I have lost over 70 pounds.
I am on Retatrutide. I strength train under duress. I eat 180 grams of protein a day and I am tired of chewing. I do it anyway. And somewhere on the other side of all that work, my cheekbones showed up. My waist showed up. People are stopping me to say I look stunning.
And I am grateful. And I am also a little angry.
Because where were y’all before?
The bias was always there. I just had receipts I could not cash.
I knew what people thought when they looked at me. I felt it on airplanes when I asked for the seatbelt extender and watched the disgust flash across someone’s face before they could manage it back into neutrality. I felt it on crowded trains when people shifted. I felt it in restaurants when judgmental eyes followed what I ordered. I felt it in the silence where compliments should have been – when I showed up in a fabulous outfit and got nothing, because the outfit registered after the body and the body got filed under a category that does not receive compliments.
That is not sensitivity. That is documented, studied, and persistent bias that most people refuse to name because it is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices left.
45% of women with severe obesity report experiencing weight discrimination. And that number only captures what people formally report – not the daily thousand cuts of shifted seats and pitying looks and compliments that never come.
Weight-based discrimination has not improved in nearly two decades. It is one of the few biases that the world has simply decided is acceptable to keep.
During hiring, recruiters are more likely to categorize job applicants with obesity as less suitable for a job – before they know a single thing about that person’s qualifications. Less capable. Less worthy. Decided before hello.
The stereotypes are consistent and ugly. Lazy. No willpower. Out of control. Unattractive. Less competent. These are not fringe opinions. They are the operating assumptions baked into how overweight people are treated by strangers, colleagues, doctors, and sometimes the people who are supposed to love them.
My friends and family ask me for the secret sauce.
I tell them the truth.
I got tired of being looked at as “other.” Not pretty. Not capable. Not worthy of basic human decency from strangers who decided my body told them everything they needed to know about me. I got tired of the emotional abuse – and let us call it what it is, because that is what it is – from people who felt entitled to respond to my existence with disgust.
I am not losing this weight for anyone else. I am doing it because I want to be healthier. I want to be happier. I want my body to work for me the way I need it to work.
Those are my reasons. They belong to me.
But I will not pretend the way the world treated me when I was heavier did not factor into my awareness of what I was carrying beyond the physical weight. It did. Every. Single. Day.
Now they see my cheekbones.
And I sit with something complicated when the compliments come.
Gratitude, yes. I am working hard. I am proud of what I am building. The comments are kind and I receive them.
But underneath the gratitude is a quiet fire.
You never thought I was pretty before. You never said I looked stunning in that outfit. You never complimented the woman standing in front of you because you could not see past the size of her. And now that the size has changed you want access to the version of her you decided was worth noticing.
I was always a 9. All you saw was cellulite.
That is not my failure. That is yours.
And I am in the process of looking very carefully at who gets to stay close to me as I move forward – because the people who only show up for the after are telling me something important about who they were during the before.
If you are in the before right now, hear me.
You are not less beautiful because someone withheld a compliment. You are not less capable because a recruiter made a snap judgment. You are not less worthy because a stranger on a train shifted their weight away from yours.
Their bias is not your truth.
Do the work if you want to do it – for your health, for your energy, for the life you are trying to build inside a body that works with you instead of against you. Do it for every reason that belongs to you and none of the reasons that belong to other people’s comfort with your body.
And when the compliments start rolling in from people who were silent before, you are allowed to feel that. You are allowed to name it. You are allowed to decide who gets a seat at the table of the life you are building.
Choose accordingly.
Where are you in this – the before, the during, or the after? And what has the bias cost you? Drop it in the comments.
