Over winter break, I lost four pounds. I wasn’t stressed out at all, so I wasn’t overeating, and I was doing things like snowboarding a lot. And I was like, cool. I’m pretty much back at the weight when I left home to go to college a few months ago.
I come back, and today my roommate asks, “Oh, did you lose weight? You seem to be a lot skinnier around your ribs.”
Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of person analyzes another person’s body so much that she can notice when I lose four pounds. I’m pretty sure someone has to gain or lose at least 10 or 15 pounds before I notice even the slightest change in them. I realize that what my roommate told me was a “compliment”, but comments like that just make me hyperaware of what I look like. It just makes me feel terrible that I live with someone who, every time I am changing clothes, seems to be taking the utmost notice of what I look like.
If this had been the first comment like this, I wouldn’t probably really have cared. But probably a few weeks into school last semester, she told me that I didn’t have a good enough stomach to only work out in a sports bra. Over the next few months she would fluctuate between comments like, “Wow, I’ve noticed your legs are toning up” to “You seem to store all your fat on your stomach.”
Whether it was a “compliment” or a kind of weird back-handed comment, it always made me feel so uncomfortable. Over the semester, she has told me that she has gained weight and lost weight. I see her without a shirt on everyday, and I definitely didn’t notice any change either way. I have never looked at her and analyzed her body, nor have I ever said anything about it other than things like, “You look nice in that dress” or something of the sort. Although she has tried to bring up the subject of her own body with me and prod me to say something, I never have.
There have been periods of two weeks or so, where when I looked in the mirror, seemed to have a pretty constant appearance, as most people do over a two-week period. However, my roommate would notice some “change” in my body. It really started to freak me out. Because it’s not like she saw me without a shirt on once a month or something. It was everyday. It’s hard to notice changes in things if you see something everyday. It made me feel like I couldn’t trust my own judgement as to whether or not I was losing/gaining weight because we don’t have a scale here. It also placed this larger importance on it because another person was constantly commenting.
If I lose weight or gain weight, unless it’s in an unhealthy way in either direction, it is not really anyone’s place to say anything. If I lose weight, unless I am outspokenly happy about it or something, it’s not anyone’s place to “compliment” me about it. To place a stigma on something like weight within a healthy BMI range is drawing a direct correlation between how “good” a person looks as well as their self-worth with how much they weigh.
My body and how it changes is part of how I am. But every pound I gain or lose shouldn’t be a talking point with other people unless I bring it up.
