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"

Doughnuts don’t keep well. It would be rock hard the next day and just end up in the bin anyway.

Urgh yes- I dont WANT to share something you have bloody chosen, I want to choose my own food thanks, like a grown adult. I find this so bloody rude/entitled.

My mum is the same.. a trend here. Also a boomer.
Definitely sees it as shameful to be overweight. Always used to eat different dinners to us, hers involved salad and cottage cheese. Would pull a disgusted face if offered potato - food of the devil. However she would graze constantly throughout the day.

She lost weight in her 50s, post divorce, and has been v slim since. Probably has osteoporosis.
Still claims to dislike certain foods, but her 2nd husband put it to her recently that she must like cheese and biscuits as she gets up in the night to eat them

As long as you don’t go on about it, it’s fine. Eating your fill. Saying “that was lovely thanks”. Is absolutely fine. Even a “It was delicious but I’m full” as plates are being collected is fine.

It’s all the dramatics before any food has even been eaten and while it is being eaten and at every effing meal that’s a pain.

My MIL was like this, and tried to control everyone else’s eating as well. Nobody could possibly eat two substantial meals in a day in her eyes (where substantial was more than half a sandwich if you were female). FIL seems to be going the same way, unfortunately; yesterday DH and I came in from slogging round 18 holes of golf in a howling gale and FIL declared that because he had had chips the day before everyone just needed a cheese sandwich for dinner. I went to the chippy for myself.

I used to make a cake every year for a Christmas party. Every woman (except me) would wait for me to cut a slice of cake and then exclaim it was too big for them and insist on a slice 'half that size'. The next woman would insist on a slice half the size of the woman before her etc etc. It was pathetic.

She is building self confidence on shaming others for their appetite. This is not a nice relative. Stop seeing her

It’s is very odd. I can’t eat big potions at all- I am a snacked. Some days I hardly eats just because I am not hungry and other days I graze all day because I am really hungry. However, I never make comments about food. It’s my business what I eat and don’t eat and when.

Fantastic phrase & spot on - performative daintiness.

With my DM its how "sickly" and "rich" food looks. "How could anyone eat that?"

My mum does this, especially the use of the word ‘sickly’ to describe other people’s food. FFS how little self awareness must someone have to not think describing others’ food as ‘sickly’ is negative and insulting.

I am lying in wait for someone to say they 'eat like a bird' so I can ask 'What, worms and things?' just to see the look on their face.

My elderly mum used to drive me nuts in restaurants ordering wine by the glass and then doing the fluttery "ooh, ooh, stop, not so much" thing when the waiter came to pour it.

I remember ages ago a thread on here where a woman said she found fruit so incredibly sweet, she could only manage a piece every few months

JOEY DOESN'T SHARE FOOD!

Totally agree!

I especially hate the ‘performative undereaters’ who aren’t even consistent. I have a friend who always only orders a main course in a restaurant, doesn’t always finish it, but will drink three of so glasses of wine with her dinner.

Whereas I don’t drink alcohol and will often eat a main and a dessert, and water or Diet Coke. She will then make comments about ‘how can you manage a dessert?!’

Yet I know that if I pointed out my main and dessert are probably similar in calories to her main and three glasses of wine she’d get quite defensive. And she’d think I was being very petty.

TikTok calls them ‘almond moms.’ Look it up - many others like you who also find it infuriating.

I worked with someone like this. I went on a client holiday with her once. We started work at 6.30 am, one of us bathing and dressing the client and helping her with meds and breakfast, the other packing the van with luggage and equipment we would need, then changing her bed and tidying her room. We then drove to our holiday destination, which was about 240 miles, stopping once in a layby for a cup of tea. After about 150 miles, I said "We'd better stop in the next town for something to eat", and my colleague said "Oh, OK, but I couldn't possibly eat anything , I'm still full from breakfast" Aware she'd left home just after 6am, I asked her what she'd eaten. "Half a slice of toast..but it was from a medium sliced loaf, so it was equal to one slice of her usual thin sliced bread".
She also laughed at over weight people dancing, or eating in cafes. Most unpleasant.

Or maybe you were just cutting the slices too big?
Ime it can be quite hard to get the person who has made the cake to cut you a small bit when you don’t have much room. Someone says ‘half that size!’ and the slicer cuts a piece that is about 20% smaller so the next person says ‘half that size!ʼ and so it goes on.
If they were actually halving it each time you would be down to a crumb by about the fifth person 😂

I've only read the first few posts, and apologies if this has already been suggested but instead of dishing up a plate for everyone, what I would do is this.
Dish up for everyone except her and when she asks where her portion is, say "I've noticed that you comment on the portion size whenever I dish yours up, so you can have as much or as little as you want, it's in the pot/casserole/whatever. There's a plate left out for you. Please help yourself."

Then there's no wiggle room for her to pass comment, particularly when she's giving herself the portion.

Just put something out for yourself for lunch or dinner and not put anything out for her. When she questions it just say: "Well you are always telling me that after (whatever she had for the meal before) you couldn't eat again that day, so I am saving you the anxiety of what you would do if I put anything in front of you".

This. No one cares about how little you eat.

You're fine just as long as you don't make a production out of it. "Thank you, it was delicious, I just couldn't finish it" is all you have to say. Even I can't always finish everything. It's not the appetite size, it's the performance.

"A vulture?"

My late husband always wanted a very small piece of the grandchildren's birthday cakes, there is now an accepted family measurement, 'a grandad slice', a scalpel would be useful to cut it!

I have a relative who tells me EVERYTHING she eats, without being asked. She loves to tell people she has “the appetite of a bird” 🤨 that’s her actual phrase. “I eat like a bird, as your know”.

She rattles off lists of what she’s had. I actually don’t eat anywhere near what she’s had and am certainly not impressed with what a dainty soul she is.

Last Saturday she came round after breakfast and started listing what she’d had. “Only one small sausage. Barely the size of my index finger, honestly. Then eggs, but without the yolk, you know me, I eat like a bird. Then I grilled some toast. I only ever grill it. Granary loaf, it’s mostly seeds…” By this point we’d had the grand total of one cup of coffee for breakfast as usual. I just nod and change the subject, it’s exhausting.