Since I joined Scholars, I have lost 55 lbs. My protocol is to eat lunch at 2 and dinner at 6. I’m committed to these times and have been consistently practicing sticking to eating at these times every day.

Before I started losing weight, I ate breakfast in the morning, then lunch at noon, and dinnertime was whenever my boyfriend happened to come in for the evening (He’s a farmer, so it’s never the same time, could be 6:00, could be 10:00, it’s not consistent). He enjoyed this and liked eating meals with me to connect with me.

My boyfriend came to me last night and told me he is more or less inconvenienced by “all the rules” and “I have to do everything so ridigly and he has so much anxiety about it because he has to worry about if we go out with friends is that gonna work for her dinner times? etc.” I’m like….. why are you so stressed about that? Let me worry about what I’ll eat. This is of course my paraphrasing of what he came to me with.

His main issue is that now we eat zero meals together. Since meals are apparently his main way of connecting with me, maybe he feels lonely?

Since I don’t eat a breakfast, we don’t eat breakfast together. (We never really ate breakfast together in the first place because he doesn’t really eat breakfast either).

We don’t eat lunch together because a) he works all day b) he eats whenever he has time, generally around noon, sometimes he comes into the house sometimes he’s on the go and c) I eat lunch at 2 now (I work from home so technically I could eat with him when he comes in)

And we also now don’t each dinner together because I am sitting down eating at 6 and he says that is logistically impossible for him to be in here eating with me then.

Him wanting my dinner times to be different does not bother me. I could care less whether we actually eat or not – because I eat it then start the dishes and it’s not as much of a “connecting” thing as much as it is just put the food in my mouth and then we’re done and that was boring.

The part that bothers me is the part where he’s coming to me saying he has issues with it and now his drama is what I want to fix in order to feel better. (Which, I recognize, is the reason I’m having problems with this). I’m not interested in changing my meal times, my protocol’s working great. But I’m wondering how I should start to work on my thoughts about wanting to change his behavior in order to make myself feel better.

Thanks so much coaches. You all are amazing, and I love Ask A Coach.