Your favourite competitive under-eating thread

[StillCoughingandLaughing]

We’ve had a couple of doozies lately - the woman who was told her Morrison’s jacket potato should fill her up for the rest of the day and was unreasonable to cook a roast after a ‘treat lunch’; the woman who thought her husband was ordering too much pizza and

'People just don't know what normal portion sizes look like anymore', usually with a reference to how healthy everyone was during rationing when in fact a great many were malnourished, got rickets in childhood, corruption and theft were rife because it wasn't enough food to keep a healthy person healthy for the most part, especially if you lived some place where you couldn't supplement it (not everyone had a garden or allotment).

My MIL does this. She's always on a diet but if eating out will not have a starter or dessert and only has a 'small' portion or childrens main. She will then eat half of FILs food. I'm fat and eat what I want which probably works out similar to the amount she has.

She is infamous for her slices of cake. It really is just a sliver that can't even stand up. I always ask for seconds .

I think that post was ironic?!

I am eating a small but tasty bag of sugary sweets as I read this...

Reminds me of sil kicking off at her then fiancé (he left, no one blamed him) because he had a second slice of cake & therefore he wasn’t allowed dinner 🤣 while we are sat there cringing.

I’m also waiting for the Christmas virtue signalling, the ones who serve steamed kale, sweet potatoes & no pigs in blankets.

The poster who ate processed food out of curiosity was on the pizza thread. Loved that.

Why are all children on mumsnet very tall therefore the fact that they’re 7 and in age 10-11 clothes is totally fine and they’re not big at all. I can wear Asda age 12 jeans and I’m not even skinny . If a 7 year old can fit in them I’d be worried. It’s as if no one can see their kid might be a bit bigger than they should be because they’re ‘sooo tall’ and ‘super sporty and never stop moving’ because they’re at tennis coaching two hours a week at which they eat a snack every half an hour....

Nokidshere

If there's plenty of carbs in the food you eat you haven't stopped carbs!

Lyingwitch

I didnt say anything about people who dont eat many carbs. I commented on people who try to exclude them entirely. A relative does this - she thinks an adequate diet for the day is one egg for breakfast, salad veg for lunch, and lean meat/fish with salad for tea.

Shes got some digestive issues and is often low on energy and refuses to believe her dietary limitations are in any way contributing.

I think that post was ironic?!

Just a little...my youngest is a rabbit.

Sorry off thread but it’s like the opposite of competitive under eating with kids on here it’s all competitively active tall kids who could eat a whole suckling pig for breakfast

Footiefan2019

You are right on this and i think its a red herring about children being tall - overweight children do tend to attain their adult height earlier. A 5 year old who is the size of an 8 year old can be overweight.

Oh please can I tell my story??!!

I have out on 3 stone in about 4 years. It comes from a history of eating disorders (bulimia) that I am in the middle of dealing with. i have stopoepd vomiting (Hurrah!!!)_ but have kept most of the bingeing. HOWEVER... not throwing up means I am way healthier, and so i am working on the bingeing bit as time goes on.

Anyway.... ac ouple of years friends of DH came to stay. The wife (who is slim) was clearly asotnished at my weight gain and she looked me up and down and said; 'I can see I shall have to teach you how to eat properly' (no word of a lie and I have just outed myself to RL friends). The enxt day I was making bacon butties for everyone before we went out hiking and she ostentatiously ate one half, and acorss the table (and while I was still eating) handed the plate back at me announcing; 'This is enough for me, and it ought to have been enough for you too'.

Thankfully I found it more amusing, although it could have sent me right back into scret voimiting....

They stayed again last year and I am still fat and she started lecturing me out of the blue about how my motto ought to be 'no excuses' and then started sending me diet and eating keo diet plans on e-mail.

She also made a big thing about saying how she was 'only 8 stone' and had lost 7 pounds on the diet. Now... we are the same height, and I have been 8 stone. Pig's arse she is 8 stone. 9 and a half maybe, but not 8.

Apparently ALL these conversations were appropriate to have at either the dinner table or the breakfast table after I had hosted them and cooked for them in my own home.

DH thinks she is a twunt and said he won't have her in the house again. I told him that actually it is an interesting expercise in human behaviour. But a few years back, yes, it would have driven me back into my eating disorder.

So competitive undereating is a thing in real life.

(waits for posters to tell me that only eating half a bacon sarnie that has been made for you by your hostess is normal).

sorry for typos.... i have a sleeping cat on my lap. :)

No, no Footiefan2019 they don't eat it they inhale or hoover it, you must get the terminology correct. It's incredible how many kids on MN are super sporty and constantly eating yet you can see their rib cages as there is nothing of them, chinny reckon, aye.

I have noticed how much less I eat in my later 40's. What looks normal at one stage in life may not at another. I'm a bit overweight BTW and basically pretty greedy but still my biology does what it does and I can't eat as much as I could at 20.

I see it from another point of view - there are also people who have lost sight of what a normal portion is. There is someone in my family like this. She gave her 5 year old child 3 large sausages for dinner for example and their cereal bowls were always full to the brim. Both her children are obese now but she still struggles to see that this is because since weaning they have eaten much more than they should.

A 'large' pizza means different things in different places. We love papa johns and 2 of the largest pizzas they sell would easily feed 5.

I've got a genuinely tall for her age, very slim child. She takes after her dad, not me! When she was younger I was worried enough to take her to the GP in case there was an underlying health issue causing it rather than just genetics. We also had to have a letter from the GP to give to the school regarding the national weighing program so that we weren't referred further.

Competitive undereating really worries me as she approaches puberty, because there's genuinely nothing to her already and she's quite suggestible. Why can't people keep their opinions to themselves? It's seriously damaging, and I don't buy that it's borne of an altruistic desire to help everyone be healthier.

Sorry, that was a bit serious of me wasn't it?

Meh I don't see these as competitive under eating. People's views of a healthy diet are so skewed now. If you don't pig out you're apparently under eating.

Much more concerning is the over eating threads, where six donuts is a portion and posters are encouraged to binge eat as much as possible.

Yes, this ^^ definitely.

Mumsnet has always generally been weird about food.

Posters getting giggly over cake, competitive about over eating pizza and positively furious if their kid is invited to an after lunch party and there's hardly any food on the buffet.

And I will never ever forget the thread where the OP said she'd eaten 48 Creme Eggs in a weekend and so many people were 'impressed'

I've just checked and that was nearly 7 years ago but I still can't believe the responses

It's a matter if time before penis portion threads start. If you're a man reading this, take note of the amounts that your mum/MIL serve your wife this Xmas.
But women are smaller than men on average. A 5ft 3 woman does (usually) require less food than a 5ft 9 man. Obviously this isn't the case for all couples, or if you are very active and so on.

The difference between someone with a small appetite and competitive undereating is the judgement of others who eat more than you.

The faux lack of understanding that someone might have a bigger appetite or just be hungrier than you that day.

The description of anyone eating one large meal as 'ramming' or 'scoffing'. The idea is to insinuate anyone who eats a big meal is greedy, and therefore bad, and you with your healthy portion sizes are good, that's competition right there, just using ram to describe a big meal is competing.

The majority of women I know who are slim restrict their intake. I have to restrict my intake to remain slim day to day tbh. Im not going to pretend that I only naturally want to eat small portions, I naturally want to eat 3 course meals and whole pizzas. So sometimes I do, most days I don't but somedays I just fancy shock horror a potato and a roast!

Scrambled you had an important thing to say. I hope your DD is okay. And I agree with you that it is often people bringing things up is not altruistic.

"and, before I stopped carbs recently"

And this sort of ignorance is so damaging, no one stops carbs. Even cucumber has carbs, choosing not to eat bread rice, pasta and cakes does not mean you don't eat carbs, how are people so uneducated about rhe food they eat?

And as for the derision Of a "massive salad" . Again it's just daft. Many salads can be incredibly fattening, once you add oils, dressing, cheese, croutons, avocados, fatty meats or fishes, eggs etc. Seldom does someone say they had a massive salad and mean a pile of leaves.

We all know this, so snorting in derision that someone says they ate a massive salad indicates some serious food issues.

I had a massive salad yesterday, I had lettuce, cucumber etc dressed in lots of olive oil and some balsamic, with a tin of tuna mixed with a large quantity of mayo, two hard boiled eggs, an avocado and lots of feta cheese.

Several hundred calories in one meal. And yes it was low carb. And yes I'm loosing weight on it. Someone want to tell me it wasn't a massive salad? Because if you'd seen the large bowl I served it in, it was indeed massive.

I enjoy reading the what have you eaten today threads for inspiration but they often have competitive under eaters.

Breakfast: nothing
Snack: 5 almonds (unsalted)
Lunch: a huge salad
Dinner: half a steamed salmon fillet and a spoonful of spinach.

This thread is interesting. I can always finish a frozen pizza. A fresh home made one is definitely harder to finish.
Unfortunately couldn't start let alone finish a salad.
Not sure about tins of soup but maybe haha

Not on here but in real life I was once offered half a crumpet, because the eater couldn't possibly finish a whole one. Two things struck me about this; who cuts a crumpet in half and who on earth can't eat a whole crumpet (barring illness or having already eaten half a dozen). My one year old loves a crumpet, a whole one.

Why are people so tetchy about this?

There obviously ARE people who bang on about how little they eat and kill everyone else’s joy around food.

Just like there are greedy people who act like twats to try to justify their greedy behaviour.

I know both of these types. As a skinny young woman I worked with a very overweight older woman who inhaled crisps and biscuits pretty much constantly throughout the day and always had a huge takeaway for lunch. Fine, eat what you want, but she made constant comments about me being underweight (I wasn’t) and how could I survive on ‘rabbit food’ (normal lunch stuff like a sandwich or soup & bread). It was so fucking jarring.

However, later on I also worked with The World’s Most Annoying Vegan who ate raw broccoli and edamame beans for lunch, ‘couldn’t possibly manage’ more than a tiny salad when we are lunch out and commented on other people’s food choices and portion sizes ‘I’m surprised you finished that, I didn’t think you’d manage such a huge portion’. Oh fuck OFF.