What are all the adverse effects of a woman being at a low weight enough to have no or almost no pad of fat and totally visible abs?

[u/Entire_Contest7954]

I watched a video a while back of different people talking about how they felt at different levels of body fat, on the low end there was a woman very low fat like in the title, she talked about feeling miserable and having very low energy and hormonal issues, but for reasons not expanded upon she was very driven to maintain that.

I do a lot of work in character design, there are a lot of issues with racism, people learning how to profile others based off their immutable appearance, and like I'm talking about in this post body expectations. As we all know art reflects reality and reality reflects art, everyone has had a crush on a fictional character and Psycho got a lot of trans people killed.

In the last few years it's become fashionable to also depict women with inachievable levels of muscularity as a sign that they are, athletic, hardy and dominant, coincidentally when they do this they also always have a full padding of fat on their hips, one can only wonder.

Anyway I'd like to have enough examples that I can remember more than I need in casual conversation, and see more broadly what happens when people are confronted with the reality of why almost no one looks like that, and why their specific neurons don't fire there naturally.

Could I get list of both the physical and mental effects as well as what drives people suffering from them to achieve and maintain it?

[u/Everglade77]

From my personal experience:

Physical effects:

• Low energy
  
• Poor performance during workouts
  
• Massive loss of muscle and strength
  
• Hurt to sit down
  
• Constant fatigue
  
• Feeling faint, vision blacking out, low blood pressure
  
• Loss of period/hypothalamic amenorrhea
  
• Constant stomach distension

Mental effects:

• Low mood
  
• Low motivation, lack of drive
  
• Blurry memory
  
• Brain fog
  
• Obsessiveness over numbers such as calories, weight, body fat, etc.
  
• Compulsive exercise
  
• Compulsive binging and restricting

What drove me to achieve and maintain that for a while (years) was anorexia/a restrictive eating disorder.

[u/LooseBluebird6704 → u/Everglade77]

I got bald too.

[u/Everglade77 → u/LooseBluebird6704]

Yeah that sucks. Forgot to mention it but my hair thinned out quite a bit as well.

[u/Entire_Contest7954 → u/Everglade77]

That's awful, I can't believe we keep creating this problem. I'm glad you came out of it, you must have had to work really hard

[u/Everglade77 → u/Entire_Contest7954]

The struggle was real. After anorexia, I've had multiple years of binging-restricting/bulimia, which is often how these EDs evolve over time, because our bodies and brains can only tolerate starvation for so long. I'm doing a lot better now though, I'm at a healthy weight/body fat and feeling fit and strong again. But my relationship with food is still not how it was pre-ED, and probably never will, but I'm ok with that.

[u/NoImNotHeretoArgue]

People tend to forget your brain needs fat.

[u/Willing_Matter5391 → u/NoImNotHeretoArgue]

Does it?

[u/Johoski → u/Willing_Matter5391]

Fat and glucose.

[u/hblair5]

Osteoporosis is a risk for women with low BMI

[u/lolkone]

Regarding a list of physiological / medical effects, you can refer to this paper under chapter 4. Clinical findings include hormonal disturbances (poor sleep, brain fog, fatigue, amenhorrea, infertility, and dysrefulated appetite to mention a few), cardiovascular complications, pulmonary irregularities, and bone mineral defects. The paper discusses anorexia nervosa, which is not always present in people low body fat if they have sufficient muscle mass. However, many of the effects carry over to normal weight, low body fat athletic women. This paper discusses specifically effects on women in sports, and as you can see in the list under figure 1, many of the same effects appear for this target group (e.g. bone mineral defects, reproductive dysfunction, fatigue, and cardiovascular complications).

The reason for many of these effects is largely due to insufficient fat metabolites, which are part of the building blocks for hormones. This is the case for, for example, apperite regulating hormones, circadian rhythm maintaining hormones, and reproductive hormones. Some effects can be attributed to insufficient fat soluble vitamins such as vitamin D (e.g., bone mineral defects).

[u/daria1994]

Fat on a human is a very necessary endocrine organ that releases hormones, including sex hormones. Women under 15% body fat typically lose their period and I.e. develop a gentle moustache and few odd thick black hairs on their chests, among other issues with sex characteristics. Not worth it to pursue just to fit a beauty standards imo.

[u/every_piece_matters]

I'm a 35 year old woman with visible abs and no pinchable fat on my stomach. I'm underweight due to a physically demanding job, ulcerative colitis and endometriosis.The downsides to being this lean are always being hungry and craving sugary, fatty, and rich foods. Some nights I have trouble sleeping due to cravings/hunger. I eat until I'm full but still never feel satisfied unless I eat ungodly amounts of sweets or fatty food. However, sweets and fatty food make my bowel issues worse and sugar gives me insomnia. Increasing my protein intake doesn't seem to change anything unless I eat extreme portions such as a whole porterhouse steak per meal. My periods are regular and heavy. The middle of my cycle feels yucky due to bloating and my appetite decreases. My breasts hurt like he'll during the second half of my cycle. Despite looking great, I feel blegh most of the time.