Sorry, this ended up being quite a long post.
I don’t know what advice I am looking for and simply wanted to share this with other people to see if anybody else has ever experienced anything like this?
MIL, who is past retirement age, has a not so healthy relationship with weight and food. There are reasons I say this which I won’t go into, but let’s just say it is off topic for this thread.
I put on weight recently, but my BMI is in the green, right in the middle. This comes after years of being underweight, at times dangerously so, and struggling to put weight on, for reasons that are also off topic here.
MIL is now constantly asking me how the weight loss is going, measuring me up with her eyes, essentially fat-checking me… she does try to be discrete about this but I’ve seen it happen. She will ask whether I have managed to lose any weight since the last time she saw me. She then confirms “but the weight is going down right?”
She herself is not underweight for her age but is on the thin side.
In her fridge and cupboard, she keeps lots of out of date, expired food. Often mouldy. She will tell anybody who listens how she doesn’t gain weight and how proud she is of it, then going into details about how she manages to do that. For example, if she has eaten a lot one day she will try to not to eat very much for several days thereafter.
Unless she eats out, she’d does not eat “real” food, instead snacking on things like tomatoes or biscuits or nuts, or if she decides to have a meal, it will be something like canned soup. My understanding is she doesn’t really know how to cook, but that isn’t something you can judge her for because not everybody does.
She will often go out of her way to make sure her son (my husband) gets food when we are there, but will essentially do the opposite with me. This used to happen even when I was very thin. If we would go out for a meal she would order something “healthy” then try to eat my food and actually verbalise that she won’t take any from her son’s plate because he needs it. She would encourage her son to get the most expensive and substantial option on a menu, and although it has never explicitly been said I always feel that I am supposed to pick something cheap, sometimes based on suggestions she makes but mostly it’s based on experience from eating out with her and the sort of obvious conclusion you can draw from the behaviour when I do get something that isn’t the very cheapest option (she tries to eat my food). Of course it is possible this is all in my head but I am fairly sure it is not.
I feel like there’s an aspect to this which comes from a need to hoard food because food costs money. Or making sure you get your money’s worth (since she paid for the meal). So her son eating is getting your moneys worth, me eating is not. This behaviour extends to other situations but again it’s a bit off topic.
She does offer me what is in her cupboard and fridge but as I say it’s all expired and mouldy. In the same breath she will talk about how to ensure you don’t get hungry by snacking on small amounts of food like sweets and nuts.
On our most recent visit she made her son some food (tinned soup). She did not offer me the same. She then told me to join her while she ran some errands, in what felt like an attempt to distract me from eating. At this point it was late afternoon and I had not had anything to eat all day. She later offered me tomatoes and crackers.
I don’t think I will ever try to “set a boundary” because to some degree it is a lost cause and I don’t want to make her cross, I mostly try to eat before and after seeing her, but sometimes there isn’t time to do that.