Ok so I had a talk with him the other day about enabling…see I am trying to eat healthier and improve my lifestyle in general. But he will do things like offer to get me fast food in the morning when I wake up or any time I have a craving he goes and gets me something. It is really making it challenging to make changes and I expressed this to him. I don’t think he took it seriously though because now he just does the exact same thing but says “I don’t mean to be an enabler but do you want x junk food”. The other day he got me a pint of ice cream when I was sad and ordered pizza and yesterday I was happy about getting a new job and he suggested we get mikes hard lemonade and he kept offering to get me another drink and I ended up going over my calorie count AGAIN.
How do I deal with this? He is a lovely person in every way but his desire to spoil and comfort me is literally killing me. I have high cholesterol, insulin resistance and am 60 something lbs overweight. It is so much harder for me to make good choices when tempting bad ones are offered to me regularly for free, and often brought to me in bed.
summary: junk food is my vice i am trying to quit but bf will not stop buying it for me and offering it to me. Often times I am not strong willed enough to turn down free delicious food brought to me in bed. I’ve tried talking w him about it but nothing changed. What do I do?
Hmmm. Sounds like he doesn’t really believe in making healthy eating choices.
Maybe you could convince him to go to couples therapy with a therapist who doubles as a life coach? Some life coaches counsel on behavioral changes for such physiological matters.
He really doesn’t care at all. He himself would eat like absolute garbage all the time if I wasn’t involved. His only motivation to eat better is that it costs less for him to not buy fast food all the time.
The issue is he has a hard labor job where he is exercising all day. He can metabolically afford to eat 3000 cals of junk food a day. I cannot. Thus over the course of our relationship he has gotten muscular and fit and I have gotten more and more overweight and unhealthy. Maybe I can bring him to one of my dietitian appointments.
That is a tricky one. On the one hand, it is very hard to conquer an addiction when you have someone constantly offering your vice. On the other hand, unless he is getting mad at you for refusing the junk food (which would be a whole other issue) the responsibility to say no is yours. He is going to continue craving high calorie foods because his body needs it to compensate for manual labor. If he ate the way you need to eat, he would become malnourished. You need to accept that the two of you have different food needs. If it is too hard to watch him eat the food you want while you stick to food you need, then maybe you guys should just start eating separately for a bit.
I will say, after a while on a stricter diet, it becomes easier to follow. When I first went pescatarian, I craved meat daily. Now, the smell of cooking meat makes me . So if you need to spend a month or so eating seperately, that might be enough to get you adjusted enough to be able to say no. And it might be enough of a wake up call for him to stop offering, or to buy food for just himself, without feeling guilty for not including you.
No he does not get mad at me for refusing. I do agree I need to get better at saying “no”. I just also wish he would be more mindful that it is an addiction I am struggling with and not to offer things to me so much.
I have been paranoid of that. But I highly highly doubt he would ever do such a thing consciously. The chance of this being the case I would say is very slim.
It could be that he feels guilty for not offering. Like he is worried you will think he is trying to fat-shame you, or that you might think he doesn’t find you beautiful as you are. Maybe if you reassure him that you know he loves you for who you are, and that you two just have different dietary needs and that you are okay with that, he might feel better.
I talked more in depth with him about it and as it turns out I am not innocent. There are many times where upon him trying to be stern and not give into my cravings I have become very upset with him. In his words he was “tired of playing the bad guy all the time”. In addition, he feels helpless when my illness acts up and I am down. “Taking care of me” ie bringing me comfort food and whatnot makes him feel like he is doing something and helping me.
I acknowledged that I have treated him unfairly in the past and we have talked about me needing to find healthier coping mechanisms for things such as frustration other than taking it out on him and also when I am depressed not relying on junk to cheer me up. I plan to bring it up in my next therapy session.
If he doesn’t get that your serious. Maybe invent a word phrase you guys say when your really serious about something.
Like me and my gf have a phrase if one of us is being too annoying and we want them to stop lol. We just say hey code serious. Then we know right away to stop
. So if you need to spend a month or so eating seperately, that might be enough to get you adjusted enough to be able to say no. And it might be enough of a wake up call for him to stop offering, or to buy food for just himself, without feeling guilty for not including you.
.