The shape stops at the ankle
Fat builds up on the legs and hips and stops abruptly above the foot, often leaving a visible cuff at the ankle. Hands and feet stay comparatively small.
Lipedema · Arabic first
Your legs are not a willpower problem
Lipedema is a chronic disorder of fat tissue. It is not caused by eating too much, and it does not go away by eating less. If you have spent years being told otherwise, you are in the right place.
No cost. No before-and-after photos. Your data stays yours.
Some of this may sound familiar
Lipedema has a recognisable pattern. Not everyone has every sign, and only a clinician can tell you whether this is what you have — but if several of these describe you, it is worth asking about by name.
It hurts to be touched
Pressure hurts. Legs ache after standing. A hug around the thigh, a firm massage or a seatbelt across the hip can be genuinely painful in a way ordinary fat is not.
You bruise without remembering why
Small capillaries near the surface break easily, so bruises appear with no impact you can recall.
Dieting changes your waist, not your legs
You lose from the face, chest and stomach. The legs stay. This is the single most demoralising part of the condition, and it is a feature of the disease, not of your effort.
It runs in the family
Mother, aunt, grandmother, sister — the same legs. Most people with lipedema can name a female relative with the same body shape.
It arrived with a hormonal change
Puberty, pregnancy, or the years around menopause. Lipedema very often starts or worsens at exactly those points.
This is not a diagnostic checklist. Lipedema is diagnosed clinically, by a doctor who examines you — and several other conditions look similar.
Some of that sounded familiar?
Answer the questions a doctor tends to ask, in the order they tend to ask them, and take your own answers to the appointment. Ten short screens, anonymous, no account needed — and no result, because only a doctor examining you can give you one.
Free. Nothing is saved until you finish.
About
What lipedema actually is
Lipedema is a chronic, progressive disorder of adipose (fat) tissue. It affects women almost exclusively. The fat is distributed symmetrically on both legs — and in about a third of cases the arms as well — and it behaves differently from ordinary fat: it is painful, it holds fluid, and it does not respond to a calorie deficit the way the rest of the body does.
It hurts
Pressing on it is painful. Ordinary fat does not do that.
It holds fluid
The tissue retains water, so legs grow heavier as the day goes on.
It resists dieting
The rest of you gets smaller. The affected area stays as it was.
Known since 1940
Described in the medical literature for eighty years. Not new, and not rare.
It is not obesity, although the two can exist in the same person and are constantly mistaken for each other. It is not laziness, and it is not a failure of discipline. It is a physical condition with a physical mechanism, and it has been described in the medical literature since 1940.
And there are things that genuinely help
Compression garments
Lymphatic drainage
Movement in water
Anti-inflammatory eating
Surgery, in some cases
There is no cure yet. But these reduce pain and slow the progression — and most of them work better when something is actually tracking what changes.
This is why the app does not lead with your weight
One number, four things inside it
Fluid
Your cycle
Ordinary fat
Lipedema tissue
Only one of the four responds to what you do. The scale adds them together and hands you a single number, with no way of knowing which one moved.
And this is three months of work
The scale
0.0kg
no change
The tape measure
−2.0cm
around the calf
If the scale is your only tool, you conclude that nothing worked. That is not a problem with the plan — it is a problem with the measuring instrument.
The part nobody talks about
Lipedema does not only change the shape of your legs. It changes your relationship with your whole body — with mirrors, with photographs, with summer, with what you say to yourself while you are getting dressed. That is real pain, and it has nothing to do with fat.
Most women with this spent years believing the problem was them. They tried every way of eating, heard "eat less" from family, from friends and sometimes from doctors, and went on blaming themselves for something their body was doing on its own. The first thing that happens when the condition finally has a name is that the blame falls out of your hands.
Which is why
A number went up?
You get a line about fluid and hormones, not about willpower.
Missed a week?
You come back to exactly where you were. No streak was broken.
Recorded something?
It says a line written for you. Every single time.
Not because kind words are a treatment — but because the months ahead are far easier when you are not also fighting yourself.
And if it is genuinely heavy — not a bad day, but something that has been sitting on your chest for a while — that is not weakness and it deserves a professional. This condition comes with depression and anxiety far more often than average, and that is in the clinical guidelines themselves, not something an app decided.
The app
What the app does
LipeLight is a private log you keep for yourself, designed around what actually moves in lipedema. It is free, it works on a phone, and it is written in Arabic first.
Limb measurements, both sides
Ankle, calf, knee and thigh, left and right, tracked separately. With lipedema the tape measure outranks the scale, so it is a first-class field, not a note.
Pain and swelling, daily
A quick score for pain, heaviness, swelling and bruising. Patterns you cannot see day to day become obvious across a month.
Food, in your own kitchen
A food log that already knows ful, taameya, koshari, molokhia and mahshi — not a Western database that thinks you eat oatmeal.
Compression garments
Hours worn, and how old each garment is. Compression loses its grip long before it looks worn out; the app tells you when to replace it.
Manual lymphatic drainage
Log sessions — with a therapist, or the self-massage you do at home — and see them next to your symptom scores.
Cycle-aware
The routine pre-period fluid swing can be more than a kilo overnight. The app knows where you are in your cycle, so it never reads that as a failure.
How it works
Sign up in a minute
An account, a name to be called by, and nothing else. No card, no clinic referral.
Log what you can
A weight, a measurement, how the legs felt today. A partial log is still a log — the app is built to be forgiving.
Look at a month, not a day
Once there is a few weeks of data, the trends page shows what is actually changing — and what is just the week of the month.
From the library
Plain-language articles, in Arabic and English, on the parts of this that nobody explains properly.
Treatment and surgery
Complete decongestive therapy: what a course involves
The intensive programme used when there is a real fluid and lymphatic component — not routine lipedema care, and worth understanding before somebody sells you a version of it.
Living with it
Movement, water and why walking helps more than it should
The lymphatic system has no pump of its own; it borrows yours. That one fact explains why walking, and moving in water especially, does more for lipedema than its gentleness suggests.
Treatment and surgery
What lipedema surgery costs in Egypt and the Gulf
No specific figures, on purpose — prices in this region move too fast for an article to be honest about them. What does not go stale is how to read a quote.
Questions people ask first
Is lipedema just obesity with another name?
No. They are different conditions and they can occur together. Lipedema fat is symmetrical, painful to pressure, largely spares the hands and feet, and does not respond proportionally to weight loss. A person can have lipedema at any body size, including a slim one.
Will losing weight fix it?
Weight loss can reduce any ordinary fat you are carrying on top of the lipedema, which usually helps mobility and pain. But it does not remove the lipedema tissue itself, and expecting it to is the reason so many women conclude they must not have tried hard enough. They tried hard enough.
Do I need a diagnosis before I start tracking?
No — you can track how your body behaves whether or not anyone has named it yet. In practice a few months of measurements and symptom scores make the conversation with a doctor much shorter, because you arrive with a record instead of a description.
Is my data private?
Your log is yours. It is not sold, not shared with advertisers, and not shown to anyone else. The privacy policy says exactly what is stored and why.
Does it cost anything?
No. The tracking app is free to use.
Start where you are
You do not need a diagnosis, a plan, or a good week. You need somewhere to put the information so that in three months you can see what actually changed.
Create a free account