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"

No patience at all for food commenters.

They get one strike and then told nicely but firmly that I don't want to listen to their commentary on what I am eating, they are eating, the woman next to us is eating or what Valerie from No.42 had for dinner last week.

Likewise food stealers. Those who performatively order a small side salad and then help themselves to your chips/bread/dessert. They get told that taking food off other people's plates without invitation is very rude.

Can you tell I have people like this in the extended family? I do try to be as gentle as possible my fucking hell it grinds my gears when they launch into their 'oh I couldn't possibly manage more than a morsel of dust' routine, in front of young children, particularly girls who are so susceptible to these disordered messages about food. Luckily their parents are all over this so it's largely stopped now.

I work with someone like this. Yes she is thin but she drinks like a fish and socially smokes. Goes on sunbed too.

How do you know she's obese from overeating? She might be on medication, or have a condition that makes losing weight difficult; and her sandwich/salad is actually an effort to lose weight; and not "performative" at all.

Tp be fair alot of portion sizes are huge and people need less calories as they get older, however no need to comment on it

Lucky, lucky, lucky you.

Come and meet my family.

Here's one idea to try: Put the food (the salad, or the pasta, cake or w/e) in a big dish in the center of the table. Then give relative an empty plate, and tell them to help themselves. Job done. They may still want to inform you of how little they can manage though!

I used to be taken to lunch a lot by media agencies. In theory very nice, but the 10th time every single woman at the table interrogated the waiters about gluten, no-bread options, carb content, whether the dressing could be served on the side, if they could have a wafer of jackfruit instead of potato fries I realised I'd rather just eat a sandwich and packet of crisps at my desk.

Ah yes, you’ve reminded me my mum does this too! She doesn’t like cheese and always acts disgusted when people have it after dinner, once describing them as “lumps of fat” whilst we were eating it 😂

My mil will eat a full meal out , then tell another relative , she only had the soup and half a roll !

There was a post on here a few days ago from a woman who apparently had a health condition whereby she still put on weight despite only eating 700 cals a day. Your body can't maintain itself on so few calories.

My friend also has some sort of competitive undereating thing going on, has side salad for lunch but sneaks biscuits from her desk all day every day and will still moan about the salad being too much.

Gah.

A lot of older women do this- we have been so conditioned to think women shouldn't eat, or enjoy eating, or enjoy anything too "physical" that we find a million ways to apologise for ourselves. Try not to judge her too harshly however irritating it is. And oh, it is irritating! Blame society!

I also think that irritating that this must be, there's a bit of a rush to always assume malign intent, that it's always based in showing off and putting down larger people.
In reality being 'teeny tiny' for most people is not a fixed characteristic like brown eyes. Remaining so depends heavily on dietary choice. Many very slim women have been OW at some point. Many live in dread of becoming or returning to being OW, particularly at life stages where we're constantly told its unavoidable. For these women preoccupation with their own portion size is not something they do to upset fatter people. They're genuinely talking to and policing themselves. Commenting on other people's portions is a different matter of course.

Do they have issues around eating / eating disorder? Id wonder this as they are making such a big deal over it everytime

My SIL is like this. For years she has made me feel like an elephant for eating a perfectly normal serving of normal food. She winds me up so much that I now refuse to meet up with her if it involves a meal or food, and DH goes on his own.

I also think that irritating that this must be, there's a bit of a rush to always assume malign intent, that it's always based in showing off and putting down larger people.

"I'm the only one having a small pizza because I'm not a pig" makes the intent pretty clear.

There's just no reason to draw attention to how much you're eating compared to others. Why would you do that? In what way does it enhance the enjoyment for people? Why is it not enough simply to eat what you want and leave the rest?

I worked with someone exactly like this. And back in the days when we weren't agile hot-desking we had bins under each desk. She would come over after lunch and actually look in bins to see what people
Had had for lunch.

I just came back from a similar holiday and I ended up with my milk supply dropping as a result of the constant small portions. Am fuming at myself for not putting my foot down earlier.

One day we got fish and chips for lunch literally at midday and the rest of the group decided we didn't need tea as a result, we could just have a slice of toast. I told them I'd be breastfeeding at least three times through the night before breakfast and made chilli nachos. Everyone ended up having "just a few, to not be rude" in the end...

It also took me until nearly the end of the holiday to insist on ice-cream at the beach after so many "oh we don't really need an ice-cream". Wish I could turn back time and just take my kids off for daily ice-creams whilst the sunny weather lasted!

It really is weird!

I've never met one of these "teeny tiny competitive undereaters" that flock around some MN posters.

Maybe it's better to be around slim people who make it look a real effort to stay that way; someone overweight can feel good about thinking how huge the "teeny tiny" would be if they ate more than 5 pieces of pasta or half a cup of soup.
Imagine how annoying it would be to be around someone who eats what they want and still stays slim, like my SIL.

My mother used to do this. When I was a child she wasn't so bad, but she always had a bit of an obsession about people she deemed fat and would always comment on them with a sort of horrified fascination. She would comment on portion sizes and make a big thing of giving me smaller portions because I was the girl and of course I wouldn't want to eat much. Of course, it made me want to stuff my face given half a chance. When I had my own house and she came to us for a meal, I deliberately gave her small portions to avoid her ostentatiously leaving most of her meal, but that didn't stop her commenting on what everyone else had.

it really came to the fore in later life. It became really tedious that her automatic reaction on being offered food was "Oh, I couldn't possibly eat that, it's FAR too much for me", and she would start saying that she couldn't eat anything before she even knew what it was. We went to endless trouble to get her things she liked, and if it was something she really liked just occasionally she would forget about it being FAR too much and eat it all. Ironically, as dementia set in we could actually get better nutrition into her because she would forget that it was only half an hour since she'd been persuaded with great difficulty to eat half a sandwich, and would eat the other half. When she was in hospital, I had to make an effort to go in at mealtimes because the nurses didn't have time to persuade her to eat and she literally would have eaten nothing without me jollying her along. With hindsight, I really think she did have a bit of an eating disorder from quite an early age.

I’ve just had friends staying who insisted on cheese and biscuits for dinner every day we’d had a hot lunch. It drove me wild. You don’t dictate what food your host provides for meals and a plateful of cheese and biscuits has loads of calories in and no fibre. By day three I was rebelling and on day five I insisted on a mumsnet massive salad for us all. It had fewer calories than cheese too. So there.

My all time favourite was someone saying they'd had a banana and someone snapping back "well that's basically like having a mars bar". Never change, MN

Hahahaha

i wonder if there is history of an eating disorder,but i would find it annoying as well

Omg how have you not thrown the entire salad over her 🤣

I think I’d just reply “good for you” or “ok” whenever she says it and just try and ignore it/change the conversation.

I do have one like this at work.

The other day she had her lunch for break because she was so hungry (fair enough we’ve all done that before) but she kept on saying how she won’t eat until tomorrow breakfast now and she definitely won’t have any lunch or dinner etc. We then saw her sneaking in a massive portion of cheesy chips for lunch.

She’s also the type who goes on about healthy eating and looks down her nose at us if there are any treats on the table, yet her drawer is full to the brim of junk food.

Fortunately we have a staff member who says exactly what she thinks and is very confident in her body as she eats well and goes to the gym everyday and does look incredible.

So when this woman is saying how she can’t possibly eat another bite until tomorrow, our other colleague will pipe up saying how she could never do that because she loves her food and it’s really unhealthy to skip meals because that is how you fuel your body etc.

It’s hard not to smirk when someone plays her at her own game.

If catering for such a person, I’d just serve them minute portions and see if that shuts them up.
However there’s no excuse, ever, for people like this who then pinch ‘just a couple’ of someone else’s chips. Or want ‘just a tiny taste’ of someone else’s pudding.