My restrictive eating triggers people

[Cadelo]

I wouldn’t say I have an issue with food but I am very mindful of what I eat.

I am 30 and spent a lot of my 20s depressed because of my weight. I love being able to put on a dress and not worry how I will look in it. I love not always having to go for the flattering option. I don’t miss the comments where people made me feel like shit unintentionally - “her body is thick like yours”.

3 years ago I lost 60 pounds. It was not pleasant. I never want to go back.

I just know my controlled eating annoys people. My own sister will invite me over for a takeaway and get annoyed when we order pizza and I only have a slice/or 2 and make a big salad to go along with it. “You only live once”. Blah blah blah.

I’m getting enough calories to maintain my weight. My bmi is also healthy. Some people call me scrawny but like I said I have a healthy bmi.

So I do take scales on holiday as I weigh myself daily. And my SIL made a comment that if she sees them she’s going to chuck them in the bin. She’s a normal weight. I’m glad her life was never small due to confidence issues. If I see I am over a certain weight I just know to eat lightly for a week or so.

I know we will sit down for breakfast (we are going to Greece in 2 weeks) and she will say something or try to tempt me when I order a fruit platter. Or constantly trying to get me to have an ice cream (I do occasionally - and when I do it becomes this massive thing).

I’m so sick of my eating being a problem for others.

I have the same story. Lost loads of weight and I now also take scales on holiday. Travel scales are light and modern and easily fit in luggage. I don’t weigh in every day on holiday, I just like to keep an eye on it so I don’t put on loads in 2 weeks. Can’t see why anyone else gets a say in that, hardly the crime of the century nor ruinous to your fortnight sunshine break.

Congratulations on losing all that weight. That is no mean feat.

your scale sounds a bit like a comfort blanket. I don’t see a problem with you wanting to weigh yourself every day. It is nobody else’s business. Your SIL probably has a problem with you “suddenly” being so disciplined when you were fat before. Bet she wishes you were fat again as your new size makes her uncomfortable as she relates to you differently now you are slim.

This is disordered thinking and it is a problem. It’s a problem I have a lot of empathy for, and I totally get where it comes from, but it IS a problem.

I consider myself to have disordered eating (constant calorie awareness & intervals of low intake to catch any creeping weight before it gets bad.) Your comment about never having more than 1/2 an extra lb to lose resonated with me …but like I said, I think I have some disordered eating going on. Be good to yourself.

Luckily I hope you’ll find lots of delicious healthy light options in Greek cuisine. I lived off amazing grilled fish & seafood… so good & I felt great!

OP, honestly I get why you're doing what you're doing and kinda good for you!

Some people have never struggled with their weight or been overweight. Some people are naturally slimmer and will never know how awful it feels to feel uncomfortable in your own skin.

I'm currently on a journey (again) right now to try and lose weight - 48lb this time, I'm 14lb down.

I'm going to succeed, and when I do i am determined to keep on top of it this time like you're doing.

For people with a healthy relationship with food it's easy to say "have a few weeks off and then just lose any weight gain when you get back", but not everyone works like that.....for me, a week or two of mad eating tends to lead to months and months of constant "ill start again once X is out the way".

You're doing what you need to do to protect your physical health. Well done.

OP said that she is making changes as soon as she sees 1/2lbs gain which is what my comment was addressing. You can win on MN if you read posts carefully

Are you reading 1/2 lbs gain as 1 to 2 lbs or as half a pound?

I took it to mean 1 to 2 lbs because most scales can barely even register half a pound and I agree that would be a bit ridiculous because it doesn't allow for natural daily fluctuations. But I do think some other posters have interpreted the OP's post as meaning she doesn't allow a fluctuation of more than half a pound before trying to rectify it.

For people with a healthy relationship with food it's easy to say "have a few weeks off and then just lose any weight gain when you get back", but not everyone works like that.....for me, a week or two of mad eating tends to lead to months and months of constant "ill start again once X is out the way".

This completely hits the nail on the head and I think it's something that people who have never known what it is to struggle to maintain a healthy weight without a huge amount of effort and self discipline and dedication to the cause can never understand.

And of course there are those who are very overweight and have probably failed repeatedly to grasp the nettle, so they've given up altogether and embraced the whole Body Positiviyy thing instead. They like to tell themselves that there is nothing wrong with being obese to the point that your health is seriously compromised for the future. They prefer to ignore all that. So naturally they are highly irritated by people actually getting on with it, achieving their weight loss goals via whichever method works best for them, and most importantly, doing what's required to keep their weight in check in the long term.

Yes I've had similar. Someone told me I looked gaunt when I was a size 12 and still in the overweight zone on the BMI chart.

I don't even own scales.

However, constantly badgering someone to eat is also ridiculous and obsessive behaviour. I have a relative who constantly tries to force food on me. It's controlling behaviour.

I went for a long weekend in a fancy hotel recently. Gained 4lb over the weekend. I so wish I'd taken my scales. I've only lost about 30lb so far still got 20 to lose and that extra 4lb is going to take weeks to get rid of. You do you OP, ignore them

OP says she’s a size 8 and 5’3” so I’m guessing around 8 stone. If she lost 4 stone, she was around 12 stone at her heaviest and probably a size 16 max. Pretty average size these days, not particularly obese.

OP said: Sadly I can’t be relaxed around eating, it was borderline ruining my life at one point…On holiday with the drinking and extra food the weight piles on. It’s a slippery slope as I used to binge. The scales just remind me not to.

It’s completely normal for your weight to fluctuate by a pound or so during the day due to water retention. That is not gaining and storing FAT.

Packing weighing scales into your suitcase and reducing your food intake if you’ve gained half a pound one day, is the definition of a disordered relationship with food. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of posters on this thread who also have an unhealthy obsession about their weight so they support the OP’s disordered thinking.

The OP is young and doesn’t mention having children and my only concern for her is that if she gets pregnant, how will she cope mentally with the natural weight gain from pregnancy and how will her obsession around food and weighing affect her future children?

I was in the obese category pre weight loss.

On the fence about kids.

My experience of daily weight tracking for the last 5 years tells me that even 2lb fluctuation is normal. All it takes is a bit of soy sauce with my dinner or eating a bit later than usual, heavy leg day or pending period and I can easily be 2.5lbs up overnight and then down again within a couple of days with no cutting calories. While I appreciate the fear of gaining after all the hard work, I think this fear can cloud judgement. I have no issues whatsoever which op looking after her portion size and I think it is ridiculous that her family are being so OTT about the fact she only has 1 slice of pizza (which is a perfectly reasonable amount of food). But lagging scales around and worrying about a very small change before looking at weekly trends is definitely not wise.

Those are wild assumptions!! Same height as OP and when I was 8st (my thinnest) I was a size 4 and I had to start buying kids clothes because very few shops had clothes that size.

A small size 8 (for me) is at around 60kg. At 85kg I was a size 16.

I hear you, OP. I'm losing weight through low carbing, and lost 16 pounds so far. I hate talking to people about what I eat and don't eat. Generally, I eat plenty of poultry, veg, salad, meat, cheese, yoghurt and berries.

If someone repeatedly said things like get a cheese nan down me I would ask them why they are so insecure about themselves that they have to comment on other people's food.

Huge congratulations on losing weight OP, it’s a big accomplishment especially with PCOS.

Your SIL is unreasonable and what you eat or do is none of her business.

This thread is quite shocking to be honest. PPs consider size 8 scrawny and normal portions “disordered eating”. I would not take scales on holiday but if it helps you OP, why not? Not my circus, not my monkeys.

If eating a whole pizza in one go, equating relaxing on holiday with stuffing yourself full and eating full English breakfast while abroad is not disordered eating then what is it? I’m not surprised so many people in the UK are obese and overweight.

If I were you I wouldn’t go on holiday with them next time and I also wouldn’t choose resort/hotel holiday. If you go for self-catering you also have much more freedom around food choices.

You don't have an eating disorder; you're just trying to maintain your preferred size in an obesogenic world. I'm the same.

The scale thing isn't that wierd - in many hotels in Scandinavia, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan, the en suites have scales as a matter of course. Monitoring one's weight is a basic act of self-care, like monitoring one's blood pressure, exercising daily or flossing after meals.

In my experience, eating in a group is like alcohol consumption - as a teetotaler I've found that the people who act the most put out about my not drinking are those who are secretly worried about their drinking. I believe it's the same with food. Pure projection.

Anyone who makes you feel bad about watching what you eat, OP - that's THEIR problem. You have every right to asset your own bodily autonomy and put whatever the hell you like in your mouth, as do they. Ignore 'em.

I’ve just re-read the OP, and she doesn’t ask for any advice on her eating habits at all, so I don’t think it’s surprising that she’s not interested in the thoughts of others, because it’s worked for her and she’s happy and healthy. I think her post was mainly a vent because of the attitude of others, including her family. The fact that the discussion has mainly consisted of a critique of her entire weight loss regime is typical of MN threads diverting from the reason for the post. I’ve experienced this kind of criticism after significant weight loss and I think the problem lies with others. When someone in their circle has been overweight for a long time and is successful in significant weight loss it can trigger the nastier side of peoples’ personalities and they will go all out to sabotage the effort they’ve made. I think that’s what’s happened with OP, and personally if I were her I would carry on as normal and ignore it. If it carries on maybe step back from the critics for a while and let them get their heads around what, for the OP, is clearly a permanent change.

This. Unless people have experienced for themselves the time and effort it takes to achieve significant weight loss, it’s hard to understand the amount of self control it takes to permanently change your eating habits. Food is everywhere - it’s pushed at us in every high street and in all kinds of advertising. Going on holiday and letting yourself go may be OK for some - and I agree that in this scenario that’s actually disordered eating and suggests an unhealthy attitude towards food, but for those of us who now know how easy it is to put the weight back on and how hard it is to lose it, that’s not an option and family members trying to coax me to do exactly that would be the death knell for me going on holiday with them again.

This is the crux of the matter isn’t it ? OP has followed a healthy diet, has reached her goal and has a healthy BMI. She’s posted what sounds like a really good and varied diet and has already said that if she goes over a certain weight she will cut back for a couple of weeks until she loses it. Sounds good to me and similar to the methods I used to lose a fair bit of weight. Once you get to your goal weight it dawns on you that keeping the weight off is now the hard part - not least because there will be those people who do have an insecure and unhealthy attitude towards eating and will gladly try to lead you astray.

OP don't listen to this noise. You do you. 60lbs is incredible. I've just lost a similar amount and I know I'm obsessed. Good luck!

Those of you who say you'd put someone else's property in the bin (scales in this case). How do you think that would help the OP relax? Its more likely to make her anxious and panicky. How can you not see that?

Out of principle. If OP really does get anxious and panicky without bringing a pair of scales everywhere she goes then that indeed is an eating disorder.