She’s Upset About Her Husband Commenting On The Amount Of Food On Her Plate Because She Has A History Of Food Issues
This 58-year-old woman and her husband, 61, will be celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary at the beginning of next year.
Throughout their entire marriage, she has requested her husband not to comment on the food she chooses to eat or what she has on her plate.
Her husband is a wonderful man and a great person to travel with. They have a blast traveling together on an almost full-time basis.
“He, however, says he forgets when he mentions things and says that I need to get over it,” she said.
In her husband’s view, it’s not a huge issue that he forgets not to make remarks about her food, but it would mean a lot for him to listen to her and respect her request for him to stop making these types of comments.
When she was a child, her mother suffered from bulimia, and later on, she also struggled with food.
Her mother sometimes told her to remember to suck in her stomach to look skinnier.
By the time she was 10-years-old, she was already using diet products, and at 11, she started taking diet pills.
She stopped this behavior once she was a teenager, but from there, she began restricting her calories.
fizkes – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Until she was in her mid-30s, she obsessively counted calories and weighed herself every single day. The number on the scale dictated how she would feel about her body that day.
Her size on clothing got to a size 1, but she luckily didn’t get into a “‘low weight'” category for her BMI. Even though she was struggling a lot with her disordered behaviors, she did her best not to slip further into even more dangerous habits that could affect her health even more drastically than they already were.
She has put in a lot of effort to recover from her disordered eating habits, but it’s an ongoing process, and sometimes she still has tough days.
On days when she notices that she’s struggling a bit, she does her best to get through it, and she’s never gone back to any of the more intense habits that she worked so hard to overcome.
“I have used behavioral modification as one tool to improve. I also became certified in nutrition (refocused my thoughts about food to be about overall health) AND learned my triggers, which are very, very few now. One of them being comments from anyone about the amount of food I have, am eating, or have eaten,” she explained.
She is in shape and healthy.
Today, she feels like she’s fully healed from her eating disorder behaviors, but she’s always cognizant of her triggers so that she can be on the lookout for future slipups or disordered thoughts about her body.
Just like other addictions, she knows that she could relapse, so she knows that her recovery is something she always has to be mindful of.
One night, she and her husband went to a diner for dinner, and she ordered breakfast food.
“It was a nice-sized omelet with some beans and chilaquiles. My husband does not make comments daily, weekly, or monthly, but it is still a trigger when he does, and I do feel like he should make a better effort not to do so,” she shared.
According to her husband, she should try harder to brush off his comments and not allow them to affect her.
In her view, people who have not gone through an eating disorder have no idea what the experience is like. She likens the experience to those struggling with alcoholism.
Similar to those going through eating disorder recovery, people recovering from alcoholism have triggers, too, and she thinks it would be wrong to continue to trigger them even after they asked you not to.
What advice would you give her?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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