It being the New Year and all, I want to be supportive of friends in their goals, but I also find dieting and scale-watching extremely problematic. Is it harmful to my friends to praise them when they talk about weight loss success? Is it worse to talk about my views on dieting?

Asked by

voytkostudios

This is one of those Your Mileage May Vary Hugely things, really.

Personally, as a matter of policy, I ask my friends not to talk about weight loss attempts around me. I find it kind of triggering (not to an ED, but to my anxiety disorder), and I tell them so. They don’t talk about weight loss attempts around me, I won’t talk about how unhealthy and/or useless I think weight loss attempts are around them. If they forget, I will gently remind them. If they just keep on “forgetting,” I will either physically walk away when they start, or start talking about the studies that show that intentional weight loss doesn’t work. That generally gets the point across pretty fast.

I feel no need at all to be supportive of anyone’s weight loss efforts, although I’ll gladly throw in a “Good for you!” for someone who’s managed to go to the gym twice this week or whatever exercise goal. Not every single thing my friends do requires my personal encouragement. It’s entirely possible to demonstrate to people that you love and support them without actually having to be a cheerleader for every single thing they do.

Everybody has to find their own balance with this. I don’t go clothes shopping with friends anymore, at least not in the classic movie montage sense, but when I did, I would happily go out with a friend who’d gone down a size and wanted to celebrate with a couple of new outfits, and be happy that they were happy – again, as long as they left the off-limit topics off-limits. Somebody else might be ok with hearing occasional updates on progress as long as they didn’t have to hear about it at length every day. Find your own comfort levels.

Look, in college, I had a friend who wanted to go all Carlos Castaneda, only with acid instead of peyote, and no teacher or any clear idea of what he was doing. And I thought he was gonna wreck himself this way. (I do think that there are many worthy things that can be accomplished through use of psychedelics, but I thought he was doing it badly.) And we had to find a balance so we could talk about his insights without either him extolling the virtues of lsd to me or me scolding him for doing it all wrong. (Which we occasionally managed, but not often.) But finding that balance was instructive.

Set boundaries, both for yourself and with your friends. Decide what talk you are willing to listen to and what you are not, what behaviors you are willing to praise and what you are not. Communicate to your friends the boundaries that you need there to be between you on this topic. Then hang on to them hard.

What are you comfortable verbally supporting? Only be supportive of that. What are you comfortable hearing about? Don’t let them talk about things you aren’t comfortable with in front of or to you.

Expect pushback. Your friends are accustomed to all of this being fair game for discussion anywhere, anytime, with anyone. You don’t have to make them understand why certain things might be off-limits with you, just that they are. That is, if you decide they are.

But I can’t tell you what is and isn’t ok for you. You have to figure that bit out on your own. Are you comfortable supporting weight loss attempts? Are you comfortable being around weight loss talk? Are you comfortable not answering weight loss talk with talk about how it doesn’t work and can be damaging? Work that out for yourself, I’m afraid.

-MG