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.

Yep, and advanced practitioners will do this even when the woman has obviously higher calorific needs like if she's breastfeeding. Naturally, it never includes a bigger share of the most iron rich part of the meal, despite women's needs being for obvious reasons greater than men's in that area.

That said, I do quite like the idea of food being served to me in the shape of a penis. This is a penis portion I might well accept.

You don't 'have' to leave her some, you could just finish your food and not go along with her performance.

She could just have a starter. In fact, she would have to if everyone just ate what they ordered.

My mum is like this but in a different way…she just talks about under eating but actually eats the same amount (if not more!) than everyone else.

So say we go for a walk and to a cafe in the afternoon. She’ll say three times on the way that she’s just going to have a drink and no cake, she doesn’t want a cake, doesn’t need a cake. Then she buys a cake and eats it. Then on the way home she’ll say five times how she doesn’t think she’s going to have much dinner as she’ll still be full from her cake, but then she eats a full plate of dinner that evening. We’ll go out for a roast around 2pm on a Sunday and she won’t stop harping on about how full she is afterwards and won’t be having anything else that day. But she’s the first getting the cheese and biscuits out that evening.
I used to call her out all the time and tell her it was annoying but she’d just laugh it off. Now I just ignore her. But it’s still very annoying.

I have a group of friends who are competitive under-eaters. Group of five out for dinner. All four others agreeing that 2 mains between 5 people is reasonable, maybe even too much to manage, leaving me feeling a right greedy bastard for daring to suggest I could eat a whole meal

Well there you are then, if you're just eating your food and letting others eat theirs, you actually have nothing at all in common with OP's mother, who won't shut up about how little she eats, and how unimanginable it is that anyone could eat more than that... implying that everyone else is a greedy pig. It's just as obnoxious as your family commenting on what you eat.

My mum has recently started on a weight loss thing - to be fair, it mainly consists of not eating something every time she passes through the kitchen - and she's boring us all to death by listing exactly what she has eaten today, and yesterday, etc. Which is all fine and dandy, but she's also a feeder and cannot stop herself from shoving more food at everyone around her. Which is really annoying if, like me, you struggle to say no to cake 😑

Just remind her that she’s not eating enough to meet her nutritional needs. She’ll end up with osteoporosis, frailty and a weakened immune system to name a few problems.

My husbands grandma is like this, she’s genuinely wonderful in every other way, a few weeks ago she came over for dinner and ate two roasted brussels, one bit of brocolli and a tiny bit of mashed potato. She turned down coffee after her dinner as she ‘simply didn’t have room’. She’s been in hospital for a planned procedure, she eats so little she has been put on a feeding plan and they’re prescribing shakes for her in addition to her ‘meals’ when she is discharged. I have an ED and I think her eating is bonkers, which says it all!

My mum, 75 is the same. I heard her the other day say, ‘oh god I’ve not weighed myself in 2 days.’ She has always been a healthy weight, is slim and eats very well. I just find it a very sad indication of the period she was brought up in.

Marrowfat peas! We used to have them for Sunday/Roast when we were small! I loved them (and you could cur them in half. They were huge).

Other than that - I'm playing the ignore card.

Mine's the same and she eats more than me but I'm always the one suggesting we have something to eat! She'll protest that having eaten at 2pm she couldn't possibly have dinner... Then she'll easily have as much as me. Cracks me up. But I'm sure I do stupid shit too and she's great so I just laugh to myself.

Thank you for this thread @Bettercallsalli 👏 and for explaining “penis portion”!
My mum does penis portions for the men.
She likes to be taken out for lunch but then won’t eat anything “just a cup of tea please, I had breakfast.” Or if she does order food, she eats one quarter of it. She then asks me to finish her meal after eating my own and actually used to get pissy about waste but then talk about my weight or sit there judging people who had appetites and were enjoying their food. I refused to eat her leftovers so she put it all into napkins to feed to the gulls or if my kids were with us she put it on their plates. My son now has a reputation of being a human Labrador. Not eating when eating out is always this way, ditto when she comes to dinner no matter how small the portion, she can’t eat “all that” but dinner at hers and she cleans a full plate. It’s not my cooking either. I am a good cook! There’s a whole catalogue of other things she does which are in addition to this behaviour to make her “superior”. It used to bother me a lot. It’s like having Albert Steptoe as a mother sometimes. I know the behaviour and expect it as well as accept it now as she’s too old to change.

my fil does this wll wont say hes full just put hardly anything on his plate- for dinner once we had salmom and a slic of tomato

o hav to bring my own snack if we stay even if it makes me look like a pig

My mum is also a “feeder” @PuggyPuggyPuggy

Absolutely, I've known several women like this and they are all late-60s/70s. It's not only 'shrinking yourself' to be unobtrusive and 'keeping trim for your husband' but about bigger portions going to the men (either because of 'penis portions' or, in households where there wasn't enough food to go round, the resources being focused on the men) so by definition the women eat less and pretend not to mind. And pretend they're not hungry - an older family member would give the biggest portion of food to her husband, the rest was divided between the children and she had a cigarette.

In my family, men even get different sized - bigger - plates.

I hate peas

All the hanging on about penis portions, men do actually need more food than women.

Two thirds of the population are overweight because they don't realise they actually need less food than they think they do.

Who the fuck has two sets of dinner plates in different sizes!?

That irritates the shit out of me. My mother does the same without the half pea. I just ignore, ignore, ignore whilst inwardly raging. Its attention seeking.

Is that you OP’s MiL?

Absolutely or be kind and sharing and tell them you got emailed a code for monjaro
discount.. you thought they’d be interested.
Then look them up and down and say “well I’m just guessing, but your bmi is like 28/29?”

And women need more iron, so naturally you'll want to place just as much emphasis on this.

There seems to be two sizes of plate within the same set. No idea why, some sets are just like that - maybe the men are being given the serving plates.

That would drive me crazy

I never comment on what other people eat and yet my mum seems compelled to tell me about her portions (ie how much food she is helping herself to and the justification for it), how much she ate earlier, how she couldn’t possibly manage x or y or z. I can assure you, I couldn’t be less interested in what my mum eats and yet she can’t stop herself going on about it. Neither of us are, of have ever been overweight BTW but unfortunately for all of us, a lot of her self esteem seems to be located in how much she eats. So I can well believe the OP is not exaggerating.

I agree but you have posted this in the Vatican City of competitive undereating