my friend and i have been weight loss accountability buddies for the past year and a half. We cheer each other on and encourage healthy habits, go grocery shopping together etc. It was honestly a great system and part of what made it great is that we both started pretty body neutral. we just wanted each other to move more, drink more water, make healthier diet choices etc. It wasn't really focused on how we looked because we very actively aimed for a mindset about being generally content with our existing aesthetics/bodies.
But over the past year we both saw changes in our bodies and I'm getting more and more worried about how this is affecting my friend's rhetoric. The way she's talking about her body, food and self image has taken a 180-turn.
She's at the lowest weight she's ever been as an adult and is now talking a lot about clothing sizes (which for women are kind of notoriously inconsistent among brands) and scale numbers as benchmarks. She complains regularly that she's still "not skinny yet" and needs to put in more effort to be a size 2 or a size 4. She says that she can finally start dating in "a hotter bracket" now that she's better looking, and go to the beach without feeling insecure. This is very different from the person I knew before, who didn't really see aesthetics as that important in dating or beachgoing, but maybe that's how she always felt??
And the way she treats food now is like she's in a constant competition to eat less and less. We split a bowl of pasta for lunch last week and she had I kid you not 3 bowtie noodles before begging off. She talks incessantly about how easily she feels full now due to her meds and how little she eats. She jokes about being malnourished but doesn't want to address it until she's at her goal weight/look.
She says she doesn't have an eating disorder because she's checking in regularly with a doctor that prescribed her meds, but a lot of this sound eerily like what my eating disorder support group said at our worst and I don't know how to address this. It's frankly really triggering for me and I find myself dodging her messages. Maybe I can't relate because my own weight fluctuates quite a bit and I haven't really had the linear experience she does??
(Also, this is not about GLPs or shaming their users or anything like that. I'm more interested in discussing how pretty extreme weight loss or body changes alters self-talk or image issues.)
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