The BODcast - S2: E7
Welcome back - it’s Tuesday and that means what? BODcast dayyyyyyy!
Today’s episode is going to touch on something I have had MANY DMs about across the last two years.
I often post things in my stories where the replies will blow up (once, it was about butter, and no I cannot explain why people are so passionate about butter).
If I post something reminding people not to compliment weight loss - or even just to avoid body-related compliments, really - I get LOADS of people asking why it’s a bad thing when ‘they’re just being nice’.
I mean, sure - people who know me well know that I LOVE an outfit or makeup compliment, because I don’t spend THAT much time making myself feel glamorous to not get noticed.
But what I don’t like, don’t want and don’t need (and I am sure you relate, if you’ve ever been a fat person) is to be told I look like I’ve lost weight as a compliment. I probably haven’t, and if I have it was unintentional because there’s nothing I'm trying harder to avoid than thinking about my body weight. I spent years - DECADES - obsessing over it and it never brought me joy.
Talking about bodies just puts the focus back on how our size is valued, measured and evaluated by strangers and society. I’ve spoken MANY times about how I KNOW that my value and my weight aren’t related, and how I want others to be confident in that knowledge for themselves.
Complimenting weight loss reinforces the idea that smaller is better - and sometimes, the cause can be from illness, stress or an eating disorder. Knowing that a high proportion of diets fail, and that eating disorders kill, encouraging the idea that we should apply this pressure to ourselves isn’t the best choice. For someone early in recovery from an eating disorder, this could set back their progress or even put them right back at the start.
It drives harmful thought processes that can cause us to think that weight increase would be a demonstration of failure, laziness and lack of willpower. This is a bias already held against fat people, and perpetuated by people like Katie Hopkins. As a form of ‘proof’ that fat people are lazy, she deliberately gained weight over a period of 3 months and then lost it. This further serves the anti-fat narrative she peddles and really only proves (without bringing in any of the other foul aspects of the kind of racist, elitist behaviour she’s displayed) that Katie Hopkins is awful and should never ever be platformed by the media.
Demi Lovato wrote on Instagram “Complimenting someone on their weight loss can be as harmful as complimenting someone on their weight gain. Because even if your intention is pure, it might leave that person awake at 2am overthinking that statement.”
They went on to say “Does it feel great? Yeah, sometimes. But only to the loud ass eating disorder voice inside my head that says ‘See, people like a thinner you’ or ‘If you eat less you’ll lose even more weight.’ But it can also sometimes suck because then I start thinking ‘Well, damn. What’d they think of my body before?’”
This rings true for me when in situations where someone whose body is smaller is mine mentions how they feel about their body. The pandemic has brought this conversation back into mainstream conversation as people discussed their ‘COVID kilos’.
Would you ever say to someone “Ohh, wow, you have gained weight”? No? Why?
Complimenting weight loss and demonising weight gain can easily have the same affect on someone, so avoiding both is best.
The more we focus on what people do and how they act (rather than how they look), the more we will make space for dismantling systems which oppress people based on things that aren’t relevant to their value as fellow human beings.
Because like I always say - my body, your body, every body is a good body.
