Everyone Is Talking About Weight Blindness: Inside TikTok’s Viral “What I Ate When I Was Fat” Trend

Social media users are drawing attention to weight blindness with hilarious personal anecdotes about the various ways they’ve deluded themselves into believing they were much smaller than they really were, or if they did have some self-awareness about their size, they lacked awareness of where it could possibly be coming from. They barely ate anything! Spoiler alert: “barely anything” was often clocking in at upwards of 3,000 calories a day. Damn you, calorie density. 

What Is Weight Blindness?

Weight blindness is neutrally defined as the phenomenon of being unable to accurately perceive changes in your own body weight, size, or body fat percentage. It can manifest in both directions, believing you’re smaller or larger than you really are. It can also stem from significant or rapid weight fluctuations that throw off your mental calibration and cause your brain to cling to outdated data. Someone might fixate on their body at a specific size, then gain or lose ten pounds and barely register the shift, insisting their reflection in the mirror “looks exactly the same.” But you don't look exactly the same. Your brain just hasn't caught up to the new information.

At its worst, you can become a permanent resident of Delulu-ville, totally impervious to all objective metrics and reality markers, intent instead to live in the fantasy or anxiety to which you cling. In the restrictive anorexic with body dysmorphia’s case, this may be an unwillingness to accept that they’re not actually fat, remaining faithful to the cause of getting ever smaller and smaller despite the fact that they’re actually wasting away. 

In this context, it’s usually a genuine mental illness; though I will say it is a bit of a caricature of anorexia that I think is not necessarily representative of many people’s experience with the disorder, many of whom are acutely aware of how skinny or sickly they look, which is entirely the point. Motivations for restrictive eating disorders cannot always be boiled down to strict vanity but have a complex range of reasons, some of which include comorbidities like obsessive-compulsive disorder or self-harm.

It can manifest in both directions, believing you’re smaller or larger than you really are.

What many are discussing on TikTok, however, is their experience with forming an identity tied to fitness, thinness, or athleticism from a certain age and just never coming to terms with the impermanence of that identity, even as circumstances and bodies change. Even as tops become uncomfortably tight, jeans literally won’t go past your thighs anymore, the scale is calling you out on your bullshit, and you look noticeably pudgy in photos, delulu always finds a loophole. 

The scale's up? It’s broken, or you’re just carrying water weight. Muscle actually weighs more than fat, anyway. BMI says I’m overweight? That’s antiquated pseudoscience anyway; everyone says so. My reflection reflects what I want to see, and when it doesn’t, I simply avert my eyes. Unflattering photos? Just a bad angle, Photoshop, maybe even AI sabotage. Clothes suddenly tight? Vanity sizing must be off this year. And if you have to size up? Totally intentional. You just like the baggy look (never mind that nothing about the fit is baggy). As you can see, it’s a commitment to the fiction we’ve told ourselves: I’m thin! I look great! I know because I ignore all information to the contrary and bend the nature of reality to my liking. 

The thing is, while it might sound and transparently be a little shameless, it’s not conscious self-deception. It’s good old-fashioned, earnest wish fulfillment that has honestly left us completely deluded. I’ve been there. Oh boy, have I been there. Enough times to know that my self-perception is not a reliable foundation. That’s why I don’t like when the body positive crowd tries to invalidate objective markers like the scale, measurements, or BMI because they’re much less faulty than my own set of eyes and brain. 

Weight Blindness vs Body Dysmorphia

Nyreh Goods warned her followers in a TikTok, “You can literally be fat and not know it.” Despite being 205 lbs at her heaviest, she admits, “I didn’t know that I looked like that when I was that big, and I think that’s the case for a lot of people.” She adds that she thinks the warped perception is carrying over into her weight loss, “When I was larger, I didn’t feel that big, but now that I’m smaller, I feel bigger,” she explains, adding that the last time she had weighed herself prior to reaching 205 lbs was when she was around 157 lbs. “No way you gained almost 50 pounds and didn’t notice it? I did. It’s probably some kind of body dysmorphia, but it is what it is. Weight blindness is a thing.”

And that appears to be literally true. A study published in 2010 actually found that 25% of overweight and obese women reported themselves as being normal or underweight. I couldn’t find a more recent study of adults, though I imagine this figure could have only grown over the past 15 years. However, TIME recently reported on the largest study to date of how teens perceive their own weight, showing similar overestimations. The 40-country study surveyed 16-year-olds between 2002 and 2018 and found that teens are increasingly underestimating how much they weigh, the figure growing by 33% over that period. 

And while body positivity activists like this Body + Soul writer Emily Holgate, with her article “It’s not ‘weight blindness’, it’s body dysmorphia,” want to collapse the two concepts, they’re hardly the same beast. Holgate casts weight-blindness anecdotes in a sinister light, suggesting they’re really just body dysmorphia or, at least, at a societal level, fatphobia. She cites Nyreh’s video, where Nyreh speculated it was “probably some kind of body dysmorphia,” since she felt larger while losing weight than she had while gaining it. 

But by Holgate’s own definition, Body Dysmorphic Disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by “an obsessive focus on an aspect of your appearance that is seen as a flaw.” She argues this might explain the obsessive tone of TikTok videos where women pore over old photos, calling their former bodies “gross.” But while Holgate claims to relate, citing her own history of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, how her recovery centered on reducing negative self-talk and decentering appearance from daily mental energy, she admits she experienced something akin to weight blindness in reverse. At her thinnest, she believed she was huge, a distortion like the archetypal anorexia-forum mirror image. 

Where dysmorphia obsesses, weight blindness neglects.

"It’s kind of the opposite of the weight blindness most commonly discussed on TikTok, but weight blindness nonetheless,” she says. Maybe, but the two are qualitatively different. Holgate’s dysmorphia meant a compulsive preoccupation with her appearance that causes great distress, like constantly checking mirrors or comparing photos: the textbook pattern. Weight blindness, by contrast, creeps up precisely because you haven’t been preoccupied with your body. Where dysmorphia obsesses, weight blindness neglects. Where dysmorphia is a debilitating disorder that interferes with your life, weight blindness manifests from apathy (rather than distress). They aren’t synonymous; they’re diametrically opposed. 

One of my favorite creators in the weight loss content ecosystem, Whitney Holcombe, who wrote the book 1 Year, 100 Pounds: My Journey to a Better, Happier Life about her 100 pound weight loss as teenager thinks the rise of weight blindness is at least in part a result of a lack of pressure to be thin and a skewed sense of what’s “normal” in America. Huge portion sizes are typical, so people don’t recognize they’re eating a lot. Most of the country is overweight, so midsize people believe they’re genuinely thin. When you combine that culture with the discomfort of realizing you aren’t living up to your highest potential, your brain defaults to defense mechanisms that flatter your ego so you don’t have to actually change.

TikTok’s Weight Blindness Excuses Are the Hilarious Wake-Up Calls We All Need to Hear

TikTok is a sea of hilarious anecdotes from the trenches of weight blindness hell, with a trend along the lines of “things I did when I had weight blindness.” You’d never guess it now, but Skinnytok creator Ashley Waraday used to be 120 pounds heavier. While many look to her now for weight loss advice, she too used to suffer from the delulu spell of “it’s not weight gain, it’s…” insert your poison here. 

For Waraday, she convinced herself her hair was what was making her look ugly, not the 100-pound weight gain that was inevitably showing in her face. The solution? Chop it all off, obviously! And unfortunately, the big chop did regrettably leave her looking chopped. It took a year to grow back, and she wishes she could have just realized “no, it’s not the hair, it’s how fat my face was.” Like most cases of weight blindness, the excuses only escalated and the scapegoats piled up. Waraday poured money into makeup, trying to contour away reality, and even flirted with getting Botox and filler injections, an urge she thankfully couldn’t afford. Because once she finally lost the weight, all those “problems” she thought she had vanished.

Emma Roma Jayne contributed to the weight-blindness discourse last year with a TikTok recounting how unaware she was of her size. “I was in denial that I was a plus-size girl. I was like, I can easily fit into Glassons; I can easily fit into the size 16. In fact, I thought 14, go figure.” In reality, she was closer to an 18 or 20 and even recalls wearing a size 22 at one point. “In my mind, I was like, it’s not me, it’s the pants.” She describes looking at candid photos and not recognizing herself: “I was like, um, who is that? That is not me. And then it got to the point where I stopped taking photos because I was truly like, no—it’s the camera. The camera is the problem.” She jokes about it now, “Slay, love that f*cking confidence, girl,” but admits that, like many, she eventually hit a canon event of realization: “Oh, I might be bigger than I thought I was.”

For Emma, that moment came while filling out paperwork for weight-loss surgery. Having avoided the scale for years in a deliberate act of denial, she underestimated her weight by 16 kilograms (33 pounds). “I don’t want to know the number because I’ll probably find a way to make it not true,” she admitted. “You know what? I’ll just guesstimate.” Her surgeon quickly shattered the illusion, informing her she wasn’t 115 kg but 131 kg. Even then, her first reaction was: “Hmmm, that’s not that big, though.” Her conclusion: weight blindness is a real phenomenon; one that can leave you in denial about just how unhealthy and overweight you are. “It was not doing much for my health.”

@Maddawgiez on TikTok makes videos about her weight loss and has done a lot of “What I Used to Eat in a Day When I Was Obese” videos to illustrate the sort of diet she used to have, and she frequently gets asked how she was eating like that and yet somehow couldn’t understand what was making her fat. Her answer: we’re all a little delulu about something. For some women, it’s insisting that a guy who treats them like absolute garbage actually likes them. “We’re all delusional in our own ways, and we want to believe that what we’re doing is the best for us, and we want to believe that what we want is what’s happening.” 

For her, it was the unwavering belief that she had a magical metabolism. She wanted to believe it, so she did. She recalls her mentality, totally detached from reality, “I can eat as much food as I want without gaining weight because I’m not getting on the scale, so I’m not gaining weight.” That was her toxic trait, she recounted with laughter. If she didn’t get on the scale, it didn’t count. Even when the reality of weight gain is staring you in the face, impossible for you to deny because it’s forcing you to contend with the fact that you no longer fit into your old clothes, the denial is ever-present.

“Like me buying new clothes that were bigger, I wasn’t accepting that I was actually getting fatter,” she explained, “I was like I want the oversized look, but it was never an oversized look, and I’m like dang, clothing sizes are running small. It was never about me; I always blamed it on something else.” But people do the same thing with guys, she points out, “they’re like, oh, he’s probably busy, he just isn’t a texter. We all make excuses until we wake up one day and we’re like damn, what am I even doing?” That’s exactly what it’s like; you want something to be the case so bad you think you can will it into existence. And as much as manifesting is a real tool when you align your beliefs with your actions, when you don’t align your actions with your beliefs, you’re just left with toxic positivity that doesn’t actually change anything. 

“What I Ate When I Didn’t Understand Why I Was Fat” Videos

As anyone who’s struggled with their weight at some point will tell you, we tend to underestimate how much we’re eating while overestimating how much we’re moving. The difference between a caloric deficit and maintenance, and likewise, the difference between caloric maintenance and a surplus, is unfortunately a lot smaller than you might realize. So, it should come as no surprise that so many women who have suffered from weight blindness and the denial that comes along with recognizing changes in their bodies have just as inaccurate a grasp on their diet. 

Alona, who goes by @shampagneshawty on TikTok, decided to hop on the What I Used to Eat When I Was Fat social media trend, prefacing it with a knowing look that basically said “strap in” and the following disclaimer: “This is everything I ate in a day when I was gaining so much weight and I couldn’t figure out why. Mind you, I was so confused, because in my head, I was like I’m eating healthy foods, like why am I not getting skinny?” before rebutting herself, “I was eating like a f*cking linebacker.” I braced myself, but what was to come was a list so extensive that it kept going and going and going; I couldn’t have possibly anticipated its length or its calories.

For breakfast, she’d have a piece of sourdough with lots of butter, a vegan sausage patty, an egg or two, and a side of spinach and tomato. Some days, if that wasn’t filling enough, she’d stop at Starbucks and get a large salted caramel cream cold brew and an Impossible breakfast sandwich. Then she’d head off to school, where she’d be on campus for a max of five hours. While there, she’d have a Go Macro bar, a flavored Premiere protein shake, and she’d get a pastry at the local coffee shop. After class, she’d go down the road to a sushi place and get some kind of sushi plate and a dessert like banana tempura with ice cream. Then she’d pack a dinner to take to work, because she waitressed at a restaurant right after school. 

Her typical packed lunch looked like a healthy buddha bowl packed with a great balance of healthy fats, proteins, and carbs—quinoa, avocado, beans, veggies, but because it would contain an entire avocado, about a half a cup of hummus in addition to pesto, cheese, chickpeas, the works, the whole thing was “sitting at probably like 1000 calories I’m not kidding.” While at work, there would be a bowl of communal fries like cheese fries sitting out in the kitchen, and she’d nibble on them as she went back and forth, and if she had to put a number to her fry total per shift, she’d guess “probably over 100 fries.” Almost every single night before she left work, she’d order a skillet cookie, which she’d sometimes share with coworkers but often ate by herself. 

Once she got home, she’d have a KIND ice cream bar, and the real kicker? To finish off the night, she’d have “probably an entire bottle of wine,” her favorite of which was Seaglass sauvignon blanc. I asked ChatGPT to run the numbers: 5,650 to 6,720 on a day where she doesn’t opt for the Starbucks second breakfast, and a whopping 6,500 to 7,600 calories with the Starbucks meal. As someone who uses ChatGPT for calorie counting sometimes, it can need some fine-tuning when it comes to accuracy, so I asked it to run the numbers again, being conservative with its estimates. Even on the low end, it came in at just under 5,000 calories a day. As for why she was baffled by her weight gain instead of the skinny legend she thought she should be while eating a diet fit for bulking? 

She genuinely thought her diet was “healthy”: organic butter, a macro-balanced Buddha bowl for lunch, and plenty of buzzy “better-for-you” picks—protein bars, “protein” ice cream, and wine (it’s made from grapes, so…health?). A combination of a lack of nutritional education and misconstruing “healthy” foods for weight loss foods can lead to this confounding scenario. Healthy doesn’t mean low-calorie. 

Then you’re putting on weight, but you don’t know why, especially when you live a pretty active lifestyle like this woman did; on the go all the time as a full-time student who worked as a server in a restaurant, and is on her feet nearly all day, even working out a few times a week. It’s funny in hindsight, but in the moment, it can be incredibly frustrating. 

But this is the sort of thing I mean when I say that people who write fat positivity articles insisting that we shouldn’t value or talk about weight because it normalizes fatphobia and causes body dysmorphia by framing our past bodies and diets negatively aren’t very helpful. Because the problem for people with this sort of pathology, if you can even call it that, is not an obsession with controlling food or preoccupation with appearance; it’s such a neglect for these concerns to the point that you lose the connection between what you put in your mouth and what you look like; that they’re straightforwardly connected—one affects the other. 

When fat activists talk endlessly about food freedom and patronizingly lie about how any food can be a health food, people don’t know how to lead the sort of lifestyle required for the sort of physique they desire. To be trapped in that stalemate while still coveting that body is such a painful predicament that sometimes we just decide to see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe. It’s learned helplessness, but it’s also a defense mechanism. 

This girl is not alone. A quick scroll through related hashtags and you’ll find a sea of comparable experiences just like hers. Women who used to be overweight but couldn’t understand why. They were eating foods high in calorie density but low in satiety, making them feel like they weren’t eating that much, even if they were actually piling in thousands of calories. This is especially easy to do if you regularly consume your meals from fast food or packaged processed foods.

Each of these videos I watched seemed to feature the same story: a girl who was often on the go or just looking for convenient meal sources, so they ate a lot of fast food, which isn’t in itself incompatible with weight loss or weight maintenance, but it is if you have no clue how many calories you’re eating. And like clockwork, they were all clueless as to the sheer volume of calories they were piling in with ease at each meal: calories that would be fit for a bulk. Hyper-palatable foods plus liquid calories plus being “busy and active” make it insanely easy to blow past maintenance without ever feeling stuffed.

These foods, engineered for hyperpalatability, increase your propensity for hunger throughout the day and, despite the high calories, don’t even offer a comparable level of protein or fiber, so everything they eat is moreish instead of satiating. It facilitates more overeating. And the bottle of wine as a nightcap is a common habit, perhaps because white wines like Moscato and Sauvignon Blanc are perceived to be “light” wines. 

A Way Forward

Recognizing the problem is the first step, but how do you actually change? Many of these creators’ weight blindness content is two-fold: they share the old delusions, the diets incompatible with their dream physiques, but then they share the solution—how they fixed it. @maddawgiez has an entire TikTok series called “what I used to eat vs…” where she compares her fast food orders she would get when she was obese vs what she orders now to stay in a calorie deficit as someone who’s lost 50 pounds. 

She demonstrates how you can still eat fast food if you’re unwilling to cut it out of your life and still lose weight by modifying your orders to be more calorie-friendly. This can involve swapping out your liquid calories for a diet soda or modifying your Starbucks drink to be lower-calorie with fewer pumps of syrup, lower-calorie milks, and omitting some toppings. She goes through the menu and gives you the inside scoop on calorie and macro-friendly options, or shows you how to get the same meals in a smaller size, or how to lower the caloric density with the modification of breads and sauces.

Here’s a visual demo of how tiny decisions add up to totally different outcomes. The Father Forge puts two guys side by side: one in shape, one with a gut, both thinking they live the same way. Neither has time to cook breakfast, but one grabs a McGriddle with an Orange Mango Naked juice (628 cals) while the other downs a Premier Protein shake packed with 30g of protein and a banana (280 cals). Neither can function "without their morning coffee," but one gets a 10-calorie black coffee, the other a 320-calorie sugar bomb from Starbucks. 

Same favorite fast food spot too: Chick-fil-A. The in-shape guy orders a grilled chicken wrap with fruit (520 calories); the big-gut guy gets waffle fries, sauces, a fried sandwich, and a giant soda (1,600 calories). And both want dessert after dinner: one whips up sugar-free jello, a low-calorie chocolate snack, and a low-cal ice cream sandwich, the other crushes a tub of Ben & Jerry’s (1100 cals). The big-gut guy swears he “just can’t lose it,” while the fit guy looks at their routines and wonders what the real difference is.

Final Thoughts

When you realize you actually have power over your diet and, by extension, your appearance, you stop needing the white lies your brain feeds you. The scale, the tape measure, and the unflattering photo all lose their sting because if you don’t like what you see, you can change it. And that change isn’t some epic, miserable grind. True differences come from the boring details: less sauce, a diet soda, lower-calorie bread. Small swaps that, when repeated over time, add up.