A Woman's Coworker Was So Angry About Her Weight Loss She Showed Up At Her Front Door & Then Things Got Even Weirder
It got so out of control she had to hire a lawyer — but it all made sense once she knocked on her door.
Pexels, pixelshot via Canva, Mangostar, wichayada suwanachun / Shutterstock Commenting on people's weight is never a good idea, for obvious reasons. Weight and weight loss are of course hot-button issues and everyone seems to have an opinion about them nowadays. But you just never know what's behind someone's weight loss or gain—a lesson one woman's coworker learned in the most unhinged way possible.
When she lost a dramatic amount of weight, her coworker had so much to say about it that she had to get HR involved—and hire a lawyer. And it only got more insane from there.
A woman was harassed for months by her coworker for losing weight after surgery.
Writing on the Human Resources industry website AskAManager, the woman wrote of her harrowing ordeal with her coworker—which was almost as dramatic as the health issues that sparked her weight loss in the first place.
The woman went from a size 20 to a size 8 after the removal of a giant tumor.
The woman found out she was near death when she finally found a doctor willing to investigate her health instead of just telling her to lose weight—a frighteningly common, and often deadly, occurrence for overweight patients, especially women. A 2017 American Psychological Association study of 300 found overweight people were 1.65 times more likely to die of an undiagnosed medical condition due to medical fatphobia.
The woman's weight loss was drastic and rapid, but she was pleasantly surprised to receive almost no comments on her body—until she went back to work and was confronted by her coworker Aubrey, who told her "I wish you had come to me to lose the weight instead of resorting to such drastic measures. You’re going to gain it all back, you know. I’ll be waiting."
It got worse from there. "I was speechless when she asked why I 'opted to get butchered instead of putting in the hard work to lose the weight,'" the woman writes.
Aside from being outright rude, Aubrey's comments are, of course, egregious given the incredibly dangerous situation that created the woman's weight loss—which is why more and more therapists, dietitians, and other professionals, like the woman below, say you should just always refrain from commenting on people's weight. It's frequently not something to be celebrated.
The woman's HR department refused to help her with her coworker hounding her about her weight loss, and she had to hire a lawyer.
Aubrey's harassment quickly escalated to constantly offering to "coach" the woman through workouts, and then to trying to sabotage her at work when she wouldn't take her up on her offers.
As anyone would, the woman went to HR. And at first, they tried to help. They called "a red flag mediation"—the highest level of intervention at her company—and put Aubrey on a performance improvement plan. But when Aubrey said she was "triggered" by the woman's weight loss and that she "should have warned" the office about her intent to lose weight, HR asked the woman to explain what kind of surgery she had in an effort to smooth things over.
That is, of course, an insane response to an employee commenting on people's weight—and it's also a HIPAA violation. So instead she filed ADA paperwork so that she could work from home—a process her HR department actively sabotaged. Which, as you might guess, in addition to also being insane, is highly, highly illegal.
In an update, she told of how she then hired a lawyer and escalated things to the C-suite, confronting the Chief HR Officer, who was suitably mortified by the situation. And then things got even more unhinged.
The coworker showed up at the woman's house to recruit her into a weight-loss multi-level marketing company, or MLM.
Yes, you read that right. After things continued escalating, the woman took a leave of absence while the CHRO and her lawyer worked things out. And that's when Aubrey decided to show up at her home and knock on her door with a cabal of fellow weight-loss enthusiasts in tow.
"She’s in very deep with an MLM (or maybe a cult, I can’t be sure at this point)," the woman writes. "Aubrey came over to 'demonstrate' some workout techniques and give me some diet 'supplement' samples and discuss a 'career opportunity' because she was worried about my 'physical and professional health.'"
Weight loss MLMs—or pyramid or Ponzi schemes as they're known in the rest of the world—have proliferated in recent years, especially on TikTok despite the app's ban on them. Weight loss and "wellness" MLMs like "It Works," which sells appetite-suppressant gummies and urges devotees to drink coffee instead of eating, have blown up on the app.
Experts like nutritionist Graeme Tomlinson say the program's claims are not only nonsense, but potentially dangerous, and dietitians like the one in the video below have called the program a full-blown scam.
People online were in disbelief at the coworker's actions and how her HR department decided to handle them.
"Every line of this was. Uh. Banana-pants," a commenter on AskAManager wrote. Another marveled how Aubrey's bizarre behavior and the HR department's rank ineptitude somehow ended up sharing a timeline. "The fact that they existed together at the same company, resulting in a doom spiral of aggressive incompetence, is mind-blowing. I am just thrilled (and in awe) that OP made it out of this relatively unscathed."
People on Twitter were similarly slack-jawed. "Nothing about this made sense until the end," writer Mikki Kendall tweeted of the MLM twist.
"I knew people could get lost in the sauce," another Twitter user wrote of Aubrey's MLM indoctrination, "but it never occurred to me that it could be THAT deep. Damn."
In the end, Aubrey's unhinged stunt and bizarre, cult-like obsession with weight loss was something of a blessing in disguise—her showing up at the woman's house was the company's last straw and they fired her, and the woman herself is now looking for a new job. Let this be a lesson to all of us to refrain from commenting on people's weight—and also stay the hell away from MLMs.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.