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"

Send her links to Coleen Christiansen on YT

A while ago I was inspired to write this poem after realising that everywhere I'd worked had one of these...............

GLUTTONY

Oh here she comes, like a hippo in heels
the office ‘food monitor’ who spies on my meals

Go and sit down, you look like a fool
with your hands on your hips, all wide eyes and drool

No you can’t have a look, no you can’t have a sniff
no I won’t swap with yours, unless yours is a spliff

I open a salad, she says, “eugh, is that grass?”
and wrinkles her nose like she’s just smelt her ass

She wants my Greggs pasty bag to rub on her cheek
then she’s lost in the moment, the food fetish freak

I open a cake box and she runs to fetch Marion
so now I’ve got two of them, like vultures on carrion

She says, “I know that I shouldn’t but I feel that I must”
and snatches my donut, she’s broken my trust

‘’Jeez, you fat lump eat your own food
this daily assault on me is just so damn rude’’

‘’I’m sick of your diet lies and that ‘glandular’ bollocks
oh and on ‘fish and chip Friday’ it’s not haddock, it’s pollock’’

Frozen in time, like an elk in a bind
her eyes well with tears, how could I be so unkind?

Her mouth starts to tremble, the jam falls from her lips
still, it’s better mashed in the carpet than stuck on her hips

Is it just to show off show slim they are, or to have a dig at you because you aren't so slim?

I have a colleague who’s performative about how little she can drink from a cup of tea. If someone includes her in the tea round and gives her a standard cup of tea she’ll drink around a centimetre of it then be all like “Goodness I can’t possibly drink such a large cup, I only have a small stomach.” Makes a massive drama every time.

😂

Here is Mine; written just now.

She Ate Nothing But Toast
She Would Never Boast
That Toast Was the Most
She Would Silently Roast
Who Had More Than Toast

The worst is when someone asks you to cut them a small slice of cake. It wouldn’t matter if you cut it with a sodding vegetable peeler - they’d still gasp and say “I said small!!”

A haiku in honour of competitive undereaters:

”You eat so much food!
If I ate like that I’d burst!
…Can I try your chips?”

😎😍

God, yes. Best thing to do is give them the knife to do it themselves if you can resist plunging it into them first.

My friend is like this, we went out for dinner and all she had was a small plate of broccoli and she offered me some of that.

I can't imagine paying for just broccoli unless it was slathered in cheese.

She sounds insufferable. However, you refer to ‘average’ and ‘normal’ a lot when referring to portion sizes but you do realise that these labels don’t mean anything because one man’s normal is another man’s or enough or too much.

My grandmother does this and so do my in laws

"We're small people, we can only manage small portions"

It would probably annoy me more if I saw them more regularly

😂

Deep fried butter on a stick is real... apparently, but you'll need to go to the US, apparently State Fairs are where they can be found.

I've worked hard not to discuss what I will and won't eat - after years of being fat and food shamed by a 'ooh no one could EVER need to eat THAT much' mother and a 'you don't need to eat that, fatso' father - it is quite hard with ARFID and insulin dependent diabetes, but with a combination of not eating around such people, and a bit of practice I think I've got it cracked!

It is all very well saying 'no one cares what you do/don't eat' but then you read threads here where fat people are always referred to as 'guzzling' and 'stuffing' and 'cramming' whatever into their faces... rather than simply 'eating food'... It is quite clear quite a lot of people DO have a rather unhealthy interest in what I consume!

Age however has been a wonderful thing and a swift 'fuck off and mind your own business' does the trick usually - I am now of an age where I just don't give a shit, nor will I take any.

My mother was also a 'WE won't need to eat xyz/until next Christmas' type... and thus would follow all sorts of snarky comments when 6 hours later following a tiny salad, I did indeed need to eat something else.

I did sarcastically respond to a 'I eat like a sparrow' comment a few days back, as our garden sparrows are consuming an astonishing amount of seed... from someone who is generally quite annoying about food ('should you be eating that dressing on your salad?' ......grrrrr)

"Oh? You constantly graze on high fat seeds and meal worms... wow, is that a new trendy diet?'

Much spluttering and 'no well I mean I don't eat much'..

"Well, small birds eat an ENORMOUS amount of food to survive, several times their body weight each day, I wouldn't use that as a descriptor again, it is rather silly'...

They probably won't talk to me again. I probably won't care!

People who do that are complete dicks (and probably have deeply unhealthy attitudes towards food). However on the flipside are people who insist on giving you vast portions then get upset or make pointed comments when you can't finish it.

I eat a lot and I eat croissants and chocolate and stuff most days, I'm not a starving waif, but I graze since I have stomach issues and can't eat a lot in one sitting. And it does get tiring having to hear passive aggressive comments because I didn't finish my washing up bowl-sized portion of pasta or whatever. But I'm also sure my loved ones think that's a "normal" portion size because to them it is. I guess normal is whatever is normal to you.

You. Are. A. Genius. H-o-w-l-i-n-g!!!!!!!!

Brilliant! 🤣

Oh I did forget to mention, on the odd occasion relative doesn't make a song and dance about how much food there is, they will instead make a song and dance about how large the pieces of food are for their tiny tiny mouth. It's bizarre!

So let's say they've been served, I don't know, a reasonable sized bowl of chicken stir fry and aren't commenting on the volume of food this time, they will instead lament:

"Oh this is yummy but look how large the peppers are! So big! I shall have to cut them into 1/256th sizes as I simply can't fit them in my mouth otherwise"

"This chicken is lovely, but I only have a small mouth you see. Silly me with my tiny mouth! I wish I could fit a whole piece of cubed chicken in my mouth in one go like you can with your big mouths!"

"Oh I bet you're sick of waiting for me to cut up all these noodles into smaller pieces, but I just couldn't fit them into my small mouth otherwise they're far too long!"

🤨

It’s rude to mention what others eat at the end of the day.

My MIL once complained I shouldn’t be hungry because SHE had a takeaway the night before.

i wish I had a donut just now!

I have an aunt like this.

Gorwing up she called me a disgusting fat little pig - for eating an entire banana. Apparently no-one needs to eat an entire banana. It's disgusting. Surely I could not then eat again that day?

Last time I went to hers for a dinner party she served 5 filets of salmon to go between 7 adults.

She has an eating disorder. And she has passed that on to her daughter and they both seem to have made good inroads to passing it on to her 9 year old GDD who looks up everything she eats in a little calorie counting book she has. My aunt and cousin thinks this is funny and sweet.

That made me laugh.

My mother used to say to my siblings and I of an evening; 'I hope you are not hungry, because I've been out to lunch'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_butter

Unbelievably, it does exist! You could try it at home....

That's the origin of our family measure mentioned earlier of a 'Grandad slice', so thin it's forensic. A scalpel works better than a vegetable peeler!

The most annoying things about the 'just a small slice for me' fuckers I knew is their not slim. It's not working so why carry on? what's the incentive to make a bag of crisps last three days if you're still overweight?

One of them is doing the cambridge diet. AGAIN. After putting multiple stone back on.