Before You Comment on Someone’s Body, Read This…

Before I dive into what I want to talk about here, I want to say that I am not trying to attack anyone or make you feel bad for something you may or may not have said or done in the past. Nobody is perfect; I myself am guilty of certain things that I now cringe about and deeply regret. All I can hope to do here is to help you understand how your words might inadvertently affect another and perhaps consider how unhelpful and outright damaging this aspect of our culture can be. Diet culture is everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be the norm and you don’t have to buy into it or accept it. Fight it, and remember that what you say to and how you treat just one other person has ripple effects far beyond what you might imagine.

My personal opinion is body comments are never okay, unless someone’s health is becoming a concern. If someone is so severely underweight that you are becoming genuinely worried, then yes, you might consider gently communicating to your loved one that you are here for them. Even in this case, however, I think the most tactful way of approaching the issue is not from the standpoint of weight or appearance; they are much more likely to become defensive and angry if you tell them they have become too thin. Rather, let them know that you are here for them, and that they haven’t been acting like themselves lately.

The above case is relatively extreme, however. What I want to talk about is actually body comments given on a daily basis to just the average person. I honestly don’t think there is anyone who has never heard or said a weight comment. It could be either an acknowledgment of weight loss or weight gain; sometimes it’s a totally off-base comment purely triggered by someone’s particular outfit or earlier meal. Never is it helpful or uplifting in the long term.

I know that for me, hearing that I lost weight when I was in the very beginning stages of my disordered eating only fueled the fire within me to lose more weight. Which would have been fine if I had any more weight to lose; instead, innocent comments from well-meaning people around me sent me into a dark spiral of feeling like I was never small enough. I lived for those comments; I was addicted to them. To me, they made all the hungry nights and exercise injuries worth it because someone was validating my work and, in my mind, my worth. Of course what happened to me cannot be chalked up to comments from others; my rocky relationship with food and my body had roots far before anyone said anything to me, having much more to do with societal ideals that had been in place since I was old enough to process and understand them. Either way, the comments certainly didn’t help.

For some context, here is a story from a time in my life where I was no longer alarmingly thin and no longer lived for validation, and yet was still strongly affected by someone else’s comment.

Last summer, I worked at a small startup. Though the company was focused on fitness, I didn’t think too much about my body on a daily basis. By that point I was already in a very good place, eating in a way that was sustainable and satisfying for me, moving my body based on what felt good each day, and generally practicing health without obsession. I also wasn’t weighing myself at the time and just going by the way my clothes fit, and I am quite certain that throughout that summer I was at my set point weight, not really fluctuating at all, apart from normal everyday ups and downs that happen with food or hormones.

I remember coming in to work one day, around midway through the summer. I was wearing a new dress,  and as soon as I walked in, one of my coworkers looked at me and said with a kind smile, “You look skinnier. Did you lose weight?”

My stomach plummeted. Though she meant the comment fully as a compliment, I heard a dull pounding in my ears, as all my old insecurities, doubts, and fears came flooding back in a manner of seconds. I smiled back and mumbled something about not thinking I weighed any different and walked to my desk in a strange kind of trance. I sat there silently processing the comment and the flood of emotions it had brought, wondering why my eyes were prickling and my hands shaking slightly.

At first, there was doubt and uncertainty. She’s saying I look skinnier; does that mean I was big before? Are others seeing me different than I see myself? Maybe I’m actually bigger than I think I am.

And then, a small but defiant voice in the back of my mind began to speak up. It reminded me of all the work I’ve done to find peace with food and my body, all the time I spent with a dietitian learning about how much food my body actually needed to be nourished and how to stop depriving myself of the simple joys in life. Was that all for nothing then, the voice asked pointedly.

Pretty quickly, my doubts and insecurities turned into anger. How dare she say something like that to me? How dare she think that’s a compliment? Was this a way to bring me down and make me question how I looked before? She has no idea how much I’ve gone through, how my clothes hung on me just two years before, or how every day I would cry as I got on the scale because I knew the number was too low but it also wasn’t low enough. I felt myself getting more and more worked up, angry tears welling up in my eyes, as I considered walking back and saying something to her.

But something stopped me. It occurred to me suddenly that this girl had meant absolutely no harm with her comment. She probably has only ever heard, “You look skinnier” be used as a way to uplift other women and so just wanted to be nice. She most likely wasn’t micromanaging my body on a daily basis like I initially assumed but simply made a (perhaps misguided) observation and thought it would be a positive thing to say. See, that’s just the society we lives in. A society that glorifies weight loss and being small, where your body size can be used as some kind of marker of discipline and morality.

Stories like this happen to me and pretty much everyone all the time. If you don’t see a family member for a long time, it’s almost expected that they will in some way comment on how your body has changed (or not changed) in the time they hadn’t seen you. If someone puts on an outfit that is particularly flattering (or unflattering), they are sure to receive comments on how they have gained or lost weight.

Why is this considered okay? Just as unsolicited comments are not usually welcome when it comes to the way we live our lives and our values, so too are they not welcome when it comes to appearance. In no way do these words help the person; they either unnecessarily bring attention to the person’s looks, making them unnecessarily self-conscious, or they inherently tie the person’s self-worth to the way they look.

There is more to the way a person looks than meets the eye; physical appearance is affected by a whole host of factors, none of which have anything to do with the person’s self-worth or morality. Just as it’s not helpful to point out that someone has a giant pimple on their nose, pointing out body changes or praising/questioning someone’s weight does absolutely nothing valuable for the person.

Again, I am not trying to make you feel bad or in any way suggest that compliments based on physical appearance are inherently wrong. Quite the opposite, actually. I, like most women, definitely do not mind hearing a nice comment about my hair or my outfit because for better or worse, physical appearance is inherently tied to our self-esteem. All I ask is that you think before you say anything, good or bad, when you don’t know the person’s history or what they are currently going through. Think about how your comment might be interpreted and how you would feel if someone said the same to you.

And please, let’s stop praising and chastising body fluctuations that often have little to do with a person’s actions and even less to do with their health. Diet culture might be pervasive and inescapable, but you can choose not to participate.

Change begins with you.

I have so many more thoughts about this, many of which I am still working through. I may never have experienced how hurtful and damaging body comments can be for people in larger bodies, but I hope this post makes it clear that I feel for you and promise to fight hard on your behalf against the diet industry and misguided cultural ideations.

Linking up with Amanda

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