My older colleague is weirdly obsessed with my food, my gym routine, and micromanaging me. Am I crazy for feeling like his behavior is crossing a line?
I (31F) recently started a new administrative job, and one of my male colleagues in his early 40s has developed the most bizarre, overbearing fixation on me.
For context, I keep a very active routine of daily swimming and full-body strength training, and I'm pretty health-conscious. This colleague, meanwhile, is on some sort of constant restrictive diet and constantly calls himself the "Michelin man."
It has escalated into this exhausting cycle where he micro-manages what I eat:
He will comment on or judge whatever I have for breakfast.
Then, out of nowhere, he’ll aggressively push junk food on me—like walking into the office first thing in the morning and loudly announcing, "There are muffins here!"
When I casually say "no thanks," he gets genuinely angry and snaps, "What?! You could burn that off in an hour at the gym why are you so fussy!"
He also frequently tells me that the gym is "bad for me," which feels hypocritical given how much he stresses over his own weight and food.
It culminated on Friday. Right with about 10 minutes left in the work week, he called me into a closed-door meeting under the guise of discussing minor flexi-time paperwork. But instead of talking about work, he used the time to lecture me for 25 minutes (claiming he had an urgent "appointment" right after, which makes zero sense if he was pressed for time). My gut is screaming that the flexi-sheet was just a fake excuse to trap me and control me right before the weekend.
Everyone I talk to says this isn't normal behavior and that he's projecting his own food/body issues onto me and trying to undermine my boundaries. But because it's dressed up as "workplace administration" and "office banter," I sometimes second-guess myself.
Am I overreacting, or is this blatant boundary-crossing and control issues? What would you do?