To ask DH not to eat all the food?

[CustardDragon]

It's really beginning to grate on my nerves. DH is fairly overweight (think bmi of about 32) and constantly eats massive amounts. It has always annoyed me when we go out for dinner and I have regular amounts, like a main and a dessert, but he orders half the menu which makes it very expensive. What is most annoying though, is that he eats everything I get for myself as well. I don't really like the idea of 'my food' and 'his food', but because I have quite a restricted diet (vegetarian and can't have a lot of lactose either) and he eats everything, I have had to get stuff I can have for work lunches and stuff. But he eats it all.

This week, he ate all his meat stuff. Then he ate all the bread. And all the cheese. He puts two or three condiments in each sandwich (salad cream, mustard and ketchup, all together??).

Money is quite tight and I am getting fed up of having to buy expensive lunches at work because there is nothing left when I get up :(

I'm not even sure how 1 weekly shop is supposed to last a week, bread is useless after 2 days, as is meat... cheese another day. At least it's being eaten rather than going off and in the bin.

I make my own bread in a breadmaker, it lasts several days. Meat, no idea but fish can last longer or you can freeze it. Cheese can last for weeks wrapped or slightly less long once opened. Oh it says consume within 3 days but it's perfectly OK for longer. Veggies if stored correctly can last days or weeks.

A weekly shop with perhaps the occasional top up in between is fine, IME.

Most of my weekly shopping lasts longer than a week.

The only exception is chicken.

Why speculate on his condition, he doesn't think he has anything wrong with him?

OP, you need to decide how much of a problem this is for you, because he won't change.

Bread is useless after 2 days? You're shopping at the wrong place.

I'd stop shopping and cooking for him. Why are you doing all this when you work FT, too? TBH, I'd have my own fridge and chest of food with locks on it. It's no way to live, but nor is the way you are carrying on now.

If he gets angry when you bring it up, there's not much you can do but separate out food and cooking.

Shopping at the wrong place or just buying bread that isn't choc full of crappy preservatives that make it last 7days. I don't live in the UK. Bread here is much nicer, fresher, cheaper and healthier.

Maybe it's a solution for op, shop every couple of days... less in the fridge to tempt him into eating crap.

Cheese lasts longer than 3 days surely. Date/quality wise I mean.

Same with bread. Only DH eats bread in our house, if bread only lasted two days we'd be throwing most of it away. That's shop bought and home made bread.

Jabbsy...are you suggesting that the ops shopping habits are actually causing his obesity, and this is all her fault...? Really ?

he just sounds like a greedy pig tbh

Hi OP
It really does sound like an eating disorder to me because I was just like your dh. The amount of times I ate the contents of the fridge and then bought more to hide it. The more I was bingeing the more secretative and sneaky I became. If anyone questioned me I immediately went on the defensive. I was a fucking horrible person to live with then. Eat eat eat. If I felt sad/happy/bored/angry I would eat.
Your dh needs to hit his rock bottom before he will realise he needs help. Whether you are there when it happens is up to you,you don't have to stay in a relationship where you are unhappy. I hope you come back to the thread and see beyond the tangent it went off on.

jabbsy he is not a child - you cannot blame his wife for his eating choices

Well jabbsy we make a lot of home made bread with no preservatives at all. It is utterly delicious, and lasts longer than two days nonetheless. If you cannot access tasty, preservative free bread that will last more than two days in your local shops, I can only suggest you look into making your own.

It is quite interesting sunny how many posters are infantilising this man and making his wife responsible for both the existence of the problem and the solving of it. Because it couldn't possibly be anything to do with him! It sounds like a compulsion tbh, has he been to the GP and got levels of everything checked? Would he? Just to isolate the cause of the problem- I am not saying it's physical necessarily but obviously that is a possibility.

Cheap shitty white bread lasts 2 days, decent bread is fine for 3-4. And there are freezers for a reason. Cheddar Cheese lasts for a couple of weeks in perfectly edible condition and I don't know about meat but once again freezers.
Beside the point maybe but for us, a weekly shop lasts a week.

Meat wouldn't last more than a couple of days just stored in a fridge, but yes obviously the vast majority of the UK population have a freezer. There are some people who get prissy about eating previously frozen meat, but it's certainly not the case that it would be useless after a couple of days. Also as OP hasn't suggested that DH is such a person, it can't be presumed.

Actually, home made bread goes off quicker as it doesn't have all the preservatives in it. Decent bread only lasts a day. That's why the French shop for bread daily.

Anyway, that's all beside the point, which is that the OP shouldn't be moaned at about her cooking or shopping. He can do his own if he doesn't like it. And he can buy all the junk he likes himself too because I would be leaving it off my shopping list. Let's see how much he wants crisps before dinner when it would mean him traipsing off to the shop to get some.

Home made bread does go off quicker do to lack of preservatives, yes. It still lasts longer than two days. But yes, this isn't OPs fault or her problem.

Meat wouldn't last more than a couple of days just stored in a fridge

Of course it does, unless you only eat chicken.

No, we eat loads. Whenever I've left stuff raw in the fridge for more than about 3 days it gets whiffy though. Except bacon actually, I don't know if the curing makes a difference. So we don't do it now. But are you seriously saying you'd leave meat in the fridge for a week, with no freezing at all in the middle, and it would be ok?

I bought a loaf of white bread in March because I had new students and didn't know how they would react to making their own dough - they reacted very well so I didn't need to use the bought loaf and it sat in the bottom of our fridge and didn't go mouldy at all for two months.

Those things are pumped full of preservatives.

Proper home made bread, cooked and not broken into can last months as the cooking process kills all the germs, and the crust keeps it all secure. Once broken into though, that's when it needs to be eaten relatively quickly.

I suppose it depends on where you buy it.

If from a butcher, I'd eat it within two days.
Packaged from the supermarket, beef and pork, even turkey, last easily 5 or more days. Often a couple of days after the best before date.

OP - with this, I'd just buy for me and I'd just buy for the same day each morning - even if it meant getting up earlier, and keeping my food in the fridge at work until I got home to cook my food.

He needs to either wind it in or go see someone about his problem.

Hmm, well nobody in our house cares for turkey so for all I know it could last a year. We get a mixture of butcher and supermarket usually. I don't object in principle to the idea of leaving something in a few days then eating it, just whenever we've tried that it smells funny.

My OH was a bit of a pain in the bum for eating absolutely everything. When I spoke up and spoke to him about it he actually ended up asking me to split the food shops into twice weekly so it isn't all just that as he just couldn't help himself. Then he asked for a 'Dont touch' shelf in the fridge and a cupboard so he knows he can't have it.

I'm happy to do these things as it solved the problem massively.

I'm not BLAMING op at all, in the slightest... I'm offering suggestions or solutions that might help and are a little more constructive than making a wound up person angrier or telling her rage should separate from him.

As I said before, maybe this isn't the place for me... most people's answers seem to come from a really unhappy place and only serve to make an irritating situation a big deal heavier.