People told me I looked great for a long while after I lost some weight, then stopped it promptly when I got down too low. No one knew I had a problem with depression, self-harm, not sleeping. I only finally told someone after I had passed out in the shower after something ridiculous like a 3 hour run and felt I couldn’t make it to my morning classes at university that day. Even then, despite being gaunt and underweight, people didn’t seem to realize that I feljt miserable inside. At that time, I worked a part-time job in the university’s government documents section. Overall, it was a boring part of the library to work, unless you got lucky enough to reshelve books (and even then, government document books have a different type coding from Dewey Decimal or fiction; you had to pass a test to get reshelving duties. Anyway, the main reason it was boring was because there were hardly any patrons at all...this in one of the largest universities in the state of Texas. I had a coworker; she was Vietnamese and tiny. One day she approached me and said she was jealous of how thin I was and wished she could be so skinny! And I was thinking, no you do not. You don’t want to be running 5 hours a day, eating an apple and exactly 1 cup of dry Cheerios for lunch, and maybe a low cal TV dinner for supper if you felt you had done all your daily exercise. You don’t want to not sleep for days wish you were better at making yourself throw up so you could eat more and exercise less, wish you’d never wake up, or be as miserable as I am.

But people will see only what they want to see. Though it IS important to realize that nobody is a mind reader. If you are acting happy on the surface, they often don’t see past the charade.