With the availablility of drugs like Wegovy, alongside procedures such as bariatric surgery, major weight loss is no longer a rare event. But that family member, friend or colleague whose body has changed might not want the response you imagine they do. Nicole Gaviria reports on the deep emotional and cultural ramifications of losing a lot of weight.
When I lost 50 kilograms after having a gastric sleeve, I stood in front of the mirror most mornings in something close to disbelief. The body I had spent years dreaming about was finally there. And yet, within months, I found myself doing something I hadn't anticipated. I was scrutinising. Pinching. Weighing myself daily, sometimes multiple times. Measuring. Standing at angles in the mirror looking for the next thing to fix. The goalpost had simply moved, and I hadn't seen it coming.
I share this not to be discouraging, but because I think it's one of the most important and least talked about realities of significant weight loss, and one that is particularly relevant right now as more and more people lose weight rapidly through GLP-1 medications. The body changes. The relationship with the body doesn't automatically follow.
What I was doing has a clinical name: body checking. It refers to repetitive behaviours we use to assess or monitor our appearance, things like frequent mirror gazing, weighing ourselves daily, pinching or measuring parts of our body, scrutinising photographs, or seeking constant reassurance from others about how we look. These behaviours feel like they should reduce anxiety about our appearance, but they actually fuel it. The more we check, the more we find. The more we find, the more we check.
And here's what I eventually understood: the checking wasn't really about my body at all.
The permission slip
When I lost weight, the world responded to me differently, and I want to be honest about that because we don't say it out loud enough. People listened to me more readily. Opportunities opened up. I got into my dream postgraduate programme. I started putting myself forward for things I had been quietly waiting to do until I was in a smaller body. I started dating again. I let myself be seen.
What became clear to me, over time, was that I had been using my body as a reason to put my life on hold. Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the message that smaller bodies deserve more, that thinness is a prerequisite for a full life. Diet culture and a society deeply steeped in fatphobia had taught me that, and I had believed it so completely that I didn't even notice I was living by it.
This is what's known as internalised fat phobia: the unconscious adoption of society's bias against larger bodies, turned inward. It shows up as self-limitation, shame, waiting. And it is extraordinarily common, because we are all swimming in the same cultural water.
The weight loss didn't heal that belief. It just temporarily made it quieter. And that's why the goalposts moved. Because the belief underneath, that my worth was tied to my appearance, was still entirely intact.
When the shine wears off
Body checking is one of four key behaviours that fuel body dissatisfaction. The others are body avoidance, it can show up as when we steer clear of situations, certain people, types of clothing, or intimacy because of how we feel about our bodies; appearance-altering behaviours, where we try to change or fix how we look, sometimes excessively; and appearance-focused thoughts, the relentless mental commentary about how we look that can crowd out everything else.
I noticed all four in myself after my weight loss, to varying degrees. And what I came to understand, through my own body image recovery and later through training as a counsellor, is that these behaviours are not character flaws or a fault of your own. They are responses to a world that has told us our bodies are problems to be solved. Healing them takes time, self-compassion, and a willingness to question almost everything diet culture has taught us.
Body neutrality has been one of the most useful frameworks in my own life and in my clinical work. It doesn't ask you to love your body or feel grateful for it every day. It simply invites you to step back from the constant evaluation, to let your body exist without being a project, to recognise that your worth is not located in your appearance. For most people, this is a radical shift. It was for me.
Comments, compliments, and those things people say
Even when I had chosen my weight loss journey, the constant comments about my body were (surprisingly) not easy to receive. People who had said nothing to me for years suddenly had a great deal to say. How great I looked. How much better. How I must feel so much happier now. That they were relieved for me.
And each of those comments, however well-intentioned, quietly confirmed the thing I was trying to unlearn: that my smaller body was more worthy of attention, admiration, and care than my larger one had been. It made me grieve for the version of myself who had been there all along, doing valuable things, doing her best to live a full life, and yet still feeling invisible and dismissed.
As a body image therapist, my position on commenting on other people's bodies is clear: please don't, in any direction.
We never know what is behind someone's body change. It might be illness, grief, an eating disorder, medication, or surgery. It might be an enormous amount of struggle, constant vigilance, and mental energy that never really switches off.
For many who have lost weight, there is a quiet and exhausting fear of regain running underneath everything, a white-knuckling of control that takes up far more headspace than anyone on the outside would ever guess. A simple compliment can land on top of all of that in ways the person offering it would never intend.
The kindest thing we can do is take a body-neutral approach with everyone in our lives, and compliment the people we love on things that have nothing to do with their appearance.
If you need to set a boundary
If you are navigating comments about your body, whether that's concern about your size from family, or an unwanted flood of compliments following weight loss, you are allowed to say so. A tool I use in my clinical practice called DEAR MAN can help.
It works like this: Describe the situation calmly, Express how it makes you feel, Assert what you need, Reinforce the positive outcome of that need being met, Maintain your position even if they push back, Appear confident, and Negotiate where you can without compromising your wellbeing.
In practice, it might sound like: "When people comment on my body, even kindly, I find it quite hard. I'd love it if we could just talk about other things." You don't owe anyone an explanation beyond that. Protecting your peace is not rude. It's necessary.
What actually helped
Body neutrality is a practice, not a destination. What moved the needle for me was gradually reducing the body checking behaviours, stepping away from spaces that fuelled comparison, practicing radical self-compassion, and slowly, consistently, building a life that felt meaningful regardless of what my body looked like.
The question I came back to, and still come back to, is this: what would I do today if I had already decided my body was acceptable as it is? Usually, the answer is the thing I've been postponing.
You don't need a smaller body to start living a full life. You never did.
Nicole Gaviria is a registered counsellor and host of the Binge Free Bestie Podcast.
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