I know what you mean. There is no-one at running club who used to know me when I was obese. A lot of my colleagues at work didn't either, but word tends to get around (and my old photo is still in the staff directory
). But at running club, people just tend to think of me as a decent runner because that's what I currently am, rather than as someone for whom running at all is a pretty big achievement.
I like it in that it's shifted my focus a bit. Instead of thinking "well, I lost 110lb so a sub 2 hour half is pretty good" (which it is, of course), I think "if I can run sub 2, can I run sub 1:55", then 1:50 and so on (I'm down to 1:43). Because no-one knows how fat I used to be, they base their assumption of what I can do on what I can do now, not what I used to be able to do, and I pick up on that.
It still sometimes floors me when we're talking about stuff like thigh chafing in marathons (join a running club for stimulating conversation!) and someone looks at me and says "with your skinny thighs that won't be a problem", or the time I said I started running to lose weight and they instantly replied "but you don't need to". I had to point out that that was because it had worked, not because I was like this when I started
Even when I say I've lost weight people seem to assume I'm talking about 10 or 20 pounds at the most.
I'm feeling less of a fraud now that I realise that it's not just suddenly going to go back on again, and that I can live life as a skinny fit person without feeling out of place doing it. The more I live the life, the more it feels like me rather than someone I'm pretending to be.