The Weird Attention You Get After Losing Weight

A Smaller Body, A Different World

Me age nine: skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado circa spring-break 2012

Everyone has their own unique personal struggles. For me, as long as I can remember, it has been my weight.

For most of my childhood, I was the chubby kid. The “healthy one.” The girl who was always a little bit bigger than everyone else. It wasn’t necessarily something I thought about every single day, but it was always in the background. A quiet awareness that my body looked different from some of the girls around me.

The funny thing is that as a kid, I was never particularly inactive.

I skied. I ice skated. I played soccer. I ran cross country. I did track. I tried swimming, although I have to admit, I still can’t swim because the water absolutely terrifies me. I rode my bike. I did karate and even made it all the way to my brown belt. I did gymnastics. I went to dance and ballet. A true Coloradan.

If I am being transparent, I didn’t love every one of these activities. Some I quit, some I tried once and never looked back, and some I genuinely enjoyed. But I was always doing something.

Through peer pressure from my parents (just kidding, of course),movement was always a part of my childhood.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I started to absorb the idea that my body was something that needed to be fixed. By the time I was eleven, I was told to start working out to lose weight. Eleven. Looking back now, that feels incredibly young and unjustifiable.

I wasn’t working out because I had discovered a profound love for fitness. Quite the opposite, actually. It wasn’t training for a sport or a competition. Before I could even understand what was happening, I was trying to make my body smaller than it had always been.

And that became a recurring theme throughout my adolescent life. By the time I reached high school, I started to understand that my height wasn’t going to go past 5’2, and that I needed to get my weight under control.

At sixteen, I started experimenting with different diet trends, such as Keto and Paleo. Whatever the internet was telling me was the newest and most effective way to lose weight, I tried. Halfway through high school, I remember doing it, but it didn’t work.

I shouldn’t have been doing any of this at sixteen.

Shortly after, amidst the global pandemic, I started working with a trainer to help me keep the weight off, but eventually, I started to gain it back. In a way, for as long as I can remember, I have been trying to lose weight.

Because when you believe that your body is something that needs to be fixed, it is surprisingly easy to become obsessed with fixing it. For a good portion of my life, losing weight has always been something I have been excessively trying to do.

Sometimes it worked successfully. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it worked for a few months. Sometimes it worked for a few weeks. There was always another diet, another workout routine, another promise that this time would be different.

And now, I have lost the weight. Again.

Except this time, something feels different.

Every time I walk into a room lately, my weight has somehow become part of a bigger conversation. People notice.

I have been told that I look different, asked what I have been doing, and often hear comments about how much weight I have lost. People tell me that “I look so good.” Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes it is direct. But suddenly, my body seems to enter the room before I do.

And I have found myself quite conflicted by this new, newfound attention.

Now, don’t get me wrong. A part of me has deeply appreciated these comments. I have spent years trying to lose weight, so hearing that people notice the change is validating in a way. After years of feeling like the “chubby kid,” there is something satisfying about finally hearing people say that I look good.

But recently, a part of me has started to think, Why now?

Why has my body become worthy of conversation? Was this version of me getting a reaction that the previous version didn’t?

The strangest thing about all of this is that I haven’t fundamentally changed. I am still the same person who has spent years trying to figure out her relationship with her body. I am still the same person who spent her whole childhood playing sports. The most obvious difference now is that I am smaller.

And somehow, that seems to change the way people see me. That realization has been difficult to reconcile.

One of the most obvious questions I get now is, So, what did you do? How did you lose the weight?

And honestly, I never quite know how to answer.

It isn’t because I’m ashamed of how I lost the weight, or because I think there is anything inherently wrong with talking about it. I just don’t want to give someone the impression that what is working for me will, would work for them.

Everyone’s body is different. Our circumstances, relationships with food, exercise, and health are all different. I would never want someone to replicate my journey and feel like they somehow failed because their body didn’t respond the same way.

There is already so much pressure to find the answer: the diet, the workout, the medication, the routine, the secret that supposedly changed everything.

But I don’t think there is one universal answer.

My journey is my journey. Someone else’s will look completely different.

We are so quick to turn someone’s transformation into a formula, as though a person’s body is a problem that can be solved if you follow the right instructions.

But bodies aren’t formulas, and someone’s transformation should never become a prescription for someone else.