Fat You and Your Fat Friends

Doesn’t that sound like a book title? A book title for an incredibly mean book?

This post is all about fat-relationships and how they change after weight loss. Now a fat friend doesn’t have to be overweight, just someone who shares the same bad eating habits as you, or as you did before changing your lifestyle, and when you change your eating habits they try to bring you down.

A fat friend can be your family member, your significant other, you can have a whole group of friends who I would consider fat friends, or maybe you just have the one fat friend.

There is a show on TLC called ‘My 600 lbs Life’ a 4-part show that follows cases of extreme stomach stapling patients throughout 7 years of their lives.

I have not seen a single episode where the 600 lbs persons family was thin. Ever.

In this show I have watched the fat family of the patients make fun of them, be mean to them, eat food in front of them and tempt them. Not accepting to make the change in their own lifestyles and instead trying to bring down the person. A little side note, none of the 600 lbs patients kept the weight off throughout the 7 years.

Prawn was a fat friend of mine. Throughout our weight loss journey we had to change our relationship from fat friends who ate out at restaurants all the time, and shared most of their interactions over food, to people who actually did other things together, ate healthy together and cooked their meals at home. It’s a very difficult concept to explain, but if Prawn hadn’t changed his eating habits to match mine, I would have lost him as a friend.

When you change from a fellow fat friend to someone who eats healthily and makes good choices, your fat friends seem to disappear or try to bring you down back to their level. When you are eating McDonalds every day, you like having friends who don’t judge you when you order your 2 double cheeseburgers dressed like bigmacs. You want fat friends who support your decision and sit in front of you with their burgers and fries and pig out just like you.

When you step away from fat friend status what happens? Now all of a sudden you are sitting in front of them with the salad you brought from home while they chow down on the food they feel guilty for, and especially guilty because you are making good choices. Sometimes they feel like you are rubbing your health in their faces, your results, your weight loss, and you lose them as friends.

Can your friendship last? That’s what separates a fat friend from an actual friend. I have definitely lost fat friends throughout this journey. People who I thought were actual friends, but in reality split after I achieved success with my diet and stopped making the same bad eating choices as them.

I was picked on by my fat friends before I stopped communicating with them. Picked on and made fun of. I was bullied by some of them, but that’s for another post.

Dieting is so difficult on it’s own, who needs someone bringing them down? You need to surround yourself with positive people who motivate you to better yourself, not jealous people who try to bring you down.

Just because someone makes bad eating choices doesn’t make them a fat friend, not at all.

So how can you spot a fat friend? Someone is a fat friend if they:

1. Make you feel badly or guilty for making good food choices,
2. Don’t accept whatever food decision you are doing and try to pressure you into eating bad or not allowed foods,
3. Repeatedly tell you the diet wont work or that you will gain all the weight back when it’s over, even after you have told them to stop,
4. Make you feel negatively about your body or about your new healthy habits.

If someone tries to pressure you continuously or makes you feel sad or guilty, you should probably stop communication with them. Jealous of your success, these fat friends will keep pushing and pressuring and maybe someday they will catch you on a bad day, you will cave and cheat and then how will you feel?

Terrible.

Good luck, and keep on losing! I’m always so proud of you guys for trucking on and losing the weight, as slow and painful as it might seem. You rock.

Surround yourself with positive people, make new, healthier friends.

xoxo