Its time to end the youre so skinny! comments for good. If you dont know why someone has lost weight, DO NOT praise them. Our fans tell you why: When my mom was sick and three months later passed away, I was so stressed out and grief-stricken that I lost about 20 lbs. Everyone at work complimented me and told me to keep doing whatever I was doing because it was really working for me. I had a good friend who miscarried a baby, and a few weeks later a man at church commented on her looking thinner and better! and she said, Yeah, I guess... and he goes Cmon, you gotta look on the bright side. I wanted to punch him in the face. I complimented a regular customer on her weight loss at the store where I worked when I was in my early twenties. She responded that she had cancer. Lesson learned. I got this a lot while in the throes of serious depression. Black circles under my eyes, yet people, strangers even, would announce how healthy and fit Id become! Know your audience or zip it. You may think youre paying a compliment, but youre really reminding someone of a bad situation! I had similar feelings post-surgical delivery of my twins where I wasnt eating nearly enough to be breastfeeding and was home alone with them 10 hours a day. I couldnt move to get myself food. “What did you do to lose the baby weight? was a reminder of the support I didnt have. It was hard to answer positively and politely when the things people say make you feel like crap. I lost about 30 lbs after finding out about my husbands addiction. Friends kept asking me about my weight loss secret. It made me sick. I was working in a restaurant and my parents would come in to eat a lot. My mom was losing a lot of weight and was having trouble eating because of what we later discovered was a faulty esophogeal valve. She went through test after test and after losing about 40 lbs we were worried that it might be stomach cancer. A manager of mine saw my mom one night and commented to me how great she looked (she was skin and bone) and I started to cry and said that the weight loss may be a sign of cancer to which she replied enthusiastically I wish I could get cancer!!! I was at my thinnest during a period of intense anxiety and OCD. Not a great way to lose weight. I am naturally a very petite person, but there was a time in my life where I went through some really traumatic experiences and as a result, I lost over 25 pounds. Since I am so small in general, this was awful. My hair was falling out, I was throwing up all the time, and I was so emotionally drained. People kept saying how pretty I looked and a bunch of teenage girls told me they wished they could be as skinny as I was.... Little did they know the physical damage that comes with being that small. When I was in my 20s my mom and I visited one of her friends who had pancreatic cancer. Her chance of survival was not great. The chemo was making her vomit constantly. She pointed out her belt, that her husband had needed to punch new holes because she lost weight, in a Im happy about that way. I reflected on how screwed up our society is to make a dying woman happy about losing weight. In a way that experienced help me to focus more on health and rejecting societys screwed up focus! A few years ago I lost a baby in the middle of my second trimester. I became depressed and must’ve lost weight, because over the next few months several people commented approvingly on how thin I looked. The irony of being complimented on my thinness during a time when I should have been full and round with the new life growing inside of me was almost too bitter to bear and more than once brought me to tears. I never felt very comfortable commenting on people’s weight before, but this experience really cemented it for me. Yup, I had a mystery illness and lost 12 pounds in two weeks. Everyone thought I looked fantastic!! :/ Lol. Being complimented when I had lost weight because I was so unhappy and sick that I couldnt force myself to eat was unsettling. I was asked how I did it. I replied that it wasnt worth it. I was always confident in my body, raised to value my intelligence and personality over my physical appearance. It wasn’t until I lost 20 pounds following a bad breakup that I began to understand the body insecurities that other girls my age dealt with. Having other girls tell me I ‘looked like a model!’ or that they were ‘omg sooo jealous!’ made me feel like my body before the weight loss was less attractive. I felt this urge to keep the weight off even though I felt awful and was completely unhealthy. It just goes to show how even someone with good self-esteem and body image can be brought down by ‘innocent’ comments. My mum used to point to very overweight people and say See you arent as big as her and think that was a compliment. I was fit and healthy at the time so all it said was I see u as fat. Messed with my body image for years. My fathers wife said youre still skinny each time she saw me. I make a point not to comment on peoples appearance. I prefer to say Its great to see you. I received the most compliments when i lost 20 pounds, i was not well and therefore i couldn’t eat. When i started feeling better i slowly started to gain my weight back and exercising and people will criticize me on how i looked compared to when i was beautiful. When I was in my early 20s I was broke, depressed, and starving. I would get complimented, or, worse, I was accused of being anorexic. Thank you so much for bringing attention to this real issue, and making me realize that I was not alone. So friends, if you know someone who has lost weight and they aren’t publicly speaking about how they did it, don’t feel the need to talk about it. Don’t automatically praise them. Don’t publicly comment on their photos with “You look so skinny!” Just don’t. Because you don’t know if they are working out and eating healthfully or depressed, or suffering with an eating disorder, or resorting to other unhealthy extremes to fit an unhealthy ideal. You just don’t know. We are more than bodies – so much more! beautyredefined.net/when-you-look-so-skinny-does-more-harm-than-good/
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 02:38:48 +0000
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