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.

@SatinPajamas would I be incorrect to suggest that you're a woman "D'un certain âge"? 🙈 😊

I hope it was a petit pois and she wasn't stuffing herself with half a normal sized pea.

😄

Plenty of older women in my husbands family who have remained waif like due to their disordered eating and societal messaging. Certainly in my husbands family they never came from poverty, being thin was and is a status marker for them. His nan for example telling me at 17 my arse was too big and a man would never want to keep me if I kept shovelling the food down. I was a size 12. Hardly massive.

Why are you determining how much food your guests have? Why not just make enough and let them serve themselves?

Next time you're cooking for her serve petit pois. She'll be busy trying to cut them in half and you can just get on with eating. Her behaviour is annoying but you're unlikely to change her.

Yes. Why?

I agree. DP’s late auntie was small and slim and ate very little. She stopped eating when she was full, which usually meant leaving about two thirds of what was on her plate. She never said a word, just set her knife and fork down and casually chatted away, usually drinking a cup of tea. That’s a world away from the plate watchers, who judge what everyone else is eating and comment on how full they are after a few bites and say they don’t know how ANYONE could eat all that. It’s a horrible passive aggressive attitude where the person projects their own shame around food onto others, consciously or unconsciously. I worked with a woman like that and nobody wanted to sit near her at lunchtime or at work do’s. She was a pain in the arse with all her puffing and sighing noises and waistband loosening gestures to indicate she was so full she was about to pass out after two or three mouthfuls.

I think this is wrong.. and I am overweight. The o.p's mum (based on what was actually said and not some paranoid raving about whether she knew the o.p was watching her cut a pea) said she wa full. That is so innocuous that most people wouldn't notice. There os only judgement there of you want to see it

What an odd comment. It's quite normal to serve guests a plate of food at Christmas or Easter or whatever family dinner you're having.

There is enough, there's always left overs. People are welcome to seconds if they want it but they never do, there's always food left on the plate or they just about finish it and are satisfied. We just don't waste food by serving more than we know our relatives eat.

Quite frankly, only an idiot would performatively serve my 90 year old 5 ft 2 grandmother the same amount of food as my 60 year old 6 ft 8 father because they had a weird problem with "penis portions".

generally speaking that comment can be innocent But op knows her mum and she was there, so she will be able to read into things and likely know what was meant.

Quite frankly, only an idiot would performatively serve my 90 year old 5 ft 2 grandmother the same amount of food as my 60 year old 6 ft 8 father just so she could throw half of it in the bin because they had a weird problem with "penis portions".

Oh because cutting a pea in half is totally normal behaviour?!

@SatinPajamas

To be fair I probably wouldn’t get up for seconds in your house. I can just imagine the shame whilst I went to get my second plate of roast potatoes 🤦‍♀️. Respectfully, you sound like the sort of person who would serve up 2-3 roast potatoes, which is an absolute travesty tbh. My mother in law would give me 2 whilst my husband got loads. That was the LAST dinner I ever had at hers 😂😂.

Lol, there's no shame here, my family quite often shock people with how much they can put away. You're projecting dear.

I can't think of the last time I was a guest somewhere and they served up - its much more common for people to serve themselves now I find. However doesn't stop the competitive undereaters spending most the meal talking about what they are or are not eating. It's just tedious as a conversation topic.

I totally believe you about the peas because I've seen something similar with my own eyes. An abiding memory of one of my daughters being really unwell with a restrictive eating disorder is that she'd microwave a few frozen peas and eat them daintily with cutlery, peeling the skins off and eating the two halves of the pea inside one at a time, and then declare herself stuffed after the first few.

I’d never heard of competitive under eating until on mumsnet.

I’m assuming you’ve lived with her making comments about your weight all your life?

id just ignore it. It will wind her up more.

Oh I had a week on holiday of this with my parents.

youd have a slice of toast for breakfast and they’d be going ‘well we don’t need to eat until dinner now!!!’ - relentless!

The fact that a recipe exists for it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s nice.

Same in our family with the older women. They are always trying to shame someone.

I’ve noticed they make horrible comments about people’s appearance. Extremely judgemental.

I've never encountered a competitive undereater but hope that I would lean over and spear the leftovers for my own plate, saying "Yoink!" After asking, of course. My theory is that such a person would hate it, wanting to see the wasted food. Not RTFT but also betting that had the CU been served a teeny-tiny portion, they'd have hit the roof.

Having read the OP's posts, I don't how the MIL has ruined the meal. Just ignore.

Not weirder than apparently noticing someone do it

We have this at the moment lol with DSIL who has been on the weightloss jabs and has gone from around 19 stone to around 10/11 stones.
Today at the Easter Sunday roast pushing food around her plate barely able to swallow a mouthful -( I guess that’s how the fat jabs work)- commenting on how she’s so very, very full and how can the rest of us ( including her teen nieces) can possibly manage to eat a perfectly normal sized meal lol

i mean while she might be competitively undereating now we well remember when the pre jab fat lump would demolish 9 roast potato’s and inhale all the gravey and Yorkies

jog on sister

or just not to your taste @ArmySurplusHamster?