If your friend is trying to shed some weight and get their summer body ready for the beach, you may want to watch what you say, as experts say that comments once seen as compliments could instead cause unintended negative consequences.
Any body at the beach is a beach body.
Telling someone who has recently lost weight that they look good or that you wish you could do what they have done may not do what you intend it to, according to Tamara Pryor and Joann Hendelman.
Pryor, a senior fellow and director of research at ED Care in Denver, and Hendelman, the clinical director of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, shared with CNN how these comments could do more harm than good.
"We do tend to operate (as if) we can somehow look at people and, based on body size, determine whether they're healthy," Pryor said.
Working with people with eating disorders and body image issues, Pryor shared that compliments about someone's appearance can promote the wrong idea and force people to become overly concerned about their appearance instead of being healthy.
Pryor shared that you can never tell when someone is actually healthy and that often, when you see someone who is slim, it is assumed.
"We have people in large bodies that are in a state of malnourishment as well as people in extremely low size that are malnourished, and people that are standard size but still very severely compromised by an eating disorder," Pryor said. "People can't look at them and tell that."
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Beyond assuming what healthy is, Hendelman shared how giving compliments can be harmful, especially when people start to expect them.
"If you don't get that compliment, then it becomes, 'There's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough,'" Hendelman said.
When it comes to what not to say and what to say, Pryor and Hendelman say that bringing attention to appearance and body size isn't good because you don't know what people are going through.
"I have known and worked with people who had cancer or another reason why their bodies were small," Hendelman said. "For them, compliments are very uncomfortable because they know they have this horrible illness, and yet people are complimenting them on this weight loss that they would give everything not to have."
Pryor says that finding ways to engage in conversation on things other than how someone looks is essential. Hendelman says it's a "disservice" to keep the focus on how your friends look and their body size. Instead, we should be focused on truly being healthy and not "looking" healthy.
"Think about what being healthy means and what your body can do for you – such as taking in the nutrients you need or gaining strength," Hendelman said.
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