u/quellesaveurorawnge

A friend, and someone I genuinely like and respect because she is honest and straight-forward, posted today on Facebook about feeling so good about donating her size 24 clothes because she has been working so hard since January at eating better and working out more and lost weight. She has been trying to eat well, and work out for years, but a few months ago, she told me privately that she started taking a GLP-1. That's why she lost weight. I know the world is not kind toward fat people and judges us, but nobody forced her to make this post. Public pronouncements about your body are unneeded, and but even more so, then why lie, even if by omission? I am disappointed in that friend.

I just came back from a 10-day organized group tour of Morocco, which was absolutely wonderful. I went with my mom and we were placed in a group with 6 other people. I'm in my late 40s, but was the youngest one by more than a decade. The rest of the group was in their 60s or 70s. The one thing that stuck in my craw the whole time was the amount of diet talk/body obsession going on, both from women and men. It felt like most mealtimes, obsession with food/losing weight/being "healthy" came back around. All of these people were not heavy in the least (I was definitely the fattest there)! None of them seemed to have any inkling that their diet talk is unhealthy; so much of it felt like talk of socially acceptable disordered eating. They would also tell stories of people they know doing all sorts of diets and which ones worked. On one of the last days, one of the women in the group bought "detox tea" while we were in a souk after the seller lauded its virtues to help you lose weight. When I pointed out to my mom how terrible these laxative teas are for one's health and that so many Insta influencers have been trying to hawk this stuff for a long time, she seemed surprised.

Anyway, I didn't engage in any of this talk, and I would constantly try to change the subject to something more interesting. But boy, it kept coming back as a topic of discussion. In retrospect, I wonder if I should have pushed back more, but I didn't feel like I could say anything that wouldn't get me shunned. Also, I concluded that people often want to think older people are more secure in themselves, but they definitely are not.