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

3 fish fingers is nowhere near enough.

It was the friend who says that's 'stingy' not the DH eating them. If he's ok with it then it's enough.

I have 2 (previous gastric surgery) kids 2 and H 3 apparently I’m stingy

Do you mean you give your children 2 and your husband 3? If so that is stingy, depending on the age of the children. Under 5, then 2 would be ok, but over that I would give them 3. I use 5 to make a fishfinger sandwich, so would not serve your husband 3.

Thanks kate :)

I am immensely proud of myself for stopping the vomiting. I think that is why I am less worried about the weight gain. I can work on the weight gain. :)

I am 48, and was bulimic for decades.

I started low carbing about 25 years ago. It felt deviant. It was flying in the face of expert opinion (low fat) and supermarkets had whole isles dedicated to the sale of carbs (bread, cereal, cakes, biscuits, crisps etc) that were suddenly irrelevant. Despite this I persevered because I had PCOS and was borderline type II diabetic. I was not overweight.

It helped to view food in terms of the way that it is metabolised. The body views a mars bar, fruit, cereal etc in terms of carb/protein/fat and how it is broken down and whether it results in insulin production without prejudice. BTW beans on toast results in an extreme reaction similar to a large bag of jelly babies.

I have lunched with friends who waste time choosing the 'healthy' option (heavy on carbs) whilst I eat half a chicken or 12oz steak with salad (with lashings of full fat mayo). They see me 'pigging out' whilst being slim and are pissed off that so-called healthy eating means that they constantly police what they eat and still weigh more than they want to, suffer sugar highs and lows, are hungry etc.

ScrambledSmegs that must be a worry.but just keep at home helping her no what health is.with all food grousp.no bad no good.she can pig out or not want as much and its ok.that she is beautiful.and that being too thin can be just as bad as being too big.there is so much pressure and its always bad to be too big.but that if she was either it wouldnt matter.becauseyou can work on your health the healthy way.being your own erson though,and beleiving in yourself at any shape or size is way more important.and that gives you the tools to be a healthy happy person always.
share with her how pressured you felt maybe.my mum did this and told me she would always wish she had told her younger self to not worry about all this and not need to deprive or be something tiny!that she just wished she had been happy being herslef.
people because of the current way thin is better stigma is banded about they dont remind people that being too thin is deffinitely not a good thing.people are all sorts of shapes,height and personalities and that they should be loved for being them.your skin and body is only the vehicle for your journey in life

@KeepOnKeepingOnAgainandAgain do you eat any carbs? I've toyed with the idea as I genuinely enjoy high protein foods, veg etc but I ruin it by eating a lot of carb heavy foods which leave me sluggish.

We used to be served 4 fish fingers on our school dinners in primary school.

Now we usually have them in sandwiches so however many fit in the bread but if having them with chips and beans we'd probably have 5 or 6 each.

And eat the rest in a sandwich later.

JapaneseBirdPainting
oh yes hun your so right.the binge pinging was the nasty bastard illness.and i know there will be times of tough in your life where it will rear its head.but remember its never away to cope.i know you must know all this by now though!im not lecturing i swear.
but its just the way then illness wins.by not beig able to control you and then you not being able to control how you feel it pushed you down and down.but you can do this.you already have.
i bet in all those times before how you often thought in those moemnt you would never be able to stop?it was impossible?but.look.at.you.now! yaaya.

There's definitely a lot of disordered eating around but it isn't new. I come from a paternal family of disordered eaters where my father varied between pushing food on me and weight shaming me in public. His mother, born in 1900, died relatively young at 70 from a heart attack, caused by malnutrition according to the doctor; her stock phrase, passed into family legend, was "I know when my stomach's full". His 5'7" sister got quite literally blown over by the wind and broke her hip. He went from severe rigid diets to loads of "treats". I inherited my mother's family's Edwardian figure with strong thighs that could out press guys in the weights room but no idea of how to properly eat. Now I have a restricted diet through gastro problems which the loca hospital trust isn't interested in.

I always think it’s weird when people say a ‘treat dinner’ is something like ‘pasta with butter and salt and pepper’ - that’s hardly a treat!!

BTW beans on toast results in an extreme reaction similar to a large bag of jelly babies.
Brilliant!

As for me, I'm a bit of a fat pie with some distorted ideas about food and eating. Sometimes I'll scoff pizzas and on Christmas day I'll be shovelling in the roasties, sometimes I eat really healthily.

I don’t think that sounds distorted at all - that sounds very honest and like you’re very aware of your own eating habits. Slim people who brag about easily eating 10 slices of pizza and bigger people who claim they can’t eat more than two fish fingers in one sitting are more often than not obviously full of shit, lying to themselves as well as others. You might eat 10 slices of pizza in one evening, but then probably didn’t eat huge amounts for the rest of the week. You might only have 2 fish fingers - but then also finished off a whole pack of chocolate fingers later while watching a film... I don’t know who they’re trying to impress with this fibbing either because they definitely and bizarrely are saying it to impress/make a certain impression.

I'm trying to train myself to not use food as pleasure and jsut see it as fuel, if that makes sense.

But that’s disordered in itself. Food is a pleasure. To try to spend your life just taking in fuel without any enjoyment is bizarre.

I should also add that within a couple of months I was no longer borderline diabetic and my PCOS had been 'cured' - normal menstrual cycles and fertility restored (I had been told that it was extremely unlikely that I would conceive naturally, had assisted techniques on the NHS (they didn't fund IVF)).

DS1 and DS2 are now 18 (nearly 19) and 13.

Drs insisted PCOS can't be cured and the original diagnosis must have been wrong.

Some people genuinely believe if you aren't fat and don't smoke you won't get cancer.

The BMI rates are widely acknowledged to be too low. Being 30 stone is bad for you, but being 12-15 stone really doesn't make much difference.

Being a bit fat can be actively good for you.

Weight doesn't make that much of a difference to developing disease (except t2 diabetes) and if you've got cancer, you're a hell of a lot better off being fat to start with.

If you're old you're much safer having some padding as when (not if) you do get seriously ill it will probably save your life.

My friends mum has food issues. Once I went round to her house and her mum told my mum she'd "treat us to dinner out" - it turned out to be going to a department store cafe where she bought 2 sandwiches and 1 packet of crisps between 3 of us. Me and my friend were about 17/18 at the time so not small children.

When cooking she also used to put the food in the middle of the table for everyone to "help themselves" when what that actually meant was she would shame every single person for how much they took. Was horrible, but maybe I'm just not used to it as I'm not from a family who served food in the middle of the table, it was always plated up individually.

grumpbum if 2 and 3 is what you and your DH want that's fine. Everyone's portion sizes will be different.

I personally would have five.

What s not okay is acting like 2 or 3 is the healthy portion, and the fact you couldmt possibly eat 5 means that me eating 5 is greedy. Saying I am 'scoffing' 5.

That's sort of the point of why competitive undereating is so annoying. Because portions vary depending on a) a person size b) what else they have eaten that day c) whether they are trying to lose/maintain/gain weight

For example if someone is trying to lose weight, there's no point telling me they eat x, and me shovelling in y is excessive. Because I am not trying to lose weight so my portion will be bigger

Tetra - I went cold turkey at the start because I really couldn't control my carb intake and needed to stop the lows that led to eating more carbs. Now I find it easy to self regulate.

A guy that I'm friends with ate a tuna baguette from Greggs,along with a small packet of crisps then said 'That's me done for the day'. I looked at him in surprise and said 'What? You're not going to eat anything else today? It's only 2pm!'. He assured me that that was all he ate most days. I was how come he weighs the best part of 18 stone

@spacepyramid Sorry, I totally missed the sarcasm in your post

I do think that many posters on here have absorbed the mantra that we don’t know what healthy eating/weight truly is and kid ourselves if we think we’re not overeating if we don’t hugely restrict calories or food types.

I am way more overweight than my food intake would suggest, and while there may be various reasons for this, people in real life often comment on it. On here, no one believes that I’m not just lying to myself, or them. I once set out my daily eating, which was a set of meals so exemplary I can imagine them on a dietician’s food plan sheet, and was told it was far too much (three meals, no snacks), that I must underestimate the quantity (maybe my lunchtime salad had been a MASSIVE salad without my noticing, eh?), that I had no idea what healthy eating really was etc.

Being 30 stone is bad for you, but being 12-15 stone really doesn't make much difference. Really? A 5ft 5 woman would be obese at 13st.

I gave our kids 1 fish finger at around age 3, by 5 they had 2 and now they are 10 and 12 I give them 3 - the same as I eat when I have them. they would eat 10 each but that doesn't mean they should (same for me!).

varied between pushing food on me and weight shaming me in public

Yes i am familiar with this from some relatives, the 'feeding' accompanies the competitive underrating..gettign cross and upset when you don't eat a special cake they made, alongside 'only having a slither' for themselves, then also comments about your weight etc

It's all disordered, remembering that helps with not taking it personally

Ifnot - I suspect you are being sarcastic.

Are you suggesting that high glucose intake (whether that be in the form of sugared beans and processed white bread or jelly babies) does not have a similar metabolic effect or that this does not adversely effect people with diabetes?