Stop complimenting women on their weight loss
And fight the promotion of self-objectification
Like many other girls, I grew up not liking my body. Starting at a very young age, I was told that I should lose weight. That meant I couldn’t eat what every other kid was eating at school and that all the adults kept track of my size.
Maybe because of that, I remember clearly the first time I was put on a “proper” diet. I was eight and was told to stop eating bread, drinking milk, enjoying butter, or even raw fruit.
A couple of weeks in, I eavesdrop on a conversation between my skating coach and my mother. She was telling her that I looked great and that the diet was working.
From that moment on, I weighed myself pretty much every day. If I’d put on a couple of kilos, I would work out like a crazy person and only be satisfied when people started noticing it.
Listening to people telling you that “you look amazing”, or that “you lost weight so fast”, or even that “you are such an inspiration to me” is like a drug. It means people are validating the fact that you look smaller, restrict your food intake, make yourself sick because of that cookie.
However, I always put back on all the weight that I’ve lost. So I would go back on the cycle of binging and purging, to make sure that I’d “look amazing” again.
After more than a decade of doing this, I decided to stop. To stop stepping on the scale ten times a day, counting calories, being afraid of simple carbs, and of drinking beer.
That got me thinking about what incidents anchored my bad relationship with food. And the most evident ones— apart from the media — were, definitely, the comments.
I thought of sharing my experience and that evidence on the spot, but I could’ve been wrong. I could be the only one that had a negative behavior when presented with a positive comment.
So I decided to talk to specialists and to read studies. Turns out, I am not the only one.
My first step was to call a therapist.
I googled “therapists specialized in eating disorders” and I came across Dr. Hugo Zagalo. His website provided his cellphone number so I reached out, told him I wanted to talk about this, but I needed some evidence first.
He told me, right away, that this wasn’t his main focus, but that he found my premise interesting and was keen on helping me.
A couple of hours later, he sent me a study that verified my theory.
It was a paper by Sylvia Herbozo that talked about “the potential downsides of appearance-related commentary in ethnically diverse women”.
These are its main conclusions:
1.) Appearance-related commentary is a risk factor for eating disorders
When you compliment someone on their figure, it might trigger that person to want to look like that all of the time.
That being said, the one in question might start restricting their food ingestion or increasing the amount of exercise they practice.
Those habits might become an obsession or even an eating disorder.
2.) Positive commentary about one’s appearance may promote societal standards;
Meaning: imagine you compliment the figure of a model. By doing that, the people near you are prone to think that they should look like that.
3.) When women are complimented on their weight, they might internalize a “thin-ideal”;
If you applaud a woman for being thin, she might internalize the idea that she has to stay thin.
After all, her figure got her some positive attention.
4.) Positive comments impact self-objectification;
This also applies to higher body surveillance and it is common amongst younger women.
Takeaways
The diet culture has engraved in us that looking thin is a good thing, a sign of being desirable and “healthy”.
Because of that, when you are complimenting a person on their weight loss, you probably think that you are doing the right thing.
Of course, this kind of commentary might be encouraging for women that are trying to improve their health and adopt a more active lifestyle.
However — and ironically — ‘positive’ comments can do more harm than good.
