Are you gonna eat that?

Something someone posted on my Facebook wall reminds me of a HUGE frustration I have with teenage/twenty-something girls and occasionally boys. Eating food is a fucking competition. Not a competition to see who can eat the most, a competition to see who can eat the least. Specifically, a competition to see who can WHINE the most about their caloric intake.

My boss recently decided that all the candy and soda we have around the office is going to lead her into temptation, so she started buying healthy snacks for the office. I have no real issue with healthy things, but what drives me nuts is that instead of buying say - fresh fruit, fruit juice, sun chips, etc, people basically buy bastardized versions of things that taste good. That and nature bars that taste like tree bark. Instead of some juice boxes like we used to have, we're drinking this weird pseudo-soda that has zero calories and all the flavor of sink cleaner. Instead of popcorn we have low-fat low-butter low-taste fopcorn. Calling it "fopcorn" was intentional. And then we have those nature bars that taste like tree bark.

Granted I appreciate people buying food for us, but the logic is somewhat absent here.

I suggested once that instead of drinking basically heavily carbonated artificially flavored water with fizz in it and probably plenty of high fructose corn syrup, we just buy the new natural Pepsi products. There are new soda products with REAL sugar out there so if you're worried about "the dangers of soda," you'd be better off with that than with all this splenda shit. I don't know for sure that splenda causes cancer, but I wouldn't be surprised. My suggestion was very much ignored.

So I've already established that every snack we've purchased has about two calories in it. That should STOP EVERYONE FROM WHINING ABOUT HOW FAT IT'S GOING TO MAKE THEM, RIGHT? No chance.

"I am just SO HUNGRY like ohmigod, I just am like SUPER hungry like the hungriest person ever I am like SUPER SUPER hungry!"

"Then eat something."

"I would but ugh I'm just EATING so much...I'm such a pig."

Okay. I don't have a problem with eating disorders. It's just this chill, flippant, nonchalant attitude toward disordered eating that upsets me. People I work with seem to think it's no big deal to eat one meal a day and then to do eight thousand sit ups afterward. As someone who flirted with an eating disorder a couple of years ago, it is really upsetting to me to be constantly reminded that food has calories and that everything I eat will make me fat. I'm trying to convince myself that my ability to be loved is not dependent on whether or not I get rid of the small bit of flab on my stomach. But then these people go on and on about it and it's hard to feel okay with who I am when they are half my size and still whining. Half my size isn't good. I'm 135 pounds, 5 foot 6.

Anyway. It isn't just their OWN eating they're concerned with. It's everyone else's too. If you grab a plate of something, it only takes moments for someone to go, "oh, I (meaning: unlike you, you fat cow) just can't eat all this. It's SO much food, I shouldn't be eating that much." Then they put like 1/4 the amount of food I took on their plate and continue on a big battle with their conscience about it. I recognize most of these people are only thinking of themselves, but it can be very frustrating to constantly be listening to people act like eating is a sin when I'm trying to convince myself it isn't.

There's also the lovely thing where I say, "I had dinner already but this looks pretty good and dinner was pretty small today," and someone responds with, "don't worry, the gym is open until midnight." As if my immediate response to having eaten on a special occasion should be to fly into the nearest gym and spend three hours on the treadmill. Come ON.

A lot of people seem to think that their ability to be wanted is based on thinness. They haven't figured out that attractiveness is lose-lose. If you're thin, men and women bitch that you don't have breasts or curves like a "real" woman. If you're curvy, men and women ignore you for twigs. The problem is, these people base attraction on the flavor of the minute. Today they like thin. Tomorrow they'll like chubby. The next day they'll like blonde. When people base their interest in you purely on physical things, they'll always find someone who better fits the fantasy idol in their head than you. That's why to me it makes sense to try hard to look good but at the same time not bank on thinness to help you find love.

I wish there was some way to tell people, "you know what? I used to be on those pro-ana sites and calculate every calorie that entered my body. I still can't eat more than a meal a day without getting serious unmentionable body issues. So please shut the hell up."

I don't eat very much at all. It takes like...emotional preparation and work for me to eat. So every person who tells me, "oh that's got FAT in it," or, "you should be eating veggie snacks instead of popcorn," or what the hell ever really needs to knock it off. I don't eat THAT unhealthily during the week. I also don't eat that much. If you're going to tell someone to stop eating fattening foods, find someone who uses food as a coping mechanism to yell at instead of someone who's trying not to have an ED.