There is a peculiar phenomenon that seems to be particular to me, and which has happened to me frequently at various times throughout my life, and it is when people insist to me that I have lost weight when I have not. Yes, I have lost significant weight at least twice in my life which may have attracted notice. These, however, are not those times that I am asked.

Here’s a recent example: A work colleague ran into me in the hallway and exclaimed, “You’ve really lost weight!” I had not – in fact I had just been weighed at the doctor’s and my weight had been rock solid for a year, and I was happy about this.

“Nope!” I said.

“No, REALLY! You’ve lost weight,” she insisted, as though somehow she were better acquainted with the recent workings of my body than I was.

“No, I haven’t. I just went to the doctor and…”

“Take the compliment!” she huffed, exasperated. I’m not a fan of this type of compliment, this sort of kindness-that-isn’t, in which the true message is, “You look better now that you are less fat.” Wouldn’t a simple “You look nice today” have sufficed?

It’s happened three more times since then. On the last turn, I said that I had not lost weight, I’m not interested in weight loss, and by the way, I’m fine with my body just the way it is. She was about to say something else on the subject when I blurted, kindly but with finality, “I don’t really want to discuss my body anymore.” Let me tell you, this does the trick of immediately halting any body talk you’re uncomfortable with!

This also happened to me at my thinner weight, with people who only knew me at that thinner weight, which I had maintained for eight years with little change. I used to wonder if people just imagined me fatter, as though they still saw the aura of my former fat self. Now I’m thinking it may have just been their way of trying to give me an awkward compliment.

I’m being generous, of course. A more paranoid translation might be that it was their way of insulting me, a little hint that I need to lose more weight. Which leads me to the whole point of this post: the weight of others is not really good, polite discussion material.

I get that in our fat-phobic society, telling someone they’ve lost weight is supposed to be a compliment. But think of all the possible outcomes of this misguided statement:

1. The person intended to lose weight and did lose weight and is happy about that, but since about 95% of people regain the lost weight and more, they might later feel bad about the fact that you said they looked better thin, and now they aren’t.
2. The person, like me, has not lost weight, and is left to wonder if you think they should lose weight.
3. The person might have an eating disorder and you’ve just reinforced the destructive motives to keep it going.
4. That person might have cancer. No joke, I’ve heard no end of mortifying stories of people who were being treated for cancer, lost a lot of weight unintentionally, and then friends and family told them how great they looked. Even as they battled a life-threatening disease, somehow their weight loss was supposed to make up for all that. That’s just fucked up. We should have learned this lesson with the indelicate question, “Are you pregnant?” but I guess we haven’t.

I’m not for banning any kind of speech – I value freedom of speech, it’s impossible to police, and frankly hearing the dumb-ass things that come out of some people’s mouths lets me know if I should avoid them or not – but let’s agree that there is such a thing as polite conversation. We don’t ask acquaintances how many times a day they poop, or what time of day/night they like to have sex and in what position (and if you do ask these questions of people you barely know and you’re not their therapist, you may want to rethink your boundaries). So how about we put questions about one’s body under the category of impolite conversation? If they don’t bring it up, you don’t bring it up.

And while we’re at it, how about we do that with people who aren’t in hearing distance too? This kind of body talk (“She’s lost/gained weight,” “She looks anorexic,” “Her boobs are enormous”) happens more toward women than men, and it’s high time women’s bodies stopped being a topic of casual catty discussion. It diminishes what we have or could accomplish apart from our bodies. It holds us back and it doesn’t do men any favors either as they get drawn further and further into the bodily perfection madness. No one feels good about this (and if this kind of conversation does make you feel good, please feel free to examine your own insecurities). I’m not proud to admit I used to participate in this kind of talk wholeheartedly, and it only served to make me more insecure about my own shortcomings and what was being said about them when I wasn’t in the room. The bottom line is, let’s stop talking about other people’s bottom lines.

By the way, I’m not talking about eliminating body talk as useful descriptors, e.g. she’s short, fat and has brown hair or he’s tall and thin. In these instances, body talk is neutral and non-judgmental. Similarly, if you want to tell someone they look beautiful or have a great sense of style, go for it – just make sure it’s occasion- and location-appropriate (i.e. “You’re a hot babe” may not fly well in your workplace with someone you’re not good friends with). I guess what I’m saying here is use your head and just ask yourself, “Is this polite?”

Also, if you want to talk about Joe Manganiello’s pecs in Magic Mike XXL, by all means go ahead because that’s what that movie is all about – people who display their bodies for a living and for your comment (It’s not about the dancing? But I really like the dancing!). Joe Blow’s body on the street is not your business to dissect.

So if you see me on the street or in the hallway at work, let’s talk about something else besides my weight. Like Magic Mike! Did you see that dancing?!?

It starts out with a simple declaration: “I really need to eat better. And I could shed a few pounds. It’s for my health.” So you join a weight loss group. You don’t really think of it as a diet because diets don’t work, everybody knows this. You’re just going to eat healthier and lose weight.

You measure and weigh out portions with the fancy food scale you bought and the measuring spoons that tell you exactly what one portion of everything is. At first this is easy and kind of fun, like a game. You’re a little bit hungry, but it tells you that your new diet eating plan is working, or at least that’s what someone in your weight loss group told you. You do frequently think about cookies and cupcakes, a lot more than you used to, but you’re not going to have any because this is for your health. Also, they don’t fit into your eating plan.

You love walking, so that becomes your main source of exercise. You walk almost every day and you love it.

You lose a few pounds pretty quickly and you think that all the weighing and measuring and avoiding of butter was worth it. People constantly tell you how great you look now that you’ve lost weight. That feels pretty good! Luckily, you barely hear the insult in the compliment.

After a few weeks, you have your first trip out to a restaurant with friends. You’ve been avoiding this for a while but you miss your friends and eating out. You scan the menu for something you can eat without breaking your diet new way of eating, but there is nothing. You heard about how restaurants will prepare food to your specifications if you ask. “Can I have a plain, skinless grilled chicken breast and steamed vegetables without any butter or oil?” The meal arrives and you are elated at how easy it was to ask and get what you wanted requested. Then you eye your friends’ meals and your mouth starts to water a little bit. However, you are also proud of how good you are being, and you revel in a mild sense of moral superiority at your eating austerity. You don’t even have a bite of the dessert your friends split. It looks delicious.

Soon you have lost several pounds. Somewhere along the way you decide on a number. What you have lost is great but you have not yet reached the number. You have reliably lost a little bit each week with your diet sensible eating that you think getting to the number will be easy. But then a funny thing happens. The number on the scale stops going down. For weeks. “You’re just on a plateau,” says the kindly weight loss counselor. “It happens to everyone. Just keep at it.”

Clearly things must change. You cut your portions down a bit more. Walking for exercise, you decide, is just not cutting it, so you join a gym and start moving very fast on cardio machines. You don’t like being inside instead of outside and you dread the sweaty, exhaustive pace, but hey, this is for your health.

A few weeks after you’ve made these restrictions changes, the scale breaks free and drops a pound. “Congratulations!” the lady says as she takes your weekly payment.

Even more diet changes: you switch to a very high fiber cereal that tastes like gravel and gives you painful gas cramps every afternoon. You eat massive quantities of low fat microwave popcorn (the kind you heard gives people who produce it “popcorn lung”) throughout the day to keep the now-constant gnawing hunger at bay. You make large quantities of steamed vegetables and low-fat, low-carb vegetable soup that you don’t want to eat after it’s made – but you do. Even with all those vegetables to fill you up, you are still hungry before you go to bed. You suck on a sugar free candy to fool the pangs away.

You lose a few more pounds but the scale stalls again. You have stopped eating out altogether – you can’t stand looking at others’ meals, can’t deal with the wonderful aromas of the foods you are afraid to eat. You’ve bought new clothes for your slimmer body but have nowhere to wear them because social outings usually involve food or drink, and right now you can’t have too much of either of those. It’s just not worth messing up all that work you’ve done on your weight health.

One day, you get tired of eating the same 10 safe foods and go out with friends. “What the hell!” you think, and order steak and mashed potatoes and sautéed vegetables. You think you deserve this because you’ve been good, but the fact is that you cannot stop yourself from eating the entire plate, well past your point of fullness. Even though your stomach hurts, you order dessert and eat it all yourself. You are not sure what came over you to make you eat that much.

You feel ashamed of your binge and determine to get back on the wagon. You do at first, but that meal opened the flood gates. You think of food 24 hours a day. You simultaneously lust for and fear your next meal. You double down on your exercise and diet (yes, yes, it’s a diet, you know it and can no longer deny this to yourself), but the number on the scale starts to move up a little anyway.

You hate everything you are doing to maintain this weight loss. You hate the gym and feeling like you have to go. You are so bored of your monotonous diet and also the lack of taste, and you are so so hungry. You dream of cheesecake one night and wake up in despair. You are not sure this is for your health anymore.

You keep gaining weight, even though you never really stopped dieting and exercising. So you start eating everything and anything you want. You know this is worse than how you ate before you dieted but you need to fill yourself, fill up the hollow feeling. You quit exercising, including walking, you haven’t done that in forever anyway and all the joy has gone out of it for you. Nobody compliments you on your weight gain.

When all is said and done, you have gained back all your weight plus a few more pounds. You don’t know that this is your body’s way of saving your life from another famine like the one it thinks you just went through. You also don’t know, yet, that you will go through this many more times, trying a different diet (Zone, Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, Volumetrics, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem) each time, all with the same results. And in the end you’ll have gained an extra 40 (or 50, or 60, or 100) pounds and you will think it is all your fault.

Someday you will find out that there is another way. It’s a way to learn how to be healthy but without worrying about your weight. A way to live without fighting your body. You will find that revolutionary. It will be called Health at Every Size®.Will you choose it?

*This is a composite of many different diet experiences…including mine.

This little gem showed up in my inbox this weekend: Cost-Effective Weight Loss Programs Help Shed Pounds And Keep Them Off.

The article reports on a study that examined a low-cost weight loss program, Taking Pounds Off Sensibly (TOPS), following 75,000 participants for seven years. The program cost about $92 a year.

Within their first year at TOPS, 50% of participants reached clinically significant weight loss. “Clinically significant weight loss” is defined as a mere 5% loss of body weight. It’s significant because it’s been found that even just a 5% weight loss results in vast improvements in “weight-related” conditions. We’ll talk more about this later. After seven years, 62% of those who lost weight maintained that weight loss. The cost of attending TOPS for seven years was roughly $644.

Well stop the presses, we’ve finally found a cure for obesity! It’s the miracle weight loss cure we’ve all been waiting for! Or so the title of the article would have us believe.

But let’s break it down, shall we? Of 75,000 people, 37,500 (50%) of them were able to lose 5% of their body weight. For a 200 pound person, that equates to 10 pounds, 15 pounds for a 300 pound person, etc. After seven years, 23,250 (62% of 37,500) managed to keep off that 5%. That amounts to 31% of total participants. So roughly one third of these folks were able to lose 10 to 15 pounds (slightly more for people who weighed more than 300 lb) for the mere price of $644. Having done my time in the weight loss industry – both as a customer and an employee – I know that most people don’t join these kinds of groups to lose just 5% of their starting body weight.

You know, I can give myself food poisoning and lose 10 pounds for free. I’ve done it before (by accident, obviously). I might not keep that weight off, but at least I’ll keep $644 in my pocket.

Meanwhile, 69% of the participants either could not lose any weight at all or regained the weight they lost. My guess is that they also spent $92 a year to find that out. Great. Did they get their money back, or were they just blamed for their lack of willpower? All 51,750 of them.

Now let’s talk about this clinically significant weight loss. The health authorities (the CDC, the NHLBI) have lightened up on the previously heralded 10% weight loss (likely having realized that even that is unattainable long term for most people) and now encourage a mere 5% weight loss. I won’t argue that some studies back this up – they do. But a 10 or 15 or even 20 pound weight loss for a 200, 300 or 400 pound person still leaves them fat. If the conditions that are “weight-related” are improved but the person remains fat, what does that say? It says that it might not be the weight loss at all that caused the improvements.

What do people who try to lose weight start out doing? They eat better and exercise. Gee, could it be the behavior changes and not the weight loss that caused the health improvements? We’ve already seen numerous studies that show that healthy behaviors make healthy people regardless of weight. Yet weight loss, a possible by-product of behavior changes, is touted as the supposed cure. Which would be great except it doesn’t seem to work for most people.

We’re smarter than this. This study does nothing but support the idea that we can’t turn fat people into thin ones, which is what people who buy into weight loss are being sold. Who plans to pay $644 to stay almost the same weight when you can do that for free? You don’t need to pay that much to make changes in your eating and exercise habits and become healthier (but not necessarily thinner), I promise you. You probably don’t need to pay anything at all.

It’s just a shame that the remaining 69% of the participants weren’t studied for the improvements they might have made in their health despite a lack of weight loss. Although my guess is that if they didn’t lose weight, they probably got discouraged and gave up any positive changes much quicker than those who did lose weight. And that, my friends, is the problem with a health intervention that focuses on weight loss.

Thanks but no thanks. A failure rate that high won’t see me giving away that kind of money. How about you?