December 23, 2005 at 11:05 AM
Once a week the South Beach Diet e-newsletter I subscribe to includes a detailed testimonial of one person's loss on the diet, complete with the before and after pictures we all love. Problem is, many times I look at these photos and think "Uh, which one is before and which one is after?"
Maybe being so enormously overweight has miscalibrated my fat detection abilities. ("Miscalibrated" isn't actually a word, but I'm going to pretend it is. If you all know what it means, doesn't that make it a word? "Misconfigure" isn't actually a word either, but it should be! Someone petition Merriam-Webster!) Maybe I am just not very observant., but if someone lost only 20 or 30 pounds, I don't think I'd actually notice. I need a chin to disappear or significant reduction in ass size to notice someone's lost weight – including myself!
It'd probably help if the people in these pictures wore the exact same clothes and were posed in the same way, but they never are. I suppose most people aren't dedicated to making 3-D progress photos like myself. Tsk, tsk!
I'm different from some people who can detect a one pound gain in someone else. Maybe you have to live in Hollywood or be a plastic surgeon to obtain this skill. I knew one girl who was always commenting on whether someone had gained or lost weight. I'm glad I'm not like this because it seems to be a silly thing to be obsessed with. I monitor my own weight, but why get caught up comparing yourself to other people constantly? I prefer to compare myself to myself and see how I've progressed.
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