The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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After spending summer at a lower weight, I've decided to try and bulk and gain again. I have mixed feelings about it because I found bulking in the past to be very stressful and miserable, but then I also hate how small and weak I am.
I'm somehow still surprised that there aren't hoards of people who jump in whenever someone talks about increasing caloric intake in order to bulk with various versions of, "Bulking doesn't work; you'll just lose the weight again; your body will adapt; different people absorb calories differently; maybe we need to fix some chemical in the food supply before you're able to bulk; even just talking about the math of bulking shames skinny people."
It really drives home how emotionally driven their arguments are when they make them on the topic of weight loss.
Though I sympathize with your point, I find that my body very easily returns back to my 'typical' weight of 78-80kg, and staying above that requires some effort. And I could easily credit the existence of biological mechanisms that make weight easier to gain than to lose. Of course it's still possible to control my weight, but it's definitely easier in some directions than others.
I would be in complete agreement with your description of your subjective perceptions. Moreover, I think they generalize fairly well. Most people feel most comfortable in some middle range of weight and begin to feel more subjective distress as they push further into either direction. Even more-over, there is some variation in subjective perceptions depending upon baseline habits, degree of one's introspection, etc. I don't think any of those factors do much work to justify the silly things that people constantly bandy about (even in places like here) when the topic of weight loss comes up.
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