Congrats, You're Thin?

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, there’s been a brief hiatus in blog posts—but worry not! I just turned in my last final exam [bye, junior year] and I am overflowing with blog ideas to share with you all now that I have free time and it is officially summer. Although I’ve been keeping some meticulous iPhone notes about all of the things I want to write about in the next few posts, I had a strange experience this morning that I think would be remiss not to share with everyone today while it’s still fresh in my mind. It’s all about what happened this morning in one of my least favorite places, the doctor’s office, and the problematic ways in which we talk about weight, not only in health care situations but in society as a whole.

 I’ve talked about my issues with the BMI chart and the ways that my pediatrician used it in my early teenage years—that is a very concrete instance, in my eyes, of the flawed ways in which we talk about weight at the doctor. Today, I experienced a much more subtle interaction that still left me questioning even my own ideas about weight discourse.

 So, here’s the story: I walk into the Student Health Center at my college this morning because I’ve been having some knee pain, probably from running [spoiler alert: non-major injury and my bursa is inflamed, so I’ll be doing non-ballistic cardio for a week then I’ll be able to get back to running]. Before I get to see the doctor, I have a little check-in with a nurse, who measures my height and weight and checks my blood pressure and such. As she’s recording my weight on my file, she notices that I’ve lost a significant amount of weight since the last time I was there, and she congratulates me on this: “Wow, you’ve lost a lot! That’s amazing. Congratulations!” At first, I just said thank you. I mean, I’m sure she was trying to be nice—she meant it as a compliment. After leaving my appointment, however, I kept turning over this interaction in my head. Why did she congratulate me?

 It’s true that I’ve lost about twenty-five pounds in the last year. Other people have commented on it in the past, but normally these have been people that I’m close to [i.e. not the nurse at the health center], such as my mom or my good friends. These people know firsthand how hard I’ve been working on regaining a healthy relationship with food centered around intuitive eating and how much effort I put into exercise, because doing those things makes me feel good. I’ll admit that when I first started these processes at the beginning of last summer, weight loss was definitely a goal of mine. That said, I realized how much better I felt both physically and mentally involving fitness and health in my life and my goals shifted to maintaining that kind of lifestyle that made me happy rather than continuing to lose weight. Thus, if my friends or family comment on my body, they’ll say things like “you look great” or “I’m so proud of you for sticking with your fitness goals” [thanks, mom!].

 I’m definitely accepting and appreciative of these comments. I think that part of the reason that I “look great” is that I’m so happy—and for me, weight loss has been part of the fitness journey that has brought me so much happiness, but so has eating donuts and pasta and salad and chicken and chocolate. All of the foods, so much food. The reason that I’m okay with my close circle of connections commenting on my body or health is that they know what my goals are and why my body has changed the way it has and how much work I put into that. You know who doesn’t know all of that stuff? A random nurse.

 Again, I don’t really mean to vilify this particular person, just the way that we talk about weight. The problems with her congratulatory remark are twofold. First, congratulating me on losing weight assumes that being thinner or weighing less is better. That’s a problematic assumption to begin with, and one that I’m constantly working on distancing myself from. [I recently listened to an insightful episode of the podcast “This American Life” that discussed this very topic, fat-shaming—give it a listen here if you’re interested]. Second, the nurse had no idea if I had lost that weight intentionally or even in a healthy manner.

 Here’s what it looks like: a 160 pound woman walks into the doctor’s office. She’s not thin, but she’s not fat either—she appears athletic, if you had to categorize her body. You weigh her and notice that she’s recently lost a lot of weight—she must be so proud! She seems happy, and she’s definitely not overly thin, so you want to give her affirmation by congratulating her, and you do.

 But there’s so much that this woman doesn’t know about me, so many other reasons why I may have lost weight besides healthy ones. I could have been upset to have lost the weight for all she knows. I could have been happy about it but for the wrong reasons, and her affirmation could have encouraged me to keep practice unwise behaviors. Here are some more scenarios:

 She seems happy, and she’s definitely not overly thin, so you want to give her affirmation by congratulating her, and you do. She smiles and says thank you, but she’s secretly overwhelmed. She’s taking a new medication, and weight loss is one of the side effects. She hasn’t been trying to lose weight, but it’s still happening, and she feels like she’s losing control of her own body. People keep complimenting her, but it doesn’t feel like a compliment. She thinks about stopping the medication altogether, but she needs it for other reasons. This encounter makes her feel even worse about an already challenging situation.

 Or this: she seems happy, and she’s definitely not overly thin, so you want to give her affirmation by congratulating her, and you do. She smiles and says thank you, glad that her efforts are paying off, but also dizzy because she only had seventy calories for breakfast. She’s budgeted four hundred for lunch, but now that she knows her methods have been working, she’s thinking of cutting it down to three hundred so that she can get thinner even faster. If people are really noticing her declining weight, she thinks, then all of her deprivation is worth it.

 These situations may seem drastic, but I can assure you they are not. I find both of them very plausible and very scary scenarios. To address the second one in particular, you cannot tell if someone has an eating disorder by looking at them. People with eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes, as do the disorders themselves. Even your friend who you think is super healthy because they go to the gym twice a day may be struggling with over-exercising, an eating disorder itself as an attempt to negate consumed calories by excessively burning them. That’s not to say that everyone who goes to the gym or eats small meals has a problem, but rather that it is impossible to identify an eating disorder through physical appearance alone. So, it’s best not to comment on someone’s weight loss or gain unless your close with them and know about their motivations and goals.

 All of this to say that it’s extremely important to be mindful of the way that we discuss weight. Food, fitness, and weight itself can be extremely touchy topics for many of us. I know I sometimes have difficulty discussing food in a healthy way myself, and I’ve been known to interpret throwaway comments about my appearance in a way that turns back to weight, especially when hangry. Here’s a great real-ish example of me being unreasonable:

 My boyfriend, Dave: “I like your outfit, that skirt is so flattering on you.”
Me: “So you think it will look bad once I eat lunch and I’m bloated, right?”
Dave, confused: “What? Definitely not.”

 Even with comments that are not at all about weight, I have a unique talent of spinning them that way. So, imagine what it’s like with utterances that actually are about weight. The more I thought about my interaction with the nurse this morning, the more I felt that congratulatory remarks about weight, even if they’re well-meaning, are also really out of place and honestly unnecessary. I was talking to Dave about this earlier, and he presented me with an interesting parallel: cat-calling.

 I think this connection makes it really easy to understand why even “compliments” about weight can be unhelpful at best. When some person makes a comment about my body from the window of their car while I’m running on the side of the road, I do not feel flattered. I feel unsettled. And the thing is, I don’t think they’re trying to unsettle me or to be mean. It’s meant as a compliment. But not all compliments come off that way, especially when contextualized.

 The thing is, we’re often missing the context when we talk about weight, just like cat-caller misses the context of being a woman alone on the road when they’re yelling their opinion. All the nurse sees is [to quote myself] “she seems happy, and she’s definitely not overly thin.” But, as in the examples presented above, she can’t see the situation from the other side, and might be missing context about medication or eating disorders or any other reason someone might have lost weight that isn’t a positive one. Having explored this, here are my conclusions of the day:

1. Don’t talk about someone’s weight loss unless you fully understand the context – even if you’re making what you think is just a well-intentioned compliment. These compliments are rarely, if ever, just that.

2. Related but different: don’t assume that weight loss is a positive thing. This inherently assumes that thinner is better, which we know isn’t true. Let’s keep working on changing this cultural stereotype.

 Basically, I think this topic is something we can all work on and be more aware of. I’m sure I’ve made some unwanted “compliments” to people about weight loss myself, but after my experience today, I have a better understanding of why that isn’t appropriate. I think we can all appreciate that it’s better to say nothing than to say something that might be harmful.