Even when it’s intended as a compliment, it’s an insult.
The implication is that you needed to lose weight or else you’re sickly. As a big guy with a firm grasp of reality, it doesn’t bother me but others are more sensitive.
A friend, family member, or coworker tells you that it looks like you’ve lost weight, they they mean it.
In my family, that would likely have gone like this:
“You’ve lost weight!”
“Yeah, I just found out I have cancer. Now go away before I cry on you.”
Not a good thing to say. Not because it’s a compliment or insult, exactly, but because it’s been a very sensitive topic.
Anecdotally…
My brother went to a family reunion which I didn’t attend (I dislike the eat-and-leave variety of reunions, especially when I’ve traveled 5 hours to get there and they all live 10 minutes away) and because he looks like one of my cousins, was asked how his retirement was going. He’s 38. He was nonplussed by it; everyone thought it was funny when they heard about it and my brother actually played along at the time.
And at Thanksgiving one year my aunt, much alarmed, shouted at me across a crowded room how fat I’d become, and asked me to lift my shirt right then and there to show her my abdomen. I was mortified.
So I guess I’d be flattered if someone thought I’d lost weight. And I agree with the above poster about pregnancy questions. You do not, ever, ask if someone’s pregnant, unless there is a baby coming out of her at that moment.
Unless I really have lost weight, I usually take it as a code way of saying “hey, you finally learned to buy clothes that hide your fat ass”, which is a sort of compliment. Sure beats “Aw hell, what happened to your face?”
I’m female and agree with NitroPress
However. This is one of those situations that my fathers best advice ever fits:
If you’re ever in doubt, assume that it’s a compliment. If it was intended as such everything will go smoothly, if it was intended as an insult you’ve just completely dismissed their opinion and pissed them off. You can’t lose!
It sort of makes me think of “You look so good today!” As opposed to all those other days where I apparently looked like crap? One of those that’s probably meant in a good way, but…
I’m not sure I’d mention weight at all. Too many landmines.
I take it as a compliment. I usually haven’t lost actual weight, but my waist size fluctuates. The same jeans that I can barely zip one day may need a belt to keep from falling off a week later.
However. This is one of those situations that my fathers best advice ever fits:
If you’re ever in doubt, assume that it’s a compliment. If it was intended as such everything will go smoothly, if it was intended as an insult you’ve just completely dismissed their opinion and pissed them off. You can’t lose!
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Your father was of course right that you should always be courteous.
But then, that situation is exactly why I have a problem with it, why it is immediately offensive to me: it’s offensive to *think *that “you have lost weight” would be construed as a compliment by me.
Sure, it has become a cultural norm. But that’s precisely the problem.
I am a human being. Not barbie doll. My worth does not lie in the way I look, and the implication it does is extremely offensive. If you were intending a compliment and you could come up with nothing better than “you look like you lost weight” you can sod off and come back when you have thought of something to say that values me as a person.
I can understand complimenting someone in that way who you know has been struggling with their weight. In that case you are letting them know you have noticed their achievement. But why on earth would you be so presumptuous as to assume that I wanted to lose weight?
And all just because I’m a woman. Nobody would say that to my SO, or my dad. That would just be weird. :mad:
How is anyone supposed to know that? I’m not dismissing your feelings or disagreeing that we are a weight-obsessed culture, but I think we’ve clearly established that it falls into the realm of generic, well-intended social comments. Unless there’s a backstory, no one saying it to you is really commenting on your weight or any change in it.
I’m similarly uncomfortable when people say things like “God bless you!” to me, but I’ve learned to keep my annoyance to myself and accept it as a well-intended social exchange. A grocery store aisle where I’ve just sneezed isn’t really the place to climb up on a soap box (even in the soap aisle, where the perfumicals do make me sneeze) and denounce their Iron Age nonsense.
Change the culture if you must, but getting angry with people because they do something polite within the culture is, IMHO, a waste of time.
It’s the cultural aspect itself at which I take offense. I don’t get angry with people, that’s why I said that Moonlitherial’s father was right to say you should just always treat people courteously.
What I wish people knew is not the inner workings of gracer, but the fact that it is offensive to reduce women to weight and appearance in that way. To compliment their appearance as an achievement, when for a man you never would. (I know losing weight might be an achievement, but that is a personal issue, and often not thing someone making that particular comment would know.)
So I just sighed on the inside when my uncle asked me, and gave him a somewhat icy “I wouldn’t know if I lost weight; I don’t own scales”. Other than that, I wasn’t rude. I know he meant well. But maybe next time I’ll say: “What an achievement that you haven’t balded more since I last saw you. Well done!” 
Huh. Interesting responses.
I’m medium-thin, have always been medium thin - at almost 55 I weight what I did at 15. Although bits of me are squishier, wrinklier and more inclined to point south. 
My weight hasn’t fluctuated much in 40 years. People tend to think I am both taller and weigh less than I actually do and this has been a trend since about 1975.
And my entire freaking life I’ve had people say to me, after an absence, "have you lost weight?
It’s never occured to me, in all these decades, to consider that an insult. I’ve just read all the responses here and I still don’t get the “insult” part. Granted, I also don’t get the “compliment” part. It is what it is.
Basically I do not give one single molecule of shit what anyone thinks about what I weigh or don’t weigh. And I’m sort of gobsmacked that otherwise intelligent people give a shit. Seriously? Unless this is some sort of defensiveness about being overweight, I seriously do. not. get. this. What am I missing?
The above was written with no snark implied or intended. I’m sincerely baffled by the notion that someone’s opinion about whether a person has lost or gained a few pounds is even worthy of note or emotion.
Meh, a lot of time what someone else thinks doesn’t matter, but I was just wondering.
Ha. I usually respond to “You look good today” with “As opposed to the pile of crap I look like every other day,” but I’m kidding.
So apparently I need to grow thicker skin and learn to take this for the meaningless pleasantry that this is, because when people comment that I’ve lost weight, I think, “Oh, so this person thought of me as fat before.” 
This sums it up, but this makes it a compliment, even if it is a rather hollow one.
I also wish to point out that it’s possible to look as if you’ve lost weight when you haven’t, just in how you dress or even how you carry yourself. Plus, it’s possible to lose fat and gain muscle, which is less dense.
World of Warcraft, male pandaren joke:
“Heeey! You look like you’ve lost some weight! That’s terrible! Have a dumpling!”