I was in class 8 when my uncle casually said to me, “You need to start losing weight. Maybe start eating less.” At the time, I was gaining weight, yes, but not nearly enough to be called obese. Still, comments like these had already started becoming a part of everyday conversations around me.
On another occasion, my aunt told me, “I think you don’t have control over your portions. That’s why you don’t lose weight.” None of these uncles and aunts I’m talking about were athletes with exceptionally low body fat or particularly active lifestyles. They were simply people who believed that if a girl gained weight, the first question would be: Who would marry her?
And then there was the time my biology teacher, in class 12, suddenly told me in front of the entire class, “You’re too big. Consider shedding some weight.” It came out of nowhere.
No, I wasn’t proud of the weight I was gaining. But I genuinely had no idea what I was doing wrong.
When Weight Loss Comments Start Shaping Your Body Image
I was one of those people who constantly tried to control portions, eat less, avoid oily food, and do whatever I thought might help me not gain even a single pound more. At some point, I even started working out and joined a gym. For a couple of days, I survived almost entirely on salad—because someone had once told me that actors only eat salad.
In case you’re wondering about my weight, I was around 67 kg on a 5’2” frame. Was it too much? Maybe, yes. But more than anything else, it slowly began to chip away at my confidence.
I remember standing in a trial room once, staring at the mirror while my mom passed clothes to me through the curtain. “Try the next size,” I said before even attempting the one she had picked. I had already convinced myself it wouldn’t fit. Over time, shopping stopped feeling exciting and started feeling stressful. I was always afraid that nothing good would fit me, that I would walk out of the store with the biggest size available, no, not because I liked it, but because it was the only thing that worked.
Whenever my mom went clothes shopping for me, I would often ask her to buy the biggest size available, just to make sure it fit. This was also a time before unlimited internet, before reels and social media constantly showed us what people across the world looked like. I didn’t have that broader perspective. I didn’t know where I really stood in the bigger picture.
All I knew was that the people around me seemed to think I was too big, too broad. So I tried everything I thought would help: eating less, skipping foods, exercising without really understanding what my body needed. But none of it answered the one question that kept bothering me: If I was trying so hard, why wasn’t it working?
And the truth is, no one really taught me how to understand food or my body. They only taught me how to feel guilty about both. It would take me years, and a lot of learning through food, travel, and observation, to realise that the answer had very little to do with willpower, and a lot more to do with understanding how we eat, what we eat, and why.
And that realisation changed everything.