I totally feel you on the self deprication survival instinct. I also struggled with my weight all through school, and being the first one to call myself fat helped deter others since I already made the joke.
Turns out calling yourself fat all the time isn’t much better than others doing it though, as I now have quite the complex about eating, exercise, body image, etc.
As someone on the edge of making the change myself, I have been enjoying these posts because I have been getting to learn some of the different distros and there pros and cons. Lemmy isn’t insanely active right now, so you get a different group of perspectives with each iteration of the question.
Maybe once lemmy gets bigger we can break off these sorts of questions into their own catalog but for now I think they are doing more good than harm here.
Just my two cents tho, obviously you have the right to disagree :)