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I chafed at a hundred and thirty pounds in high school and I chafed at a hundred and eighty pounds at my own wedding and I chafed at every single weight in between, and I want to tell you about a conversation at a work retreat in Asheville last September that finally explained to me what twenty-five years of dermatologists and gynecologists and one very expensive sports medicine doctor could not, because if you are also a woman whose thighs have touched her entire life and you have been told to lose weight by people who watched you chafe when you were thin, I need you to read this. I am forty-three. I have a fifteen-year-old daughter named Claire and a husband of eighteen years. I have been dealing with the inside of my thighs since ninth grade P.E. class, when I walked a mile in gym shorts and came back to the locker room with two raw red patches that my mother told me I would grow out of. I did not grow out of it. I chafed on the track team at a hundred and twenty-eight pounds. I chafed on my honeymoon in Cancun at a hundred and sixty. I chafed on a family trip to Yellowstone at my heaviest, one eighty-four, the summer Claire was nine, and I sat on a bench at Old Faithful while my husband took her to the viewing area because I could not make the walk. The collection of things I have tried over a quarter century is genuinely absurd. Vaseline when I was sixteen. Baby powder in college. Body Glide starting in my late twenties when it came out and everyone said it was the answer. Monistat gel in my thirties because a Reddit thread said it was the secret. Megababe when Katie Couric was on Good Morning America talking about the founder. Bandelettes twice, a black pair and a pink pair, both of which slid to my knees on walks shorter than a block. Bike shorts that rolled up by lunch every single time no matter what brand or size I bought. A prescription cream from a dermatologist in 2019 that cost ninety dollars with insurance and made my thighs feel like they were coated in wax. A silicone anti-chafe balm from a triathlete forum. Coconut oil from my grandmother. I have been told by three separate doctors over the course of my adult life that if I lost weight it would improve, which is a thing that is impossible to argue with when you are sitting on an exam table, but I remembered every time that I had chafed at one-twenty-eight on the track team and I knew in my body that weight was not the whole story, even if I could not articulate why. Last September my company did an off-site retreat at a resort in Asheville. Two days of workshops, one group hike scheduled for the afternoon of day two, a five-mile loop through the grounds. I was dreading it from the moment it landed on the itinerary in June. I wore the black bike shorts under my hiking pants. I had Body Glide in my fanny pack. I was hoping to get through three miles before I had to excuse myself. About a mile in, a woman named Denise from our accounting department, who is in her mid-fifties and maybe a size eighteen, fell in beside me. She was wearing normal-looking shorts and no fanny pack and no visible anti-anything, and she was walking at full pace. She asked me why I kept adjusting my waistband and I did a thing I almost never do, I told her the truth. I said my bike shorts were rolling up and my thighs were going to be destroyed by mile three. She looked at me for a second and said, when did you start chafing. I said I was fifteen. She said, same, and then she said something I have now retold to four women. She said, it is not size. It is heat. She said she had finally figured it out about two years ago because her niece is a physical therapist who works with a lot of postpartum and perimenopausal women, and her niece had explained it to her at a family barbecue. She said what happens in heat is that your body redirects blood to your skin to release heat, and fluid shifts out of your blood vessels into the soft tissue around your thighs. Your inner thighs literally swell, slightly, before you take a step. That swelling is what creates the contact zone that rubs. The balm is trying to slide skin over skin. But your skin is being pushed against itself from the inside, and the amount of pressure increases the longer you are in the heat, which is why the balm works for an hour and is useless by noon. She said it has nothing to do with weight, it happens to roughly three quarters of all women whose thighs touch, and the women who do not chafe in heat are mostly women whose thighs do not touch to begin with, which is a genetic lottery, not a virtue. I stopped walking for a second on that trail because I felt twenty-five years of carrying around the wrong story about my own body rearrange themselves in about forty-five seconds. My thighs were not broken. My weight was not the variable. I had been using a lubricant to try to solve a pressure problem, which is, when she said it that way, genuinely impossible. Denise told me what she wore instead. A specific brand of compression shorts, graduated pressure at the thigh calibrated to fifteen to twenty millimeters of mercury, three-dimensional knit between the thighs so the skin physically cannot press on skin. She had worn a pair on an eight-hour walking tour of Charleston in July. She did not reapply anything. She did not think about her thighs. She sent me the name of the brand in a DM that night from her hotel room. It is called Cellumove and the system is called the Thermo-Hold Protocol. She warned me that the normal places to buy this kind of thing do not carry it because those places are set up around the balm and powder category and this is not in the same category. So I purchased a pair, and I have worn them now to my niece's wedding in Charleston, to Claire's soccer tournament weekend in Raleigh, and to a three-hour walking tour of old Savannah with my mother, who was the one who told me at fifteen that I would grow out of this. I did not grow out of it. I just had the wrong information for twenty-five years. I am telling you this because I sat at my mother's kitchen table two weeks ago and she told me her thighs have been bothering her since menopause and she had assumed it was just her age, and I realized my own mother has been carrying the same wrong belief I carried my whole life, passed from her to me and almost onto Claire. If somebody has ever used your weight to explain this to you when you already knew better. I knew better at sixteen. Nobody listened until Denise.