A friend will try to help you if you’re having issues, whether you like it or not, and some of them might not stop even if you explicitly tell them to. That might get annoying and when asking nicely doesn’t work, there are other ways to handle it.
This woman chose gaslighting her friend into thinking that she is happy with her new weight after giving birth despite losing it, because she was irritated by the friend’s efforts to make her eat healthy and exercise more.
More info: Reddit
Someone's weight is a touchy subject and when this woman gets comments about it from her friend, she decides to play a little game
Image credits: Pressmaster (not the actual photo)
She lies about not having lost weight and being happy with her new body, despite losing 50 pounds, because her friend never noticed it
The author of the story gained 50 pounds during her pregnancy and noticed how her friend's behavior changed
Image credits: rthanuthattaphong (not the actual photo)
She started talking about diet and exercise as well as not giving the new mom anything that was in high calories
Image credits: Farknot (not the actual photo)
Despite being asked to stop talking about it, the friend kept going, not noticing that her friend was already doing all that and losing weight
Image credits: u/No_Carob2670
The friend finally learnt that the new mom lost all of her excess weight only when they met with a mutual friend, which made her upset
The story took place a while ago after the Original Poster (OP) gave birth. During the pregnancy, she gained 50 pounds (22 kilograms) and her friend M was very concerned about it. The friend was childless by choice and didn’t have experience with a changing body when you are carrying a child inside you.
However, she was careful not to hurt the OP, but brought up diet and exercise regularly, which made the new mom annoyed. Bored Panda got in touch with the Redditor and she told us that her friend never directly mentioned weight and she wouldn't discuss it with her either.
She said, "I told her I was healthy and making efforts to be even healthier, and that I wasn't unhappy with the way I looked - once I even directly asked her if she was fat-shaming me, and she denied it, and said she just wanted me to be 'healthier.'"
But the change in the friend's treatment was obvious. Previously, when the new mom would come over to her friend’s house, M would offer her all kinds of snacks, but now she would get only cut vegetables and other low-calorie foods.
The friend would also invite the OP for walks and wasn’t happy when she refused, but it wasn’t because she was lazy, rather she was just tired. Over time, the woman got tired of her friend’s comments.
The most annoying thing was that the OP actually was eating healthy foods and exercising when she had the time and energy. It was helping her to lose weight and she already fit into the clothes she wore before becoming pregnant.
Somehow M didn’t notice that, kept pushing diet and exercise on the OP and didn’t ever stop when she asked to. When asking didn't help, the woman decided to lie about her weight loss progress, and the friend keeping going on about it was quite funny as it was getting ridiculous.
The Redditor wasn't sure how M could have not notice her body change but gave it a guess, "Maybe because I was losing it very gradually, and she met me often? I saw her almost every week. Also, when I was younger, I didn't gain/lose weight in my face, which mostly looked the same. Maybe she didn't look carefully at my body?"
M finally snapped out of it when a mutual friend pointed out that the OP had lost a lot of weight, which made M mad that her friend would lie to her. But maybe it’s not entirely OP’s fault, because M isn’t blind and should have been able to see for herself how the OP looked.
This argument wasn’t friendship-shattering and the woman assured the readers that M is a really good friend and this incident was the only annoying and intrusive behavior she ever displayed. She told Bored Panda the same thing and from the responses in the comments it seems that she is convinced that M just wanted to help her to get back in shape and there was no malice behind it.
We asked if it was possible that the friend did notice that she lost weight but kept on with the indirect comments because she believed the OP needed to lose even more weight, but the woman doesn't believe it, "I was slender before I got pregnant, and after losing the 50 pounds of 'baby weight,' I was slender again."
Image credits: alexlucru123 (not the actual photo)
It’s not hard to believe that M is truly a good friend because she is still OP’s friend and even after she did gain weight, M never commented about it, so we could assume that she learnt her lesson. Or maybe she didn’t notice the slow change again.
It’s not surprising that a person would notice a small change because they sometimes are oblivious to large ones as well. The phenomenon is called change blindness and Very Well Mind explains that “In many cases, the changes in the visual field are so dramatic that they seem impossible to miss. Yet when attention is directed elsewhere, people are capable of missing both minor and major changes that take place right in front of them.”
Maybe you’ve heard of the Selective Attention Test from Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, created in 1999. The test subjects are asked to count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball and then showed a video of about 20 seconds showing 5 people throwing a basketball to each other.
The correct answer is 15 passes, but what is more important is whether you saw the gorilla. On their website, the creators of the test say that “half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.”
What they concluded was that “we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.”
The Guardian explains that “During change blindness everything about your visual system is intact and functioning. All of the information enters your visual system in the same way and is processed by the retina the same way; it even enters primitive parts of the brain in the same way.”
But we still miss so much information. Very Well Mind gives a couple of causes of the phenomenon. One of them is that we can’t focus on everything at the same time. We only can pay attention to a few objects with our whole concentration, so other information just goes by.
Our minds are also influenced by our expectations and past experiences so if we don’t expect or don’t even know that a change can occur, our brains don’t register it.
It all comes down to our limited resources: “To cope with an overwhelming amount of data, huge amounts of information enter our visual system without being assimilated. Focused attention on a single part of our environment allows us to 'shine a spotlight' on something that we deem to be important.”
Maybe the OP’s friend was so focused on making sure that her friend needed to lose weight and get back in shape, she didn’t notice that she was already doing that. What is your theory? Let us know your thoughts about the story and if you feel the OP was a jerk for not telling her friend that she was already getting back in shape.
People in the comments agreed that the friend needed to be taught a lesson because she was overstepping the line
