To wish my relative would stop harping on about portion sizes

[Averagesizedsalad]

I have a relative who is doing my head in with their repeated "Oh I'm so teeny tiny, oh this is so much food however will i manage" dramas. I need to rant before I explode! Share with me your infuriating virtue signalling teeny tiny stories? Maybe I am just extra cranky because I am HUNGRY everytime I see them because I'm breastfeeding 🤷‍♀️

Said relatives recent examples:

• When served a totally average sized salad for lunch, lamented "Oh this is so large, however will I have room for dinner later? I shall have to skip dinner, this salad will keep me full until morning" (I WISH I was joking, but alas I am not)

• Recently cooked a meal of pasta for lunch, in which I could count the number of pasta pieces on one hand. Of course accompanied by "Oh what a large meal, I shan't want dinner later at all!" It equated to about 1 normal sized portion of pasta dish split between 2 people, so fair enough that might be considered a light lunch if you're expecting a big dinner later, but not so much food that you wouldn't need to eat later on!

• Lamented that after having a normal sized slice of cake at a party that they were "Being sooooo naughty and would need to go on a big diet afterwards". It's a single slice of cake at a birthday party for goodness sake! You're not eating 1/4 of a cake everyday for dessert!

Obligatory: relative doesn't suffer from any health issues that might result in a small appetite blah blah blah. They are just insufferable and enjoy attention.

Thanks for listening to a hungry lactating mother complain after having about 10 curls (pieces? Squirls? What is the correct term here??) of pasta for "Lunch"

‘I was up at five doing a two hour workout, mummy dearest.’

Or maybe:

"I eat like a bird, you know..."

"Well, I can believe that. Dinosaurs and birds are very closely related."

Excellent! I’d also be tempted to wonder aloud what kind of bird they eat like. A gannet maybe, eating huge quantities of fish every day? Or perhaps a vulture, killing their prey then eating animal carcasses?

Work colleague said she only had " 1 piece of toast" (dramatic pause) "all day"

I find it is best to ignore someone like this, they just want attention.

You could read the whole box for yourself?? I used to have to share the back of the box with my brother, and he always read more than was fair!

It sounds like you could be normalising large portion sizes for yourself, this could pile on the pounds if left unchecked.

Oh, yawn.

Kind of how threads and forums work really. If we all keep things in our heads and don't share experiences, opinions we may not share elsewhere... it'd be pretty quiet in here!

Boring too!

All the different opinions is what makes Mumsnet interesting.

@RoseAndRose very true I eat far less than I used to but am still heavier. I never mention portion sizes or comment. My old line manager, I’m a similar age to her now used to say she had to eat 30% less post menopause to maintain weight. She was sadly bloody correct.

Shoving your head into the entrails of a wildbeest?

I was in a holiday group once with a woman who announced at EVERY FUCKING MEAL that she ate like a bird, she wouldn’t need much, couldn’t possibly need food already because she’d had breakfast a mere 6 hours ago. On and on it went.

I could have coped with that, but she then started commenting on what we were eating (“Gosh, all this exotic food, I don’t know how you can stomach it!”), how much we ate (“I couldn’t possibly eat all that!”) and how often we ate (“Gosh, you girls are always eating!”). That’s right love, we’re bloody starving because we got up at 6am and have been walking up hills all morning.

She also felt the need to tell our guide that we were always eating (we had three meals a day), couldn’t understand why we ate so much (“I don’t know where they put it all!”) etc etc.

Mind you, she was an absolute nightmare in so many other ways that the performative under-eating was just comedic relief after a while!

😂😂😂

You must have been so tempted to say "ONE piece of toast? All to YOURSELF?"

<thoughts😶>

<opinions😶>

<😶tumbleweed >

It's seagulls. Because these people always order a starter as their main then steal all your chips.

😂

😂😂

😂

These are all hilarious!

I'm loving the turn this thread has taken.

We really could do with a "like" button.

Why we didn't get one when they updated the site I don't know.

Yeah, there's always weird as fuck comments on Mumsnet about food

"Peas are sugar bombs/fruit only every few months as it's too sweet"

But my favourite is the row I got into with people who said pizza was 'unhealthy'

No it's not, it's bread/tomatoes/cheese - the same constituents as a cheese and tomato sandwich.

When your body eats it it's EXACTLY the same 🤔

People are mental about food

I was very tempted 😂

Otherwise she is ok to work with.

But that's what makes them so DELICIOUS! 😄

I think they try to be good, ordering the not junk option and end up eating it anyway (as tempted by the other person's)plus the healthier option which gives them more calories as junk added to healthier.

They would be better of just getting the chips only if that is what they really want.

I can’t stand it. “Oh my goodness, I couldn’t eat all that”. “Oh, I just couldn’t, there’s just sooo much foooood!” “I don’t understand how you can eat so much, I’d be ready to burst” and so on ad infinitum. We. Don’t. CARE!

The worst is when they try to convince you how healthy their tiny portions of nothing are and how everyone should eat like that. I remember a woman I worked with many years ago hot desking near me for the first time and making a thing of the size of my lunch. She was sat there clutching a smoothie, so I said “Well, there’s no way I could last all day on a drink.”

She replies, smug as anything, “This smoothie has everything I need” and then went into mind-numbing detail about the 428 vitamins and minerals it contained. “I have this at lunchtime and it gives me all the energy I need for the afternoon.”

Apparently the only thing she needed that wasn’t in the smoothie was the chocolate raisins. I’m guessing she needed those too, as I saw her inhale a bag less than two hours after her magical appetite-busting smoothie.