Being in recovery from an eating disorder is like taking the red pill in “The Matrix”: You feel free from the constraints and expectations of an image-obsessed society, but most of your peers have taken the blue pill and are stuck in that paralyzing, vapid world. You are alone in your freedom and long for the company of others.
When I started intuitive eating counseling in 2015 to recover from yearslong eating disorders, I had no idea what I was in for. So much of the program was designed to rewire my brain and teach me how to trust my body, its hunger, and its desire to be nourished, not starved. I had to learn not to diet, to stop weighing myself, and to let go of comparing myself to famous women I so desired to look like.
But what the intuitive eating program also taught me was how to change my dialogue about weight loss.
I was surprised when my therapist told me that I shouldn’t compliment people on weight loss. No matter how obligated or pressured I felt to affirm someone on changes to their body size, it was my duty to carry the torch and not contribute to a dysfunctional conversation surrounding body image in our society.
Not compliment someone on weight loss? That seemed so counterintuitive to everything I knew. I was the girl who grew up seeing clips of Oprah Winfrey wheel fat out in a red Radio Flyer wagon to demonstrate how much weight she had lost on a liquid diet – 67 pounds. I watched Marie Osmond hock flavorless, meal plan deliveries so subscribers could drop weight at home. I joined Weight Watchers at age 13 so I could lose the pounds brought on naturally by puberty. Why was it suddenly not OK to compliment people on weight loss? That was all I ever knew. That was all I ever saw. What else was I to do?
It has taken me years to understand the true measure of that rule and why I and everyone else shouldn’t compliment weight loss.
Whenever someone I know visibly loses weight, I’ll see compliments on social media such as, “Wow, you look great! Keep up the hard work!” or “I’m so proud of you for taking your health seriously!” I don’t want to be a jerk, but I know that complimenting weight loss is a losing game, for a number of reasons.
For one, it affirms the outdated narrative that smaller is better, thinner is the ideal, and achieving a slim figure is better than being plus size. That fat people are unattractive, obesity is your own fault.
How are we to champion body positivity and inclusivity if we continue to celebrate weight loss? We can’t.
And what happens if the person we validate gains the weight back? Are we supposed to chastise them? Have they failed? Were they more successful when they were smaller? Does the validation about their self-worth end simply because they have gotten larger?
And who is to say that one’s weight loss was ever their intention? My mother’s friend was in chemotherapy when compliments about her weight started pouring in. She hadn’t told many people she was ill and being treated for cancer. For years, she had been on restrictive diets to be smaller, though nothing ever seemed to keep the weight off. And yet, when she was dying, she was somehow seen as more beautiful, more successful, a person who had finally achieved her goals.
After giving birth to my son in 2019, I was breastfeeding, getting little to no sleep, struggling in my relationships, and barely getting by in my career. I never saw friends because I was too afraid to leave my son at home with caretakers. I didn’t realize that I had dropped significant weight during this stressful period.
One morning, when I was wearing a milk-stained dress with my eyes barely open, someone said to me, “Wow, you look amazing! You’ve dropped all the baby weight and then some!” I was smaller, not because I wanted to be, but because I was suffering emotionally and physically. I was malnourished, sleep-deprived and depressed, and yet my weight loss meant success to others.
I took the compliment because it’s hard to explain in a passing conversation why compliments on weight loss are inappropriate. But that compliment triggered my pre-recovery self who was so weight-obsessed for many years. Even in my post-recovery mindset, I felt validation.
This is also why you shouldn’t compliment anyone on weight loss: Perhaps they are in recovery and hearing that compliment undermines their hard work to stay there. As a person who’d tortured her body for years so she could be considered beautiful by her peers, I didn’t need validation. I needed a nap.
Or what if the person you are complimenting is still in the midst of an eating disorder and needs help, not affirmation?
At one point in my late teens, at the height of one of my eating disorders, a teacher stopped me in the hall and told me that my fellow students were talking about how great I looked now, and that I should be proud of myself for achieving my weight goal.
What she didn’t know was that I was consuming no more than 500 calories a day, that I chewed sugar-free gum to ward off natural cravings, that I always felt close to fainting, and that my period had stopped six months earlier because I was starving. I didn’t need someone to encourage my illness. I needed someone to save me from myself.
So before you compliment someone on weight loss, stop and ask yourself, “What am I really complimenting here? Am I part of a larger problem?” In a society that has finally begun to vocally champion body acceptance and inclusivity, it’s time we moved past this kind of fatphobia.
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