How to handle situation with close friend

because you are choosing to eat healthier and exercise, you are making your friend feel guilt that she isn't doing the same, it is pure and simple jealousy, believe me i've had more or less the exact same thing my best friend. she quite often told me i'd lost enough weight and should stop now, when that didn't work she started telling me i'd took it to far and now looked like c**p! (at that point i was technically still 20lbs overweight) if you still want to be friends with her your either going to have to sit her down and tell her how she's making you feel or see her far less, unfortunately unless she chooses to lose weight herself she is just going to keep attempting to sabotage you as if your overweight too it makes it ok for her to be
good luck x

I don't even want to say that this could be part of it because to me, any time my friends made choices to better themselves, I celebrated it with them because I know how hard that decision is, even before I buckled down and did it myself.

This is also not an over-night thing. I made a decision to get healthier about a year ago, and have been steadily working towards it since. This pattern has developed over that year. If it were once in a while I would be able to ignore it, but it's become an obvious and regular pattern.

A few of you do bring up a few good points, however. Our entire of friends (7 of us) are overweight. Two of our other friends are morbidly obese and when we do things with them, we have to plan out things carefully because they can't fit in certain seats and such. These two are supportive, though! They don't even bat an eye when I order minestrone instead of a giant bowl of Alfredo pasta. More often than not, they'll ask to try it and tell me "Oh, that's actually not half bad. I might get that next time" or something along those lines and that's the end of it. A couple of weeks later they'll tell me they ordered some to take to work for lunch or something. It's a nothing thing, it's just food and it's yet another thing that they like. Excellent. Everyone wins. They're curious about my new food choices (I don't bring it up. Even in the beginning I didn't bring it up, I just started ordering differently and it took them months to realize that I was no longer doing certain things or they'd ask me if I'd lost weight. I didn't and don't want to preach and be obnoxious - no one wants to hang out with THAT person, and as said, it's none of my business what they eat) There's no attempt at guilt on my part, and if she doesn't want to join me, she doesn't have to. That's completely up to her, but if she doesn't want to, I don't understand why she'd try to disrupt my plans. She's also done this when it's a group of us getting together. One of my friends mum is a professional bellydance instructor. 4 of us got together and scheduled a session with her (which we do sometimes) and this friend showed up with peanut butter (her mum's known weakness) and DVDs and convinced her mum to watch a movie instead of work out while the rest of us were getting changed. It's this behaviour that doesn't fit in my mind. If you don't want to, then don't, I'll never try to convince anyone to do anything they don't want to, but don't try to derail me.

Occasionally, yeah, there's room for a last-minute mind change because something happened today or something and you're really feeling down and don't want to. Right there with you, I get it, but when it's quite literally EVERY time?? UGH!

The thing that people touched on are these:
- Her parents aren't vegetable eaters and never made her eat them growing up. A doctor apparently told her mom to "just let her eat what she wants" when she was two, and she never saw reason to change that, so she never learned to like vegetables. When I say she won't eat ANYTHING that's green, I'm not exaggerating. If you've ever seen that show Freaky Eaters, she's like a combination of meat dude and the cheesy potato woman. I don't judge her. I don't look down on her for her choices. They're hers and she's the one who'll be suffering the consequences of them, not me. My only "feeling" I guess, over it is worry for her, which I only brought up once years ago, and have never addressed with her again because it's none of my business and if she wants help digging herself out of this hole, all she need do is ask. I'm behind her 100% in anything she wants to do in her life cheering her on (or at least being neutral about it). I can't understand why she's not the same with me.
- She has convinced herself that being fat (as in she has a BMI of around 40) isn't that bad for your health and that she doesn't look that bad. If she wants to stay like that, that's her own thing, and I won't say a word. It's her business. I DO, however, have a problem when I tell her one day that I feel gross and that I've been having issues looking in the mirror lately because I'm disgusted by what I see and that my anxiety and feelings of intense guilt concerning food has been heightened lately, and for her to turn around the next day and try to badger me to "Just forget about dieting today! Get pasta and then afterwards, let's go get icecream!" and suggesting I eat 1400-some-odd calories worth of pasta covered in butter and cream sauce and follow it with an extremely fattening dessert in a sitting. If your friend has just sat there, less than 24 hours earlier and said that the way they look is making them have such issues with their body that they can't look in the mirror, why would you turn around and try to convince them to make it worse? I just don't understand.

I don't have much of a supportive family. In an average week, I'll get a message or two from at least one relative telling me that the speed of my weight loss is unhealthy (In a year I lost 50lb and have bounced around here for a few months. By no means too fast or unhealthy) and the family I live with tells me I'm too picky and, even though I told them over a year ago that I wouldn't be eating meat any more, they try to pressure me into changing to this day, and my grandfather's favourite hobby seems to be criticizing what I look like and how I eat. I'm already at a disadvantage when it comes to a support system, and most of the progress I've made is the direct result of a mixture of will power and stubbornness. Yes, I have given in in times of weakness and allowed myself to be persuaded to make poor decisions around her. If she weren't constantly pressuring me to do so and belittling and undermining my efforts to make wise decisions and better myself, it wouldn't be an issue. I do fully own my part in it. She can b**** and moan as much as she wants, and try as hard as she wants to get me to do anything, and if I give in, I've made the decision and it's not her fault that I let her persuade me, it's mine for allowing it, but over time, if you keep getting pressured to do something, you ARE more likely to give in eventually. It doesn't make it ok and it doesn't specifically make you a "victim," or anything, but it still is a little messed up on the other person's part to knowingly try to pressure someone into poor decisions. Everyone is susceptible to that. Everyone.

If my friend were going through this, I can tell you my initial response would be "let's get together and research food and find some inventive recipes to try! Arm ourselves with knowledge and such and let's do this together. If no one else wants to support us, we can support each other. Screw them!" or "Go you! I'm so proud of you for making this decision. You know who to talk to when things get rough and you need a shoulder to cry on. *squee* I'm so proud of you, though!! Can't wait to see how great this is going to be for you! You deserve it " not "oh, you're doing something that will help your over-all happiness and raise your quality of life? Nah, don't do that, come, walk this path to destruction with me. *offers biggest and most difficult to resist temptation*"

It's weird for me to even flirt with the concept that perhaps she could be jealous of my progress or that I'm making her feel bad by making these decisions for myself, but that suggestion does, I guess make sense. I don't see myself as anything to be jealous of. I'm a work in progress and at some point I'll likely have to have surgery to get rid of loose skin. It's no walk in the park, it's rough, and every time things get difficult and my response is to control my food more, I have to ask myself if I'm walking that dangerous tightrope between making a change for the better and sticking with it and lapsing back into disordered habits. She knows this. I can't wrap my head around being jealous of someone who, in times of stress, obsesses over past poor food choices for sometimes days or weeks, feels excessive guilt and is almost always thinking about food and stressing about it. She also knows that I have a hormonal disorder which makes it difficult to lose weight, but I'm working my *kitten* off and trying to do things the "right" way and not just swing to the other extreme where I go back to restricting excessively and such. To me, to be jealous of that would be as ridiculous as being jealous of someone who's suffering from Contamination related OCD for their hygiene and clean home, ignoring the scars on their hands from over-washing, the fact that the enamel on their teeth has been worn to nothing due to excessive brushing and that entering their home makes you a bit woosy because it constantly smells of cleaning products.