I'm 5'3 and 260lbs. I was always on the chubbier side (between 140-160lbs) but had a traumatizing experience in 2011 that essentially forced me to starve against my will for six or seven months before food was available again in abundance, and my body ate as much as it could to compensate. I rose from 125lbs to 190lbs in a year, and have since gained around 10lbs every year until I hit 270. I've been stable at that weight for three or four years.

I've never had weight-associated health problems before. A year ago, I found out I was pre-diabetic (my numbers were on the lower side, but still within that range). I've been eating much healthier since then, but recently decided to get back into exercise for the first time in almost ten years for mental heath reasons. I have ADHD and depression as well as anxiety, and the difference regular activity makes in terms of dopamine and serotonin levels is like night and day. I've been practicing walking a mile everyday and getting into strength and endurance training without weights. It's been an amazing experience but not having anyone to talk about it with kind of sucks.

All of my friends are good people and care about me. But the ones who aren't overweight or plus-sized just... do not know how to have a healthy conversation about fitness and weight loss at all without projecting their own self-hatred, and my plus-sized friends have fought for so long to accept themselves that talking about dieting or exercise feels like an attack, which I understand.

I wish there were a subreddit for plus size people getting into fitness. A lot of the fitness subs seem to retain some of the anti-fat rhetoric which the fitness community in general used to be notorious for... which makes sense when people are trying to shed weight, but I guess I want a space where fat is viewed simply as neutral rather than bad or a burden. At the same time, it feels difficult to have these conversations in plus size spaces without triggering people. :( As much as I love what I'm doing, I wish it weren't so isolating.

ETA: Okay guys, I went and did the thing. I saw that /u/freewillcreative started /r/fattiefitfire and I joined, but I realized I had a specific vision for what I was looking for. So I created a subreddit: /r/fatneutralfitness. I'm going to try and maintain it when I get bored, I don't expect it to grow too much all at once. Please feel free and join! I put up a monthly challenge and a prompt for the coming week. I'll give it its own post in this sub here within the next couple of days. Hope to see you there!