So... I've always been a pretty good-looking, "cool" guy. I was thin, sometimes a tad on the dadbod side. I was actually a skinny vegan before I had kids but both pregnancies and infancies -- cooking calorically dense foods to share with a woman whose metabolism had skyrocketed while "eating for two" then feeding children entirely with her won body, while also lounging around and enjoying new babies -- added each about ten lbs to my frame. So when I started being really serious about fitness, I was maybe twenty pounds heavier than skinny. Started getting into fitness and bb for a bunch of reasons and attracting women was low on the list, though I do want to stay attractive to my wife and I am poly so I date/sleep with other women (and always have).

Presently, I'm a pretty good-looking, cool, "swole" guy. The main difference with regard to women is that women no longer call me cute, they call me "hot" and more overtly sexualize my body in my presence and, I've heard, in conversation with other women. I'm not sure if it "helped" and can't honestly say that I've slept with any women who wouldn't have slept with me when I didn't bench three plates or whatever. But now I've done so as more self-consciously sexually objectified, which is just a different experience than before. Once, pre-fitness, I was talking with an ex, a woman who I am still friends with but was not sleeping with at the time. She was talking about a recent lover and said he "has the best body of anyone I've ever slept with" (and she has slept with a lot of dudes). She didn't mean it as an insult and I didn't take it as one but it still was kinda like "ouch" and it stuck with me. I saw a picture of that dude recently and also one of her new husband (a different guy) and I can say, objectively, that I have a better body than both of them. That actually feels kinda great. Just like it feels great to be ogled, to have hot women squeeze my bicep and exclaim a little. One really cool, really hot young woman who was, frankly, on the lower age range of anyone I'd sleep with as a man in my thirties, grabbed my thigh post-coital and just said "wow, you're just really a beautiful man!" because she'd never felt a body that was that hard in her life. These things feel good. They add to the confidence thing that everyone talks about but mostly they just add a little umph to the encounter. It was one thing to be cute or to be smart or to be cool; these are things that I've sorta carried with me my entire life and didn't really mean that much to me. It was another thing to be hot, to be, even for a hot, slutty woman, the hottest.