LGBTQ+

Skin can be exposed in many areas... chest, shoulders, back, legs, hips, etc. not just the abdomen. You don't have to expose skin everywhere, but there are probably places you'd be comfortable with exposing but are typically not exposed on male cut clothing.

I'm going to share with you something a friend said to me that significant changed how I viewed my own body wrt to clothing.

It was Summer and my friend was wearing a crop top. She was chubby, like me, and she told me about how her mum always hated my friend wearing crop tops because she thought it was inappropriate if you weren't skinny. My friend explained that she found this an absurd perspective, because it's not like the fact that she was chubby was at all a secret - like it's not as if covering up her tummy made people less aware of the fat that existed there. The kinds of people who would be negative about her weight would be negative regardless of what she was wearing.

This struck a chord with me because I had spent years trying to lose weight, and also dressing in a way that made me miserable, because I had mentally gated off any fun self expression or style as something for when I got to a size I was happy with. When I look back on photos from that time, I cringe, not at my weight, but on how I dressed; my compulsion to cover up the body I wasn't happy with made my body look worse.

I had the best progress in losing weight when I sort of snapped and just started wearing what I liked, regardless of whether I felt I "should" or not, and I look back on photos from that period much more positively. What my friend shared with me helped me along that route, though it did take me a while to be confident enough to wear crop tops.

Although this story is about crop tops, I'm not trying to convince you to do anything you're not comfortable with. Expanding one's style to be more reflective of how you feel is usually a gradual process and there's plenty of other things to start with. Just try your best not to make the same mistakes I did. Internalised fatphobia often makes losing weight even harder, and I found it much easier to imagine the person I was working to be once I started dressing a bit more like her. A sense of vision was helpful. Also, "too chubby to wear [thing]" is a pretty blurry line and it's not clear when you've reached it, because wearing things that you'd like to but don't feel able to is always a stressful thing that needs working up to