I never had any negative comments towards me either and I'm lifting for 3 years already.

I don't focus on strength or very low body fat percentage. I just work out to be healthy and in shape.

I'm one of the fittest women at my gym, but maybe not good enough to be talked about or I'm just deaf.

It's also possible that people working out at my gym are generally very nice and friendly people, that are only getting motivated more and more by following people like me or few other people, but I kind of doubt that.

I'll only add that I'm working out at pretty big gym that doesn't have this friendly vibe, like other, smaller gyms, where people are a very tight-knit community.

I don't really see people talking to each other at all here to be honest.

Welcome! It's nice to have you here.

I understand your problem.

I was always more of a skinny person than a fat one as well, so I can kind of relate to you. First of all, most diets you find on the Internet and in the newspapers are load of cr**. You shouldn't take them seriously, I've seen diets like 1000 calories out there, low carb diets designed for a period of few months without any carb loading and so on... So if I were you I would never trust random sources from the internet ever again. Especially as you are clueless it is very important to find a right forum, right community who can guide you or simply pay money for somebody who knows what's what, because it's easy to do some damage that is much harder to repair later on this way.

I knew many people trusting random sources from the internet, like many guys from my gym who were heavy on steroids without even running full tests, overweight girls trying those extreme 1000 kcal diets, looking like zombies after a week.

I could give a lot of examples. Additionally, you shouldn't focus on details like what time of the day is the best to eat fruits or how many meals do you eat per day. Those things may be of importance, but not on your level. The first thing that you should do is make a balanced diet, cut any junk food and slowly add calories from your 0 calories point.

Just make a model like this at first and eat what you want, but avoid junk food - focus more on healthy products, but don't be paranoid either.

If you want more details on how to do this, you can send me an PM and we can talk more about this. Something like this should get you going for a while and you should notice a good progress and a few extra pounds in your very first month.

Amazing job you have done here! I hope your passion for gym and weightlifting won't wither and soon you will be one of the strongest forum members :D Good luck on your journey and congratulations on achieving your other goals as well!

I can vouch for just simply switching to lower/higher reps. It was personally a game changer for me and I was able to maintain a pretty good progress thanks to this. My story is a little bit different though, because I started from split training method that I found on the internet way before I've found this forum, back in the days when I was totally clueless about working out, but after a year or so of split, I've switched to FBW on lower reps 4-6, which didn't help as much as the next plan I've picked anyway. I was doing this training for 8 months and then I simply picked another fbw, the one which had higher reps and I noticed increased stamina, better muscle visibility - definitely a game changer. I'm only doing fbw for now and I don't plan on changing it, although I'm not taking gym and my figure as serious as some people here, so if you are really aiming for a dream body, then my approach won't have much use I guess, but the point is - keep experimenting!