Please Stop Commenting on Your Friends’ Weight Loss

When I got divorced in 2017, I fell into a horrible depression. I have told the story many times how I lived on protein shakes for longer than I should have because cooking real food and chewing it required more energy that I could muster. Weight loss ensued. It was not my intention. It was a major low point in my life. The upside? I looked great. Everyone noticed. And said things. I grew up the skinny kid. People commented then too. In 8th grade, a girl asked if I had anorexia. In my 20s, other women poked me in the ribs in bar bathrooms and commenting on my weight. Being skinny was part of my identity since I was eight years old. When you find yourself in your 30s and that part of your “identity” slips out the back door, taking a good chunk of your post-partum sanity with it, it wreaks havoc on your psychological well-being. In short, it fucked me up. Bad. I have gained and lost the same 10 to 15 pounds for almost 15 years. When you go through this cycle enough times, you see patterns not only in your behavior but in others’ as well. During periods of my life where I have slid back over to the lower side of my weight spectrum, people never failed to comment on my weight loss, even directly questioning me about it. “You look amazing! Have you lost weight? What are you doing?” It was as though I had discovered some secret they wanted to know or they thought maybe I’d cheated the system, like that girl in gym class in 8th grade. <a href="https://vanessatorre.medium.com/please-stop-commenting-on-your-friends-weight-loss-24a087e4dea3">Website</a>