Question by Cassidy Lane: When my overweight friend tells me beans and almost everything I eat is bad for me what do I say?
I have a close friend of the opposite sex who finds it fun to criticize me for being vegetarian. I am not the type of vegetarian who acts holier than thou, and I’m good at biting my tongue when people start telling me what I should and shouldn’t eat.
For some reason, my friend, let’s call him “John”, cannot stand the fact that I do not eat meat. He is a self proclaimed genius (and he is extremely intelligent in most areas of acedemia *and* common sense). He recently started this new diet and to quote him, it’s ‘not to loose weight, but it’s to get back to the way man is supposed to eat.’ He had started doing the caveman diet, where he eats mostly MEAT, some vegetables, and some fruit. He is completely out of control. He gave me a 30 minute lecture about why beans are bad to use as protein (because neanderthals did not consume them), then when I tried to speak my point of view he talked over me and moved to the next food which was avocados- he said that avocados are the sole reason vegans and vegetarians can’t lose weight and that they aren’t loaded with all the goodness that people say they are. He went ON and ON and ON. Every-time I get a word in he gets LOUDER and LOUDER. It is getting to the point where I am not going to want to be around him if all he is going to do is LECTURE not just me but everybody on why their food is garbage and that we are meant to adopt a paleolithic/caveman way of eating. You guys don’t even wanna know what he said about whole grains. Yet he still drinks beer, and eats cheese, which totally goes against everything he is preaching. But when I told him that- he just played stupid, which we both know he’s not. He’s just being ignorant.
Anyway, he has been an amazing friend to me in the past and I don’t want to lose him as a friend for being judgmental about the diets we don’t share in common but he is making it really hard to want to be around him when all he does is criticize my eating habits and my weight.(He tells me I’m too thin, which, I’m not. I’m exactly the size I need to be (5’8″, 138 lbs). He, on the other-hand, has gained about 50 pounds in the past year, and needs to be careful or he WILL have a heart attack.) This has all developed in the past two weeks, so I’m hoping it’s just a phase, but it’s really bothering me because I can’t get a word in and by the time i get a chance the window of opportunity is gone and I don’t want to bring it up again. HELP ME!!!!!!!!!
Best answer:
Answer by Sensei Ono
ask him some questions and seem interested. Then, politely let him know that your choices are your own and ask him to respect that.
Sometimes people just need to be heard before they’ll let something go.
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