It's important to understand your goals belong to you and no one else.
You decide if you're a Fatass or not. Not societal norms, not your spouse, not your friends. You.
Whatever state you're in, if that's the state you like being in, then screw the world.
You could decide that you're a Fatass, and being a Fatass is not something that needs recovering from.
If you've decided you're a Fatass, don't like the fact that you are one and want to recover from it, then own it and understand it's all on you.
Neurosis begins when something is causing unhappiness that's within our power to change but we would rather deal with a lifetime of discomfort than deal with temporary discomfort that comes with the effort and delayed gratification that our goals require.
It's not neurotic to admit that we're unhappy with the way we are.
It's neurotic to pretend that we're happy in public when in our private moments we know we're not.
Dieting and Neurosis
If leaning out is the goal, then diet is king.
Whether you initially tell people you're dieting, or they realise it once you start getting results, people around you are suddenly going to have a lot of opinions and advice. Some may tell you you're on the wrong path, or that paying note to calories is crazy, or that diets are for losers and you should be focusing on a life of hedonism.
Your goals belong to you and no one else. As such the you're only answerable to yourself for the methods you employ. Be gracious and open minded, but don't let people hijack your process if what you're doing is working for you.
Most people would think that tracking your food intake in a food tracking app and spending some time weighing out all your food portions on a food scale even for a short period of time is neurotic.
I would argue that accurate tracking of metrics provides information which can be used to effect desired change. We don't have to track forever, but if we don't build familiarity with our true caloric intake, the estimations we use for the rest of our lives will continue to be rooted in false assumptions.
The calories in food exist, whether or not we acknowledge them. Being meticulous for a while to learn the truth isn't neurotic. Avoiding the uncomfortable truth and choosing comfort over desired change is.
We construct stories and blame diet boogeymen like :
carbs are the enemy
fats are the enemy
societal norms are making us unhappy
capitalistic food industry conspiracy theory XYZ
our "broken" metabolisms
our genetics
where we're absolving responsibility of our happiness to circumstances that we can't change.
Because it's easier to believe we don't have control.
The problem is that it not taking responsibility doesn't make us happier.
You don't have to be as lean as the fitness model you see on Instagram to be happy. But you need to be in the state you want to be in.
Maybe you really do have a lower metabolism, or were dealt a shitty genetic hand. But if that's your go to self-talk when you haven't even done the work to truly know your caloric intake is to begin with, you don't actually know.
And if you'd rather not know even if the results of all the decisions and actions you've made leading up to now aren't enough for you to be happy, that's neurotic.
Even if it was true that you had the lowest metabolism in the world, you'd be left with two choices. Be happy the way you are now, or accept it's harder for you than most, but that you won't be happy until you get to where you want to go.
Life is DEFINITELY too short to spend lying to yourself.
Go do whatever it takes to get whatever you want.