Are you slender and are they fat? You may want to say “Yes that is all I am going to eat because I do not want to become FAT!”
FYI - I knew a guy with high metabolism who was skinny as a bone and worked with a bunch of overweight women… He would have to take a grocery bag full of food to work each day - have several snacks a day and also have a large lunch - JUST to maintain his weight!
The women on the other hand would starve themselves with lo cal salads and so forth. Anyway they bugged him incessantly about how much food he ate every day.
Work small talk involves relatively few questions asked about relatively few topics:
Health - How are you?
Activities - How was your weekend?
Weather - Did you get much rain last night?
Family - How are the kids?
Food - All those mentioned above
We all have ones we dislike more than others. I think the weather questions are pointless most of the time. Most of my cow-orkers live within a 20 miles radius of me, so the chance of dramatically different weather is pretty slim. My method of dealing with it is to smile, return a general comment like “Nope, not much” and chalk it up to general human inanity. It works for me, but obviously is not the preferred method for others.
Problem is, there are a lot of fat people (esp. in the US) who think they are normal, or at least not so fat as to be a problem. The standards are so skewed.
People need to mind their own business because dipping fries into chocolate pudding sounds tasty as hell. You get that whole sweet and salty thing going on.
“No, I have a live chicken back at my desk. I’m going to have an omelet in a few hours.”
I eat the same thing every day, mainly for two reasons. One, I’m being health conscious. Two, I don’t know how to eat otherwise. Seriously!
I’ve discovered that if I don’t follow my routine (which has me eating small meals every few hours), I skip breakfast, eat whatever fast food is available for lunch, and have whatever dinner my wife is in the mood to make. And if she doesn’t feel like cooking, I’ll just have some junk food, unless I just decide to skip an evening meal altogether.
None of that is good - my cholesterol naturally runs high, and I have read enough about nutrition to know that it is depriving me of very important nutrients. My energy level suffers, and it makes me sedentary. Eating the same things every day ensures that I get a variety of healthy and tasty foods that I enjoy (especially fruit, which I tell my wife is “nature’s candy”) while also doing good for my body.
If somebody gave me shit for that, I’d just laugh at them.
I don’t get comments every day but often, partly because I am a vegetarian and partly because I bring my lunch.
However, even when I was an omnivore, people still commented because they were curious and were trying to make conversation. People love to talk about food.
I don’t, but part of the reason I don’t is that I don’t go out to lunch with my fat coworker.
Eating in the break room, there may be questions about what you’re having but they’re generally geared towards getting the recipe, nutritional value, whether you can batch-and-freeze, where do you do your shopping… many of my coworkers are learning to cook.
I’m currently working on losing weight, as I’d gained a lot in the last three years: I’ve lost about 10kg since joining the company, would like to lose a few more but I’m back to a size that’s within my normal. So, what do I do? Not eat as much as I can, for starters! My fat coworker is always talking about how he really should lose weight; often he says this while he munches on fried pig skin or snacks on a mayo-and-crab sandwich. I’ve gone to lunch with him and other coworkers twice and both times he’s criticized what other people ate. We counterattacked (the first time he asked “how can you eat fish?” when six people had asked for the fish dish), but he’s not someone I look forward to having meals with.
There is a group of us who eat lunch together every day, 8-10 people. We wander in randomly, so it is a regular thing for someone to join the group while lunch is already in progress by those who arrived first.
So, when each person enters, sits down, and unfurls their lunch, every eye at the table lasers in on it, assessing each item as it is unpacked. And there is always a comment, sometimes several.
My response is always the same: “Keep your eyes on your own lunch”.
mmm
There is a group of us who are really into cooking in a conceptual way. So we are the ones who will comment on your lunch hoping that you will tell us how easy it is to make so that we can imagine that we will one day make it ourselves.
Your lunch, we would ignore, because we can totally make that! But if you come in with leftovers, we are all up in your lunch wanting to know how much time it cook, did it keep well, and did it live up to expectations. Note: most of us either buy lunch or bring a really basic lunch other than the once a month where we get off our asses and cook “real food”