When Relatives Comment on Your Food Choices

The comments drop like silent bombs. They may come out of nowhere. Or, you’ve been holding your breath, knowing they will eventually arrive. 

You can feel that family member, so-called friend, or co-worker watching what you are about to eat so slyly.  The words to follow will just be a matter of time. 

Are you going to eat all of that?

Are there any cookies left? (code for: did YOU eat all of the cookies?)  

Boy, that’s a lot of food. 

Ya know, I’m really cutting down on my carbs and I feel a lot better. You should try it. (while you have a plate of pasta). 

Hmmph (with a disappointing look). 

The words sting and shock you. Even if they’ve made comments about what you’ve eaten in the past. You may feel it like a punch in the gut. Or, like they just threw a black blanket of shame over you. 

This sucks. There are no other words for it. 

When someone else comments on what you are eating or how much you are eating, there is no doubt that they’ve just invaded you personally.

In big DIET culture, we are regularly having conversations around what we are eating and drinking. Magazines are sharing high profile star’s meal plans under the heading of “find out how so and so lost 20 pounds in 10 days”. Social media proudly gives us a checklist of fat-fighting foods. Even gyms, yoga studios and cross-fit boxes have jumped into the conversation and share diet tips and food challenges with their members. 

So, it’s not surprising that these conversations trickle into our homes and social circles. Yet, with the holidays and family festivities fast approaching, what do you do when you are just waiting for your least favorite aunt to comment on the ice cream you put on your apple pie? Or when your cousin wants to show you her calorie tracking app and her clean eating recipes? 

This dynamic may be so commonplace that you don’t even recognize how destructive it is. You may recognize your anger or annoyance toward the person, but there is something underneath the surface that’s also happening.

They’re challenging your choices. They are questioning your ability to eat in a certain way. There is a subtle or not so subtle implication that they know how you should be eating better than you do. 

Now, in DIET culture, we are all being convinced that certain foods hold a life or death quality to them. You should not eat xyz food because it will make you diabetic, fat, unhealthy, give you heart disease and high blood pressure.  You should eat more abc food because it will reduce inflammation, fill you with vitamins and minerals and make you feel light and clean. 

I will not dispute or deny the value that food has on your health. However, I will absolutely dispute that someone else holds 100% of the answers of how food impacts your health better than you do. AND, I will absolutely dispute that someone else (your mother, a health coach, or diet company) should be telling you how to eat, how much to eat and when to eat without your own active participation in the process. 

As a collective society, we’ve lost sight of an important fact. Our body knows how to thrive, how much food it needs and when it wants to eat. 

Instead, the messages we’ve been receiving have been pretty clear. Don’t trust yourself. Someone else knows better than you. AND, if you think you’re overweight, you’ve really screwed up. You definitely need the counsel of an expert. What in the world?!

DIET culture has created righteous soldiers, broadcasting these messages around food and letting people know what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s crazy condescending and super obnoxious. 

Here’s the thing. We don’t need to be fighting these soldiers. We don’t need to be arming ourselves with weapons, arguing with them and making them wrong. That would take up way too much of our own precious energy. 

And we have more important things to focus on. Like connecting with our body. Listening to our intuition. And becoming more and more in tune with ourselves. 

Can you imagine having so much confidence around your relationship with food this holiday season, that when these silent bombs get dropped, you can just softly smile, set a boundary and move on with enjoying the celebration? 

That’s my wish for you. Holidays are a precious time. Let’s not get distracted by food and those that want to tell you what and how to eat, but instead, enjoy what we choose to eat, relax because we know how to nourish our bodies and spend time connecting with loved ones.