickly and will be more resistant to shedding it in the long term.

Why we do it

It’s not hard to understand why trans people do these things to our bodies, really. The vast majority of trans folks experience gender dysphoria, and the vast majority of those feel it because of the shape of our bodies. It’s dead simple, really: women want bodies shaped like women, and men want bodies shaped like men. That’s true whether you’re cis or trans. It’s why BBLs and boob jobs are a thing for women. It’s why extreme bodybuilding is a thing for men.

All of us are trying to make our body fit the map of who we are inside our heads. That’s a good thing, in general. It just gets more complicated for us, because trans folks are trying to fight back against the dysphoria we’re feeling over a body that’s not the right shape for us. Weight control is a tool—a dangerous tool, to be clear—that many of us use to try to fight our dysphoria.

The problem is, though, there are a lot of knock-on effects that follow from it. Generally, eating disorders happen because a person has Body Dysmorphic Disorder. In many ways, dysmorphia is the exact opposite of dysphoria: a person looks at themselves in the mirror, and what the mind interprets the reflection as is wildly different than reality. That misperception hurts. Because of that, traditional treatment for eating disorders is classic, and effective, things like mindfulness, body awareness, exercises that help a person see their body for what it is in reality.

But when you do those same things for trans folks? Well, it doesn’t exactly get the job done. Sure, those things help, some, when a trans person has both dysphoria and dysmorphia, a comorbidity—that means two conditions at the same time—that trans folks are also at a much higher risk of having.

But mindfulness work makes dysphoria worse.

How fat actually works

Let’s talk about the basic idea behind weight cycling for trans people. You lose weight—”burn fat,” as they say—so, when you gain it back, the body puts the new fat cells where they’re supposed to go, right? To speed up the fat redistribution that’s part of the whole hormonal HRT thing, right?

Wrong. Big time.

When you lose fat mass, the fat cells don’t actually go away. The best way to think of them is as a whole bunch of little sponges. When you have more calories available than you really need, the body takes some of that chemical energy, does a little fancy biochemistry to it, and stores it as potential energy in your fat cells, which swell up as more and more of that potential chemical energy is stored inside you.

Meanwhile, when you lose weight, those fat cells siphon off that potential energy, little by little, to keep your body going. As with any chemistry, there are waste products that the body has to deal with—that’s beside the main point here, but it’s worth remembering—but the really, really important thing to understand here is that the fat cells don’t go away. They just shrink and shrink and shrink, like a kitchen sponge that’s drying out after you used it.

Like all mammals, we have this system because it helps us survive famines. Eat lots when the eating’s good, and that helps us, you know, not die when there’s no food at all to be had.

But every part of the body is adapted to learn from the things that happen to you, to better meet the needs of whatever you’re living through… and if you weight cycle, what your body is learning is that you experience very frequent famines, so it needs to get better at storing spare energy.

Yeah, this whole “civilization” thing is really, really recent in evolutionary terms, and civilization without regular lean times even moreso. Your body’s still working on monkey-brain-logic. That’s why weight cycling especially, and intentional weight loss more generally, tends to make you just gain more weight. And don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing inherently bad with being bigger! It’s just, if you’re doing this sort of thing, that’s obviously not what you want.

Yeah, that whole calories in/calories out model of weight gain and weight loss is dead wrong, and we’ve known it for a long, long time. The whole diet and fitness industry works really, really hard to preserve it, though, because if you believe it you’ll by diet smoothies and gym memberships. But, then again, don’t take my word for it—Abigail Thorne made one of the sharpest, most on-point dives into exactly this I’ve ever seen.

So how do I get to the right shape, then?

Deep breath.

This part’s gonna suck. Hang in there with me, okay?

Fat redistribution is one of the parts of hormonal transition that pretty much every trans person really, really wants. It makes our bodies the right shape. And yes, the right hormones for our genders makes them disproportionately grow where we want them: in the torso for transmasculine people, and in the hips and butt for transfeminine people.

But the way that actually happens is that your body is constantly storing bits of energy in your fat cells and is constantly taking them out, push and pull, like the tide. The healthiest way for a person to live, in terms of nutrition and weight, is to minimize the feast and famine cycle.

But the body doesn’t grow a new fat cell until an existing one gets old and dies. And the more you train your body to expect famine cycles, the longer it holds on to those old fat cells.

And the average fat cell lives for around a decade before it finally dies.

Yeah, that means that it’ll be around a decade—maybe more if you, like I did, trained your body to expect bad and frequent famines—for your body to turn over all of the fat cells it has, and for that fat redistribution to really get where you want it to go.

I know. I know. I’m sorry. I warned you it was gonna suck.

The very best thing you can do for fat redistribution is to eat regular meals of healthy foods with lots of different vitamins and minerals. Plenty of protein, a good share of fat, and lots of veggies. The classic omnivore’s spread. Same thing you’d do to be healthy if you were cis. And, along with it, do some moderate-but-regular exercise. If you’re trasfeminine, and want a great booty? Don’t skip leg day. If you’re transmasculine and don’t? Definitely skip leg day. Exercising the right muscles for your body and eating a regular, varied diet will do more to put your body in the right shape than any diet you’ll ever find.

And be patient.

Fat redistribution is the long, slow, patient wait of transition. Nothing you can do can speed it up.

But you can definitely slow it down, like I did.