Actress Gabourey Sidibe recently stated that after having bariatric surgery and losing a great deal of weight, she started receiving all sorts of compliments from people, and she wasn’t really comfortable with it. As she told Refinery29, “My body actually has nothing to do with you. I don’t really need your support for it. It seems ill-placed.”
She’s not the only woman to go through a weight-loss transformation and be unsettled by the sucrose-sweet things people have said to her only after dropping the pounds. Queen of TV Shonda Rhimes revealed that people have started treating her in a way that makes her feel as though she came into her own solely after losing weight — which she knows isn’t true.
“Women I barely knew gushed. And I mean GUSHED. Like I was holding-a-new-baby-gushed,” the 47-year-old Scandal creator wrote in her new Shondaland newsletter. “Only there was no new baby. It was just me. In a dress. With makeup on and my hair all did, yes. But…still the same me. In one of my same dresses (cause why am I gonna buy a NEW dress when I can take this to a seamstress and she can just make it smaller? Who am I, The Crown? No, I’m from the Midwest, baby, and I come with coupons). Women gushed anyway. And men? They spoke to me. THEY SPOKE TO ME. Like stood still and had long conversations with me about things. It was disconcerting. But even more disconcerting was that all these people suddenly felt completely comfortable talking to me about my body. Telling me I looked ‘pretty’ or that they were ‘proud of me’ or that ‘wow, you are so hot now’ or ‘you look amazing!'”
Yes, Rhimes lost nearly 150 pounds, and that’s amazing. But the attention paid to her body, according to her, has been a bit too much.
“I discovered that people found me valuable,” she said. “Worthy of conversation. A person one could look at. A person one could compliment. A person one could admire.”
“You heard me. I discovered that NOW people saw me as a PERSON,” she added. “What the hell did they see me as before? How invisible was I to them then? How hard did they work to avoid me? What words did they use to describe me? What value did they put on my presence at a party, a lunch, a discussion? When I was fat, I wasn’t a PERSON to these people. Like I had been an Invisible Woman who suddenly materialized in front of them. Poof! There I am. Thin and ready for a chat.”
But as Rhimes would go on to say, “being thinner doesn’t make you a different person. It just makes you thinner.”
This isn’t the first time Rhimes has spoken about people who treat her differently since slimming down. As she told Variety in 2015 while promoting her book, The Year of Yes, while she feels better since going on her weight-loss journey years ago, she still feels like and is the woman she’s always been.
“That has been a fascinating journey to watch other people deal with,” Rhimes said. “To me it’s just the outward example of everything else. You’re still exactly the same person, but to other people, it’s this huge thing that is very big for them. But for me, it’s the same thing. Except maybe I have a ton more energy.”
The post “When I Was Fat, I Wasn’t A Person”: Shonda Rhimes Didn’t Like Being “Gushed” Over After Losing 150 Pounds appeared first on MadameNoire.