I want to disbelieve

This Reddit thread is full of stories of people losing weight and getting treated better afterwords. That is some interesting, but what is *really* interesting is my knee jerk insistence that it's not the lost weight, it's the confidence. These are people I have never interacted with or seen in my entire life, but I'm convinced my intuition trumps the pattern reported by every one of them. And even if I were correct, it might be worth considering *why* people are so much more confident when thin. Possibly they are not making it up just to make me sad.

In my defense, I am very consistent about this. Recently, I've been getting flirted with/hit on much more often. It's in the same spaces I was in before, so we can rule that out as a variable. I immediately jumped to changes in my behavior. That I had no idea what the behavior changes were did not deter me, I just asked my friends to observe and report back. This explanation wasn't preposterous on its face: it's been an emotionally tumultuous month and it's entirely possible I'm subconsciously responding differently. On the other hand, I'm also back down to my pre-birth control, pre-cortisol weight. And various painfully objective sources* have made it clear there's a significant discontinuity in my attractiveness level starting at about 3 pounds above that weight, and every subsequent pound lost adds to that. But I would really rather the explanation be behavioral, because that will not go away next time a doctor decides to put me on metabolism-wrecking medication.

*"You look so much better now than you did in those pictures I posted on facebook three months ago" then why did you post them on facebook.