If Only
Lose the weight, keep the weight, change everything, or change nothing. They will still talk.
They talk about your body like it’s a damn public meeting.
Not always to your face. Sometimes it’s the look that goes a second too long. Sometimes it’s the joke everybody laughs at, and you sit there feeling your face go hot. Sometimes it’s the little “if only” tossed out like it means nothing, like it doesn’t land in your chest and stay there.
If only you were thinner. If only you were bigger. If only your stomach was flatter. If only your arms were tighter. If only your face looked better. They never have to say the whole sentence. You know how it ends. You’ve heard it so many times you can finish it before they do.
And that is what wears you down. Not one cruel comment. It’s the stack of them. The years of them. The fact that it comes from everybody. Friends who swear they are just being honest. Family who raised you and then spent the rest of your life trying to edit the body they helped make. Coworkers who toss it out like small talk. Partners who touch you like they love you and look at you like your body is failing an inspection. Even strangers feel bold enough to weigh in.
Men do it to women. Women do it to men. People do it to people. The body is fair game because it is right there and it can’t talk back fast enough.
Some people stop caring. They get tired of chasing everybody else’s approval and just let it go. Good for them. Really. Eat what you want. Move how you want. Refuse the whole shame circus. But even that gets judged. Suddenly you are “not trying,” or “letting yourself go,” or “giving up.” As if peace is laziness and self-respect is some kind of failure.
Then there are the ones who try. They really do try. They cut back. They skip the dessert. They make promises in their own head and mean every one of them. They stand in front of the mirror and negotiate with themselves like maybe this time the mirror will be fair. But wanting to change your body and changing your body are two different wars.
And then there are the ones who grind. Every day. Gym before dawn or after work or both. Food tracked. Steps counted. Sleep protected like it matters because it does. They put in the work. They shrink. They build. They fit into clothes that finally sit right on their skin. And still somebody finds a way to ruin it. Too thin. Too obsessed. Too much. Too vain. Too proud of yourself. Too serious. Too focused on your own damn life.
Effort becomes the new thing people hate.
Then there are the shots. The surgery. The choices people love to call shortcuts because they were not the ones who had to make them. Maybe the scale drops. Maybe the body changes faster than people expected. And still the fucking mouths keep moving. Now it’s cheating. Now it’s fake. Now it’s temporary. Now your face looks different, your skin hangs, your body must have come with a moral warning label.
You cannot win.
Lose weight, and they find something else. Gain weight, and they remind you of what you used to be. Stay the same, and they tell you what you should be doing better. Work out, and they call it obsession. Don’t work out and they call it neglect. Get surgery, and they call it vanity. Refuse it, and they call it laziness.
The rules are bullshit. The goalposts move every time you get close enough to touch them.
And the worst part is how normal everybody acts about it. Like this is care. Like this is love. Like a person’s body is a project the whole damn room gets a vote on. It’s not care. A lot of it is control with better manners. A lot of it is cruelty wearing a clean shirt.
So you end up living inside a body people keep rating while pretending they are helping.
Some days you can shrug it off. Some days the words stick to you like grease. Sometimes you believe the people who say they are proud of you. Other days, you do not trust a single nice thing they say because you know how fast a compliment can become the same old shit.
That’s the part people don’t want to sit with. Not the weight. Not the surgery. Not the diet. The part where being watched becomes normal. The part where you start hearing other people’s opinions before they even open their mouths.
The shame is not only on the person standing there in the body. It belongs to everybody who keeps looking, commenting, correcting, and then acting surprised when people start hating their own skin.
The body changes. Or it doesn’t. The comments keep coming either way. And people keep getting dressed, walking out the door, and trying to live anyway.
Not heroes. Not failures. Just people dragging a body through a world that never learned when to shut the hell up.
