Why I won’t comment on your body (and you shouldn’t either)

“You are so slim!” he said admiringly. I was 15, and my first boyfriend and I were on a walk on a beautiful summer evening. We had stopped at a pasture to admire the horses, and I was leaning against the fence, my hands braced on the rail and my lower body tilted attractively just so. I was wearing a long skirt and a cropped top, which had ridden up and exposed my midriff. My first reaction at his comment was pleasure — who doesn’t like a compliment, especially if it’s from the opposite sex? But what followed almost immediately was worry — a nagging sense of unease that I now needed to make sure I stayed this way, since the shape of my body was evidently an important part of what made me lovable.

I didn’t know it then, but those words would haunt me for nearly 20 years.

I grew up with a dieting mother who weighed 30 grams of ham for her one slice of toast for breakfast and went on different diets when she got bored. I was a picky eater and a dreamer, much more enthralled by books than food as a child, and never thought much about my body. It simply existed, propelling me along on my bike and roller skates and two healthy legs that enabled me to run around with the neighbourhood kids and play outside every day after school. Puberty arrived late for me at age 14, and since it came with acne, furious blushing and greasy hair to add to the awkwardness of wearing round Harry Potter-glasses before Harry Potter existed I was much more concerned about my ugly face than my body.

It wasn’t until people started commenting on my body that I started paying attention to it. I remember an outing with the church youth group I went on when I was 14. I had just had a growth spurt (my last one as it would turn out) that left my legs coltish long. My hips hadn’t come in yet, and with my denim shirt tucked into my jeans I was all legs and no hips. One of the older girls looked me up and down appraisingly, and at last delivered her verdict: “You have a nice figure, Miriam.” I blushed furiously, which made me worry much more about my ugly face than being pleased about the compliment — but as you can see, I still remember it, 28 years later.

Her words didn’t have the same impact as the fateful ones of my boyfriend less than a year later. By that time I had gained a bit more confidence about my weird face (after all, I had a boyfriend now) and I was ready to obsess about something else I could hate about myself. Bam, my body insecurity was born!

The concept of being content with who you are was completely unknown to me. Every single woman I knew complained about something to do with her appearance, and not doing so was a sign of arrogance. I mean, who could honestly say that they liked the way they looked? Were they blind? It was the 90s, the time of supermodels and Kate Moss’ infamous “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, and there was plenty to feel insecure about. Fat jokes and fat shaming were commonplace in the media (remember “Fat Monica” from Friends, the world’s obsession with the Spice Girls’ bodies, or Ally McBeal?), and all the years of being exposed to my mom’s dieting and obsession with being skinny finally kicked in.

I won’t bore you with the details of what followed next. If you’re a woman, chances are that you lived through a version of it yourself. I never developed an eating disorder (I couldn’t even make myself puke, much to my annoyance), but I did plenty of the things that I now know to be problematic: I drank water instead of eating when I was hungry, counted calories, exercised as punishment for “being bad”, didn’t eat before a night of drinking to save calories, chewed sugar-free gum excessively (to distract myself from being hungry and hoping the maltilol would work as a laxative — it never did), didn’t eat ice cream on vacation, used mustard instead of butter or mayonnaise on sandwiches — the list goes on.

Fast forward to 20 years later. Through a combination of yoga, mindfulness, seeing the diet industry for what it is (a money-making scheme that creates body insecurities mostly in women to get rich) I have arrived at a place of body neutrality. I’ve basically returned to the state of mind I had as a child, where I didn’t think about my body at all. I listen to it and give it what it needs: rest, sleep, movement, nourishment, fresh air, peace of mind. But I don’t worry about what it looks like anymore. I’ve spent two decades thinking about it almost every moment of every day, from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning to the moment I went to bed at night. Do you know how time-consuming and exhausting that is?

It’s incredibly draining. Every decision you make is influenced by how you feel about your body: you get an invite to a wedding or class-reunion? I need to go on a diet. Someone invites you to an exercise class or, horror of horrors, swimming? Sorry, I can’t make it (because you feel too self-conscious in workout clothes or a bathing suit). It affects your social life (you can’t go out for dinner when you’re dieting or everything will be ruined), your energy levels, and how you feel on any given day: like a failure (if you didn't lose weight or worse, gained) or relieved (when you lost weight), quickly followed by worry that you can’t mess up now.

I left all this behind in my mid-thirties, and I never looked back. But I know how difficult it is to become body-neutral in a world that won’t shut up about our bodies. Too many people get filthy rich by telling us that we are not good enough, but if we buy their product we will be to ever get rid of the diet- and beauty industry. But there is a small, yet important thing you can do to stop perpetuating this unhealthy cycle: stop commenting on bodies.

• Don’t complain about your own body (I’m fat/I need to lose weight/I was bad today).
• Don’t boast about your recent weight loss.
• Don’t compliment other people on their weight loss. I know it’s meant well, but it can have many unintended negative consequences: it implies that their body wasn’t good enough before they lost weight. It can jump-start an unhealthy body-obsession that will affect their life for years (or forever). Weight loss can happen after personal tragedies the person isn’t ready to talk about yet: an illness, a miscarriage, heartbreak, depression, the loss of a loved one.
• And for the love of God, never comment on someone’s weight gain. Even if the person is okay with it (which is hard enough in our society), what are they supposed to say? That they are fine with it, just to be met with your disbelieving or pitying gaze? That they feel awful about it? That they “need to work on it”? There is no good answer because it’s a stupid and unnecessary and insensitive comment. Weight fluctuations are normal. There’s no need to announce them.

I wish we’d live in a world where all bodies, skin colours, hair or no hair, body textures, ages and (dis)abilities were treated equal. Sadly, we don’t; but as individuals we can do a lot to make every person we encounter feel either better after meeting us, or worse. May we all strive to achieve the former.