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"

And shovelling. You forgot shovelling.

Ah, yes I did! I will never forget an MNer telling another poster that they weren’t losing weight as they were eating far too much food, the far too much being half a tin of soup. Apparently pointing out that it doesn’t provide enough calories was innapropriate, yet being pro-ana is fine. It is scary how many posts on food/diet threads are essentially pro-ana.

@10HailMarys you’ve made my day 😂

I’d be hard pressed to not stab her with a desert fork

Could she have an eating disorder. From someone who has, it sounds as if she is trying to justify eating it to herself

Quite likely, but I'll still thank them not to attempt to pass it on to me. It may not be their fault but it isn't mine either and I'm not joining in the shit games. Wouldn't be helping them either.

I always get comments on the HUGE salads or portions of veg I eat with my lunch from colleagues or acquaintances as if it’s obscene. Somehow it is so offensive they have to say something as if I’m trying to set an example. I’m just trying to eat my lunch in peace because I’m hungry but somehow it triggers the same attention seekers to start another conversation of how naughty they’re being with their lunch. Really bored of it. Just eat your donuts and shut up about it.

My mum is like this, I don't know if it's performative or not, but she goes on about portion sizes being too big.

However, if I make her a roast dinner, she eats every last scrap of it!

I remember going out for lunch with work colleagues a while ago and I was the only one who finished my meal. We then had a dessert, most of them left half of that too. I could have happily hoovered up the lot. No idea if they were having another dinner that day (I wasn't) but I really did wonder how they could eat so little.

On other occasion I had soup in a cafe and asked why they'd only given me half a portion

I am a size 8. I exercise a lot, so I can eat a lot normally

I also eat huge bowls of salad. They are huge. But they are salad. That's the point - you can eat a lot of it!

I could go another one of the same?

These are exactly the kind of people that get home and sit in front of a cupboard and stuff in a packet of biscuits sideways. Just nod and smile.

It's just really rude to comment on anyone's portion size and how much they do or don't eat of it, regardless of what they are eating and what size they are.

I remember when I lived on my own and my Dad commented about my huge bags of shopping and how could I possibly eat all that. Except it was a full week's shopping and I was thin at the time so it mostly consisted of healthy vegetables and raw ingredients. That interaction left me feeling pretty shit < how greedy I was needing all that food> and as I have a pretty unhealthy relationship with my weight and food, I vowed to never say anything about what people were eating unless it was commenting positively about how nice it looked or similar.

This is really common with Baby Boomers. DM and MiL are both like this. DM never eats any whole thing (she cuts a Weetabix in half). In fairness she’s tiny. My MiL isn’t and I suspect only protests about food portions in public

Had a horrible time growing up with my DM everything I put in my mouth was commented on. Constant comments on my weight (was a consistent size 10 up until uni)

My daughter and her generation laugh at this now. They’re called ‘Almond Mums’. I wish I’d been able to laugh at it!

It's a very unattractive trait and unless the person has an ED, really bloody rude.

My ex-MiL was very lovely but so joyless around food. Breakfast was always a tiny bowl of cereal followed by grapefruit. Lunch, a cheese or ham salad sandwich. Evening meal, a ready meal with a bit of veg. She made a big thing of never eating between meals and she would only eat out at 2-for-£9.99 type places, where she’d make a fuss about the “huge” portion sizes every single time. She loved pointing out that she was a size eight and that she had no interest in food or cooking - “I suppose I’d better get that Sainsburys lasagne out of the freezer, then, sigh…I’d be happy with an apple after that cheese sandwich I had at midday but [ex-FiL] will want a meal, sigh”.

It was kind of draining.

My family have a morbid obsession with portion sizes, food in general and being overweight. They can't help but comment on what I'm eating, it drives me mental. DM has to point at her stomach every time I see her and tell me she can't understand why she is overweight, seeing as she 'doesn't eat'. Diabetic DF swings between telling me I can't be eating enough to survive, and then sits at dinner calling me out for 'stuffing it in' when I went back for seconds - a whole single extra roast potato, whilst himself eating a second bowl of cake and custard. For context, I had a gastric bypass some time ago due to being VERY overweight (surprise surprise) and I can FEEL their eyes watching my every mouthful.

I have a relative that does similar, always saying how she never eats lunch or never really fancies eating a dinner . Yet not exactly slim. I don't understand the fascination in pretending not to hardly eat .

😂

I've a friend who had gastric surgery to lose about 10 stone and now does that 'oh I just eat like a bird, I'm such a delicate flower' thing even though her stomach was literally reduced by surgery to the size of an eggcup. It is quite annoying.

This might be me. Every time I go out to a restaurant for dinner, I really look forward to it but can only eat a small amount of it. I don't do this at home, I love my food and clear my plate, whether that's pasta or a stir fry or whatever. It's weird. I think it's because restaurant food is a lot richer than the food I cook, and also because I always have a starter (as I prefer savoury to sweet things) and then I fill up too quickly and can't finish my main. Maybe I'm less relaxed as well. Who knows!

As a small eater myself, while it is annoying you please consider that (a) they might be trying to pre empt comment (because no meal I eat passes without comment on how much I ate ffs) or (b) they feel eternal guilt at not being able to finish it (there's starving children in Africa etc)

🏆The winner

I see a lot of this and it’s really annoying yes but it’s rooted in deep insecurity for many of these women. I find it’s primarily my Mum’s generation and older 60+. My Mum comments constantly on what I eat but I eat big meals and don’t really snack. She eats tiny amounts every hour or so, which is why she doesn’t eat full meals!

A lot of women on this thread justifying their big portion sizes by the fact that they do loads of exercise. Which is pretty much the same thing tbh.

I would remind her that pelicans are birds and also that it's really boring listening to the same thing, rinse and repeat.

It annoys me so much that when my ex sister in law had a go at my brother for eating another bit of cake, I asked her what about the handful of biscuits she'd eaten in the kitchen? I wouldn't ever comment on what people eat but the minute that somebody does comment on what somebody else is eating, they're fair game.

Mine was the same! Once when I was 18 she saw me walking up the drive to our house and came out to say 'oh my god you look massive darling.' I was nine and a half stone and a size 10 - which is more or less what I've always been (I am 5'7). But I've always felt fat. She always said she was only seven and a half stone but she clearly wasn't - and my sister similarly lied about her weight and still does - and the weird thing was that I believed them, it was years before it dawned on me that I was actually slimmer than either of them so unless I had really heavy legs or something, it was unlikely either of them were seven and a half stone.

Do you make a song and dance of it or just quietly stop eating and/or ask for a doggy bag?

If you're doing the first then this thread is all about you. If not, then you're fine.