To think my husband, son and daughter shouldn't have 'staged an intervention'?

[SoniaSwanners]

Last night, my husband, adult son and adult daughter and I were all in our car and my son saw a small pizza box under one of the seats. I'd had a pizza the day before, while on my own - as a treat. My son said, 'Mum, you've got to start eating more healthily, we all want you to live as long as possible and it's not good for your health to eat junk food', and there then followed an hour and a half of husband, son and daughter all saying:

• I'm overweight
• I should be worried about becoming Type 2 diabetic
• I should be worried about my blood pressure
• I keep saying I need to lose weight and eat healthily and then I don't do it
• I keep saying I want to treat myself occasionally, but then treat myself whenever I feel like it.
• It's easy to eat healthily - you just make sensible choices; what's so hard about it?
• I shouldn't make excuses or deflect - I should just do it and sort myself out.
• they're only going on at me about it because they care about me.

Now, all of this is maybe true. I have massive willpower in every other area of my life, but not in relation to food. I have always eaten too much and not as healthily as I should have. However...

• I swim every single day if I can, for an hour, which is very good exercise.
• I eat healthily (cooked from scratch meals, very healthy) most of the time
• my 'vices' are: lack of portion control, tending to finish off leftovers, and too many takeaways/meals out.

I felt very attacked and berated and kind of assaulted from all sides when they spent 90 minutes hectoring me about it last night - and felt a bit scared when they said, 'It's easy - just make different choices', because it might be easy for others, but it's decidedly not easy for me, psychologically - which is why I've never done it properly before.

Am I being unreasonable, and are they just trying to help me/ensure I live for as long as possible? Or is there something off/wrong about suddenly laying into someone over their weight/eating habits?

Ok, so you need to lose weight.
You can't be on track most of the time yet be
2st over weight.
Your family are concerned.
Obviously their approach was shocking, but would you have listened to any other approach?

A whole pizza for lunch is a ton of food and calories that won't leave you full for long. A whole pizza would feed me for a day. I have a side of the family that is eating themselves to death. One of my cousins is over 400 pounds and close to housebound. I visited over the holidays and was shocked by how much they ate but they claimed that they ate a healthy amount and it was genetic. I was just standing there with the same genes and a healthy weight.

2 stone isn't that much.

While I understand them wanting you to be as healthy as you can be, a 90 minute lecture would have done my head in. I'd have stopped them at 5 mins (max), "Ok, point taken", and changed the subject.

Great that you are active with the swimming. I'd imagine that it's better healthwise to be slightly overweight and active than skinny and inactive. I cycle a few miles every other day (been told that 45 minutes every other day is the sweet spot, neither overdoing it or not doing enough), burning calories while also having that slight immunosuppressive effect that is very important for health.

Stop thinking of food as a treat. If you want to treat yourself, buy a lipstick or a magazine, some nice shower gel or new underwear. That sort of thing.

you can't say that two stone isn't that much, maybe if we knew OP's height (6'2"?) we could.

But 2 stone of excess weight is probably somewhere between 15%-20% of her overall weight and it is fat. Ideal weight for a woman usually accounts for around 18% body fat so overall OP's body fat % is probably in the mid thirties. That is not ideal and should not be minimised, even as a kindness.

It was not an intervention, the OP was wrong about that. An intervention is planned. This was an unscheduled conversation prompted by finding the pizza box.

There are a couple of issues here. Did she deliberately hide the eating? Probably. I just cannot imagine ever eating a pizza of any kind in my car, unless it was on a long trip somewhere maybe.

Is she hiding her eating because they are bullying her and making her feel like crap about her weight/eating?

If that is the case then they should know that this pretty much never works and will often lead to even more disordered eating.

Or is the OP just berating herself mentally and hiding the eating because her eating is disordered and her relationship with food is a problem for her.

Additionally - do they bully her or put her down regularly? Or is this genuine concern that manifested when the box was accidentally found.

Without the answers to these questions we are missing big chunks of information. And it looks like the OP has run away never to return.

Regardless, she should have a conversation with her family and tell them how their lecture made her feel, and add that if they want her to make good choices they need to help her - and she also needs to come up with a plan or the to do that.

You're smarting from embarrassment right now, OP.

But when that wears off, could you admit you have a problem and get help with it? Don't try going it alone.

Think of how much better you'd feel with your swimming and all the good things you do in your life if you didn't have this thing you're ashamed of keeping you feeling bad about yourself.

Oh, fabulous. I've had my adverbs policed and now someone's going for my nouns.

The OP used the term in quote marks. I think we know what she means.

From the Merriam Webster dictionary:

The meaning of INTERVENTION is the act or an instance of intervening.

From the Cambridge dictionary:

intentional action to change a situation, with the aim of improving it or preventing it from getting worse

Going just on the info OP provided, your family aren't unreasonable to be worried, but their approach was absolutely unreasonable and very unlikely to help. It sounds like an unplanned intervention/vent that got out of control with very little thought for consequences. A 10 min conversation opening the door - sure. Prolonged harassment about "making better choices" is not.

I am 3-5kg overweight, have struggled with disordered eating to varying degrees since my teens (when I was a very healthy weight) and narrowly escaped developing a full on ED in early adulthood. I'd love to do more about dropping some weight, and eat more healthily, but it's amazing how quickly the usual advice descends into ED thinking and behaviour - literally 2 mins from sensible reduction of portion sizes to reckoning I could skip nearly every meal without anyone being the wiser. Those subconscious thought patterns require professional help and a lot of work to change.

Still haven't figured out how to move forward except what I have learned over time - the more focus on food and weight, the worse things get. That includes all the "good" advice about calorie counting, food diaries, exercise diaries etc. The less focus on food the better.

If OP's family is really concerned, then they should have gone about this a very different way, including not viewing themselves as experts, or any concerning behaviour as necessarily a choice.

I'd also say, and maybe controversially, no one owes you their life or their good health. Not your parent (once you are an adult), not your spouse, not your friends or family members. The only people who owe anyone life and health are parents until their children are adults, because they chose to have them and that is the bare minimum responsibility. And for any of us - our life and health, our control over such things - is only ever one accident away from disappearing. Lived experience on that one, from having a very physically fit healthy parent to a care-dependent chronically unhealthy one. All her good living choices and thin athletic body didn't mitigate the one bad choice and catastrophic injury as a result.

It is heartbreaking watching someone act against their best interests, but equally it is their life, not yours. If they want help, go for it. If they ask for an opinion, give it. If they need help, offer it - proper, good, well thought-out and practical support. If you can't live well alongside their actions, remove yourself. There are things you can do, but the one thing you can't and shouldn't attempt to do is control someone else. It doesn't work and isn't loving.

That just jumps off a cliff from ‘normal weight’ to ‘obese’ on the basis of 0.1 of an inch waist measurement!

2 stone is over 12kg. That's a huge amount - almost certainly obese territory, not just a bit plump.
That's a lot of information to leave out of your OP!

Ummm - can I just say that 2 stone is NOT a huge amount. FFS - I'd be willing to bet that at least 50 per cent of all adults in the UK are at least 2 stone overweight.

A huge amount would be like 5 or 6 stone overweight.

That goes both ways though. The healthy people in your life don't owe you care when your weight has disabled you and require care. Obesity kills. Let's be honest about it, and it's heartbreaking to watch a loved one eat themselves to obesity and disability. I know. I have family members actively doing it and a lot of their mindset is that their loved ones will pick up the burden for their care when they can't. That's not fair and not right. I've told my family members flat out that I will not help them if they do nothing to help themselves, and I'm not a monster for doing that. It's incredibly selfish to pass your burden onto others.

Your family are allowed to be concerned, and to voice those concerns - but not for 90 minutes! Someone attacking me like that would have had me running to the nearest fast food place, grabbing a tub of ice cream on the way, just to annoy them.

You are an adult and capable of making your own decisions. I've lived with an asthmatic who smoked, and also drinks far too much, no amount of this being pointed out made any difference whatsoever.

Absolutely it goes both ways. No one owes anyone care outside of dependent children. Your own boundaries are important. Their expectations of you are their problem. By all means, crack on.

However I am concerned that obesity seems to be treated as this somehow unforgivable sin deserving of derision and contempt. You don't see the same attitude toward, say, rugby players with dementia by way of multiple concussions, or tradies with bung backs in their 50s / 60s, or physical labourers with wrecked bodies well before their time, or however many people driving or riding in cars who end up permanently injured. These are choices too, many of them much less psychologically complex than over-eating, with well-known risks to the body, and yet they're not shamed for their health issues in the same way.

I think they caught you in a vulnerable position and that there was a bit of a power imbalance so I can totally understand feeling negatively or hurt by the interaction.

I am sure it does come from a place of love and conversations to do with our appearance or aspects of ourselves we maybe aren't comfortable with are always hard and always feel very outing.

I think I would use it as a moment to reflect on what changes might help me and whether there is value and truth in what they're saying that I could act on. I would also maybe get the perspective of a trusted person who might be able to give a more neutral point of view in terms of whether there is a 'problem'.

Take care.

Also meant to say you are most definitely not a monster 💐

It's 12KG. That's a huge amount. It's the size of a cocker spaniel.

Anyone who thinks 12KG overweight is not a huge amount is absolutely barmy.

It is that much. I'm halfway through a mission to lose 5 stone and I cannot tell you the difference it has made to have lost that 2.5 ..we are now so absolutely used to seeing most people carrying extra weight we have completely normalised it and think it's fine.

@LandSharksAnonymous makes a good point. 12kg is roughly the size of a cocker spaniel.

Too many people have normalised being fat, and now obese. Unless OP is 6,6 she’s almost certainly close to, if not, clinically obese. Saying ‘but she’s not’ is just a lie. Sorry, the average woman is 5,5. And the average woman (or even 3-5 inches more) carrying around an extra cocker spaniel worth of weight is fat. End of.

You should have told them that if they feel that strongly then between them
they can fund the jabs for you.

It wasn’t an automatic response - just trying to understand what the rest of the family do if they’re so high and mighty.

I exercise a lot and struggle to lose weight. So I get it. Sometimes it’s the type of exercise that matters.

“cook from scratch” also doesn’t mean it’s healthy or the correct portion size for that person. I’ve “cooked from scratch” many times and then eaten loads of it and made myself ill!! FGS!

OP if you want to lose weight and portion control is your issue you need to track what you eat so you eat the right amount and make sure you eat enough protein and fibre. There are loads of apps for this, the best ones tend not to be free because you need to enter and save meals if you cook properly. And do it really slowly over a year or so.

Theres a lot of really odd diet advice on the internet and I don’t think that helps either tbh.

I think yanbu but having been just over a stone above 25bmi, I feel a lot better having lost 10kg. All this ‘overweight category is fine’ well tbh not for me and weight tends to continue to creep up if you are overweight.

Exercise doesn’t help that much because it makes you hungrier. Particularly swimming as per the OP - that’s the worst for it.

Very true. I’m always hungry after swimming! I’m finding weights is more effective especially at an older age!