Holiday gatherings can feel like emotional minefields for anyone struggling with food or their body.
If you love someone who struggles with food, body image, or their weight — in any body size — this is for you.
Many people asked what actually helps beyond avoiding certain comments. This piece goes deeper — not just into what not to say, but why it matters, and how to offer support that truly reduces harm in real time.
You don’t need to read this all at once. Take what’s useful and leave the rest.
Eating Struggles Don’t Have One Look
Eating struggles are not limited to people who appear visibly underweight.
They can also affect the person who is constantly dieting or “making up for” what they ate, feels out of control around certain foods, skips meals or hides how little they’re eating, binges or purges in secret, avoids eating in front of others, exercises to “earn” or “burn off” food, or hates how they look in photos or repeatedly checks their body.
Many of these struggles are invisible — especially during the holidays, when food, celebration, and expectations collide.
A Pause for Self-Awareness: Noticing Our Own Biases
Before focusing on what not to say, it helps to reflect on what many of us were taught — often unconsciously — about food and bodies.
Messages like thinner means healthier, some foods are “good” or “bad,” eating less equals discipline, or weight loss equals success can slip into comments, jokes, concerns, or even compliments — even when we care deeply.
Self-awareness isn’t about blame. It’s about choosing intention over habit.
Why Food Policing and Body Comments Make Things Worse
A Nervous System Perspective
Food policing — commenting on what, how much, or how someone eats — often comes from concern. But for someone struggling, it can activate the nervous system’s threat response.
When someone feels watched or evaluated, the body shifts into fight, flight, or freeze. In that state, anxiety increases, hunger and fullness cues become harder to access, shame intensifies, and rigid control behaviours often strengthen.
Food policing doesn’t create change — it creates protection.
Even subtle comments can communicate “I’m being watched,” “my choices need approval,” or “my body is open for evaluation.” This can lead to increased restriction, bingeing, purging, secrecy, or withdrawal — sometimes long after the gathering ends.
What Often Goes Unseen After the Gathering Ends
What many people don’t see is what happens after the table is cleared.
For someone struggling with food or body image, holding it together during a gathering often means the nervous system is in survival mode. The impact of comments, looks, or pressure may not show up right away.
It often shows up later — in restriction, bingeing, purging, body checking, or a wave of shame once they’re alone.
What looked like “doing fine” may have been the body waiting until it was safe again. This is why food policing doesn’t just affect the moment — it shapes what happens afterward.
Adults and Teens: Why This Lands Differently
Food policing affects both adults and teens, but the nervous-system response can look different depending on development and power dynamics.
For teens and adolescents, nervous systems are still developing and are especially sensitive to loss of autonomy and perceived judgment. Food policing can intensify threat responses, increase shame and secrecy, and undermine emerging body trust. Teens may eat less in public, hide food, binge in private, shut down emotionally, or appear compliant while struggling internally. For teens, safety comes from feeling trusted, not watched.
For adults, long histories of body shame, food rules, or trauma are often present. Food policing can reactivate earlier experiences of criticism or control, increase internal self-policing, and deepen shame tied to identity and worth. Adults often turn control inward — restricting more rigidly, bingeing privately, or avoiding social situations. For adults, safety comes from relief from evaluation.
Why “Positive” Comments Can Still Harm
Comments such as “you look so well,” “you look better now,” or “you’re so thin — you look amazing” are often heard by someone with eating struggles as their body being assessed.
Silence around bodies is often more protective than praise.
What Body-Neutral and Food-Neutral Support Looks Like
You don’t need to love bodies or food to be supportive. Neutrality is often safer.
Body-neutral support includes avoiding comments on bodies — including your own — stepping away from weight-loss or appearance talk, and gently redirecting body-focused conversations.
Food-neutral support includes avoiding labeling foods as good, bad, or earned, letting people eat what and how much they choose, and avoiding moral language around food or exercise.
Neutrality communicates that someone does not need to perform or explain themselves.
What Helps More Than Advice
Support that actually helps tends to be quieter and less directive. It’s not about fixing, correcting, or coaching — it’s about helping the nervous system feel safer.
Just as important as what helps is knowing what to step away from.
Dieting talk of any kind, including conversations about weight loss, cutting carbs, fasting, “clean eating,” or plans to change eating habits, can increase shame and vigilance. Fad or trend-based food conversations, even when joking, can have a similar effect.
Discussions about weight-loss or appetite-related medications, including who is using them, results, or suggestions that someone should consider them, can also be activating.
Comments about food amounts or portions — how much or how little someone is eating, getting seconds, skipping dessert, or “balancing it out” — as well as moral language around food or movement, such as “being good,” “cheating,” “earning it,” or “working it off,” often increase the feeling of being watched or evaluated.
What helps instead is sitting with someone without watching their plate, letting meals unfold without commentary, gently redirecting conversations, and normalizing breaks or early exits.
Responding to emotion rather than behaviour can sound like “this seems like a lot today,” “you don’t have to push through,” or “I’m really glad you’re here.”
Offering choice rather than solutions, helping in non-food ways like taking a walk or helping with cleanup, and allowing silence without filling it can all reduce pressure.
For both teens and adults, safety — not pressure — is what allows regulation.
Support Is About Safety, Not Perfection
You won’t say everything right — and that’s okay.
What matters most is creating spaces where people don’t feel pressure to appear okay in order to put others at ease. That pressure can show up as feeling expected to eat a certain way so others don’t worry, feeling pressure to look relaxed or “normal” during meals, being praised for eating more, eating less, or eating “well,” sensing that others are watching for signs of improvement, feeling responsible for managing other people’s discomfort around food or bodies, or feeling like they have to prove they’re doing better.
For someone struggling with food or body image, these expectations can increase anxiety, self-monitoring, and urges to control eating or hide distress.
Supportive spaces ease this by allowing people to eat without commentary, feel uncomfortable without being corrected or reassured, step away without explanation, and participate without needing to demonstrate progress. Reducing this pressure helps lower vigilance and makes it easier for the nervous system to settle.
Supporting someone around food and body image during the holidays doesn’t require special language or perfect responses. It requires awareness, restraint, and a willingness to prioritize safety over reassurance.
When we reduce commentary, step away from assumptions, and stay attentive to how someone may be experiencing the moment internally, we create environments that are less activating and more supportive. These shifts may seem small, but they can significantly reduce harm. For many people, that reduction is what makes it possible to move through gatherings without needing to brace, hide, or compensate afterward.
If this resonates, you’re not alone. Many people carry quiet stress around food, bodies, and gatherings, especially during the holidays, and it often goes unseen.
If you’re noticing how these dynamics show up for you or someone you care about, support is available. You don’t need to have the right words before reaching out. At evolve Psychotherapy & Consulting Group Inc., we work with individuals, families, and caregivers to better understand these patterns and to build safer, more supportive ways forward.
