“You look so much better!”
“Don’t you feel healthier!”
Six months ago, I weighed nearly seventy pounds more than I do today. Very often, when I get together with folks I haven’t seen in a while, I hear a version of those two quotes.
There is a concept I’ve wondered about and now find is known as “reverse body shaming.” As much as I enjoy the compliments, there has also been a cringe inside because the implication is that the person I was six months ago was unhealthy, ugly, unacceptable in our Barbie and Ken world that worships the “thinner is better” mythology.
In the last few years, I finally came to an acceptance of my body size and shape, realizing that it was, in fact, a gift of DNA and nothing that deserved to be shamed by myself or others. I indeed resemble my mother and my grandfather’s bodies. What a lovely remembrance of two incredible human beings.
Even now, with the wonders of modern medicine having gifted me a slimmer body, I accept that I will never have the ripped, Hollywood star body that seems to be the cultural ideal. And I frankly love that, and love who and what I am.
Consider this. Perhaps a person’s weight does not reflect their health. It has little or nothing to do with their self-worth or value as a human.
And consider what it means when you “compliment” them. You reinforce one of those cultural expectations that I hope we are all working to let go of.
In a reply to an Instagram post, a favorite author, Sophie Strand, says it very well. “We have a bias towards judging ourselves and others on intelligence without compassionately considering the full arc of a person’s lived experience”.
Her insight can apply just as much to appearance-based judgments—particularly those woven into well-intentioned compliments like the ones noted above. We risk reducing a person’s multifaceted and unknown to us life experience to a superficial change.
And that can cause harm.
What if instead of reverse shaming, we acted with kindness, compassion, and love, and spoke to the ways we have always loved our beloveds just as they are?
There is more than enough shaming in this culture. This is just one way we can choose to lift each other up. May it be so.
Thank you.