The FA community of clowns likes to make a big deal about how sometimes when someone gets sick and they lose a great deal of weight, some clueless lummox says something like, “Wow, you look so great now!”

Supposedly this “proves” how weight loss is unhealthy.

Nope.

What is proves is that being skinny — no matter the proximate cause — triggers an evolutionarily-primed (but not 100% innate) response where in the simian brain skinny == health*.

Of course this is invalid in the case of, say, a leukemia patient but your tiny simian brain doesn’t know that. Can’t tell that thing nothin’.

In reality the person saying that — though not very tactful — is having the correct response.

Weight loss 99% of the time is a good thing and leads to improved health and for nearly all of our evolutionary history (including now) that has been true.

*It should be noted that to most people now “skinny” is what many people would have called overweight/fat when I was a kid. For instance, people call me skinny at work. Though I am not fat or overweight, I’m not really skinny at all. Just nearly everyone else there is unhealthily large.