Constant competitive undereating is giving me the rage

[Bettercallsalli]

Family Easter meal and once again ruined by my mother!
After 6 mouthfuls...o im so full. Cutting peas in half...just makes us all that eat nornally on edge.

Thirded

what are leftovers? Never seen them in this house. I would delight in eating everything except eg fat off the steak edge.

"I realised that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional ideal is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets." - Bridget Jones

Years ago I had a boyfriend whose mother was like the Final Boss of what's being described on here and he genuinely believed that the optimal human diet was zero fat, and that people just ate food with a fat content as some sort of tasty indulgence. When I said that it was recommended to be about 30% of your calories, he was entirely disbelieving.

Re Brigit Jones, that whole book is a historical document of the fucked-up diet culture of the time.

The people who made the Bridget Jones films didn’t understand the books.

The fat off the steak edge is my favourite part of steak. I would take great delight in eating this in front of a competitive under eater.

And mine!

Are you Jack Sprat's wife?

At least they licked the platter clean!

Probably!

The time for this was before you felt moved to offer unasked for advice about further participation. I mean, talk about controlling.

Thank fuck someone said it.

Me too, I relish the fat on a steak or chop etc. I used to fear it as a child because parents treated it like a kind of poison, and always told us off if we ate any fat on our meat.

It wasn't until I left home and started cooking for myself that I realised what I was missing.

Another one who loves the fat off steak. Also the fat off lamb chops. mmmm. DH before he became vegetarian used to shudder. So we were Jack Spratt and wife, not least because he is tall and thin and I am ... not.

They are doing what makes them feel good by the performative under eating and the commenting on what people eat - that's why they do it!

These performative undereating threads always attract those "shrugging" posts from people who try to depict the undereater's hapless victims as "just as bad" because we "even notice" their exhibitionist habits.

The real problem of course is that it can be very difficult to draw the conversation away from a determined attention seeker, with the result that meal time too often becomes a stressful challenge.

They sound very similar . I do think my sister is a narc. Anything and everything for attention and always competing. If she thinks she's not getting enough attention she has 'collapses' but doesn't want to 'bother' anyone. She'll phone everyone but tell them not to say anything as she's a very private 🙄 person. Even though she makes sure she's got an audience but refuses to go to the hospital.

And women of that generation all wonder why they are frail and have arthritis. Silly mares.

Agree, and fail to understand that, especially when it's a parent doing it, there is far more tied up in it - just tell them, ignore them etc. It's far more complex than that.

I suspect that both these contributor are, in fact, competitive under-eaters themselves and, as there is no visible food available, have to find a different way to compete each other into oblivion.

🤣

I was reading the book “Good Girls” by Hadley Freeman (about her time being treated for anorexia) and quite a lot of the stuff in the book seems quite similar to the stuff described here. There was one hospital, in particular, where there were quite a few older anorexics who would bully the younger ones. She was sitting her GCSEs and one said she didn’t understand how she could sit still for a two-hour exam because “I’d feel so fat”.

At one point, they would all have to sit at the lunch / dinner table but, because the older ones would performatively mess with their food, it would take up to two hours.

We don’t because we’re not all frail. I do have arthritis though. Hereditary. Silly mare yourself.

(a) The MIL's age hasn't been given, so I wonder how you know what generation we're talking about.
(b) It makes no sense to say that all women of a given age are all the same. Think about your own friends. Are they all the same? I doubt it. It certainly isn't true of everyone I know of my age. I've already said on the thread that there were no women who dieted obsessively in my family when I was growing up. There are none in my own generation either. I've been lucky there.

I for one take massive comfort in this thread, knowing that my struggles with my mother who is 100% like this are not unique. My sisters and I all agreed that the thing that would make our mother the most proud would be if we developed anorexia. Which is a truly warped thing to say, but her thinking indeed is truly warped. The constant comments on the nutritional profile of anything that hits our lips is just SO TIRESOME!

As a dare from one of my sisters I ate a full lunch immediately prior to a family lunch gathering recently and loudly declared that I couldn’t eat anything as I’d had two whole slices of toast for breakfast. My mother said nothing but I could tell she could not compute me - a normal person - willingly, casually skipping a meal when she is permanently tortured by hunger.

Its just so fucked up it really is.