When you are trying to make healthier choices, but your partner is not
Hi all, I need some advice. I suffer from BED and food addiction and have gained a lot of weight over the last few months and am really trying to get better. I don’t want to completely cut out processed foods, but I am making an effort to eat way less of them (especially snack foods) and also to eat out way less.
Overall I’ve been doing well I think, but sometimes it gets really hard when you are on this journey and your partner is not. My boyfriend isn’t the healthiest eater either and doesn’t go to the gym, and has talked about wanting to make better choices and take care of himself better, but has not taken any steps to actually do so, and I think we’re just at different places right now in our health journeys.
It’s not like he is not supportive of me and the choices I’ve been making, but there are things sometimes that he does that make it harder. He will buy snacks for himself and then offer them to me, or when we go grocery shopping he’ll ask which snacks I’m getting, or say we should pick something out to share, when I’ve told him I’m not eating chips/crackers right now. On the weekends he keeps suggesting we get takeout, and if I agree I will at least try not to eat my whole portion, and then he will “joke” that I “made him look fat” since he finished all of his. Or sometimes at dinner even when we do cook, he’ll make a comment about how small my portion size is and how it makes him feel like he took too much food, and I keep having to remind him that he’s like 7 inches taller than me, so it was not healthy when I was taking the same portion size as him anyways, but he still seems like offended almost.
We’ve lived together for a little over a year now, and lately I’ve been finding myself really missing when I lived alone and had full control of what food was in the apartment, how much I had, and when I went out. Obviously it’s not his fault or his problem, really, and I support him eating what he wants when he wants, but I wish he wouldn’t make comments so much. I have brought it up in the past, but more in the sense of just reminding him that I’m trying to make healthier choices so I don’t want as much snacks or takeout, not really a direct response to his comments. Is there any way I can address the comments without sounding rude/insensitive? He is kind of an emotional guy and I don’t want it to sound like a personal attack.