Weight Loss, You Need Weight Loss

by Dee Jeffers

At the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, I stop at a mushroom stand. The vendors smile, eager, pointing at tiny plastic cups of cloudy liquid lined in neat formation. 

I sip, polite, and try to ask what it’s for. One woman rattles off the benefits in broken English: health, digestion, energy. Then her eyes land on me.

“Weight loss,” she says.

Again, slower this time, with firmness and clarity: “You need weight loss.”

She laughs. The others laugh. I laugh too. The words hang in the air, heavier than the thick liquid I force down.

My weight enters a room before I do.

In China, it drew stares like spotlights – sometimes curious, sometimes blank, sometimes edged with judgment. In Shanghai, I felt invisible and too visible at once. But here in Guangzhou, a stranger gave it language. My difference translated into blunt syllables I could never un-hear.

I walked away with the taste of mushrooms on my tongue, the echo lodged in my chest.

It wasn’t the cruelty of the words but their certainty – as if this was the only thing about me worth naming.

The weight becomes both explanation and erasure. People don’t see how perimenopause has betrayed me; they only see what should be reduced, reshaped, refined. And it echoes back home too. 

The world is quick to tell women what to lose, what to fix, how to shrink. A stranger’s bluntness on a trade-fair floor was only a sharper echo of a chorus I already know.

Still, her words followed me. Across cities, across continents, whispering in mirrors, fused with my own self-critique. 

“Weight loss, you need weight loss.”

I know now that shrinking is not the same as living.

The words may have clung to me, but so did the memory of mushroom tea, a steady warmth in a plastic cup. So did the neon of Guangzhou at night. So did the fact that even in this body, carrying all its weight, I was still there – seeing, tasting, witnessing.

I was fully present. 

And that is not small.