Why do we congratulate weight loss before we know why it happened?

Imagine five women, each noticeably lighter than when you last saw them.

The first has spent a year changing how she eats and moves, and she is quietly proud of it. The second has spent six months sitting beside a hospital bed, forgetting meals because there was never a right moment to eat. The third has not been hungry since the winter, and has not told anyone that getting out of bed has become the hardest thing she does each day. The fourth has a diagnosis she is not ready to share. The fifth has been counting, restricting and weighing herself several times a day, and the number that frightens everyone else is, to her, not yet low enough.

From the outside, they look the same. And to each of them, sooner or later, someone will say: you’ve lost weight — you look amazing.

A compliment with a blind spot

I understand why we do it. Weight loss has been sold to women for generations as unambiguously good news, the one change to a body that everyone is expected to celebrate. The remark is a reflex, and it is almost always meant kindly.

But it makes a guess about what has happened, and it says the guess out loud. It assumes the loss was chosen, that it was healthy, and that the person is pleased. Often all three are true. Often they aren’t, and there is no way to tell by looking.

What weight loss can mean

Grief can do it, and it is easily overlooked. So can depression: the US National Institute of Mental Health lists changes in appetite and unplanned weight changes among its recognised signs. So can stress, the end of a relationship, a new medication, or a gruelling few months of caring for someone else. And now that prescription weight-loss medicines are widely used, the compliment increasingly lands on someone who may have no wish to discuss her medical treatment over a glass of wine.

Weight loss is also something doctors take seriously as a possible symptom. In older adults, for example, losing five per cent or more of body weight over six to twelve months without trying is treated as clinically significant and worth investigating; the causes range from digestive illness and mental health conditions to cancer. The woman you are complimenting may be halfway through tests she has told no one about.

And weight loss can be the most visible sign of an eating disorder — including in people whose bodies were larger to begin with. The Academy for Eating Disorders is clear that eating disorders affect people of all body shapes and weights, and that you cannot tell who has one by looking. In a study of adolescents treated at a specialist eating disorder programme, most of those with atypical anorexia — which involves the restriction and weight loss of anorexia, without the person becoming underweight — had previously been overweight or obese. Many were physically unwell, and their psychological distress was as severe as that of patients with anorexia who were underweight.

Those are the people for whom “you look amazing” is most dangerous. To someone who is restricting, praise for the result can sound like encouragement to keep going. And because their bodies still look unremarkable, or even “healthier” to a casual observer, they are exactly the people least likely to hear anything else.

What the room hears

The compliment does not only land on its target. Everyone within earshot learns something too: that the change most worth noticing about a woman is that there is less of her.

The friend who hasn’t lost weight hears it. The teenage daughter at the table hears it. The woman who has gained weight during a hard year and is dreading being seen hears it most of all. A single remark, repeated across a lifetime of kitchens and offices and family weddings, is how an entire culture teaches itself what to admire.

What to say instead

This does not require elaborate rules. It requires taking your eyes off the body and putting them on the person.

• “It’s so good to see you.” Warm, true, and it makes no assumptions.
• “How have you been?” Then actually wait for the answer. If something has been going on, this is the question that gives her room to say so.
• “You seem really happy.” Only if she does, and only about her, not her shape.

If she brings up her weight herself — because she has been working on something and wants to share it — then follow her lead and respond to what she tells you. Celebrate the effort, the energy, the thing she can now do, in the terms she chooses. That is a very different act from announcing a verdict on her body before she has said a word.

And if you notice someone losing weight in a way that worries you, the kind response is neither a compliment nor an interrogation. Try a private, gentle “I’ve missed you — how are things, really?”, and have the patience to hear whatever comes back.

The reflex is learnable, and so is its opposite

Most of us will get this wrong at some point; the habit is decades deep. But it is worth unlearning, and not only for the sake of the woman in front of you. The same instinct that praises a friend for shrinking is the one that assumes a larger woman must be neglecting herself. Both mistake a body’s size for a report on a life.

Go back to the five women. Only one of them wanted to be congratulated, and she would have been just as pleased to be asked how she was. The others needed someone to notice them, not their weight. The kindest thing you can say to any of them is the thing that works for all five.

Sources

• National Institute of Mental Health. Depression.
• Gaddey HL, Holder KK. Unintentional Weight Loss in Older Adults. American Family Physician, 2021.
• Academy for Eating Disorders. Nine Truths About Eating Disorders.
• Sawyer SM, Whitelaw M, Le Grange D, et al. Physical and Psychological Morbidity in Adolescents With Atypical Anorexia Nervosa. Pediatrics, 2016.