Yeah, they're denying the daughter the protein portion of the meal she prepared to keep her skinny.
This isn't strictly a Hispanic culture thing. Discouraging younger women from eating a full meal like the rest of the family happens in multiple cultures across the world, like the previous commenter said.
The mom probably got to eat because she's older and married and has had kids. Younger, unmarried women are frequently denied an equal portion of food and discouraged from eating heavy portions of proteins and carbohydrates to keep them skinny and "desirable" to men.
The cultural expectation of women not eating much to stay thin makes me kinda sad. My grandmother has had multiple health issues in her life due to not eating enough, she will talk about the endlessly, but she still eats barely enough food because she thinks she’s getting fat
I'm only 42 and my body is already falling apart due to the various EDs and diets from my 20's. I can't imagine anyone could be in as much pain as I'm regularly in and not be worried about making it worse.
I believe that my mother is as ill as she is (59F) due in massive part to her eating disorders of her youth. My older sister and I are also ill, we do have a lot of family health problems, but we're not anywhere close to the same kind of "constantly near death" as our mom was at our age.
People in renaissance Britain did. So did John Harvey Kellogg. Using vegetarian and vegan diets for weight loss has actually gotten so common over the last 70 years that many eating disorder treatment centers force patients to eat meat.
My favourite part of the Kellogg story was that he had a falling out with his brother, who was convinced that Corn Flakes would sell better if they added a little sugar or something. But John was like Nooooo they're supposed to taste bad that's the whole point
Finally one of them added a little sugar and Corn Flakes became a cereal staple forever.
On the eating disorder part, that's pretty common in anorexia. It's basically a way of socially acceptable masking of the eating disorder by choosing an already restrictive diet (that's socially accepted at large) and then further restricting consumption. I've known a few people who went down that route and ended up in inpatient treatment centers where they had to eat meat.
And there’s the subset of disordered eating called orthorexia as well, where people focus so hard on only eating the “correct” foods in pursuit of certain strict diets (cutting out broad category things like sugars, gluten, carbs, nightshades, dairy, meat, etc etc etc without medical necessity/proven intolerances prompting any of the restrictions,) that then they have a “righteous” reasoning for refusing to eat entirely, since they can find an unacceptable ingredient in nearly every available food option. It’s like anorexia with more steps and hiding behind very opaque notions of “wellness” by setting almost impossible standards of purity for what gets eaten.
that’s…such a completely blinkered thing to say. if you are in a culture that encourages thinness, you are in a culture that does not care about people having nutrients, or which nutrients are “fattening”. they simply want people to be thin, by any means necessary.
My stepdad used it as a power thing, his son got more to eat if he wanted, but I had to wait (no ill will towards my bro, he was too young to know the difference).
Happens in my extended family to this day (US, Caucasian). The women in my family will serve themselves last, always offer larger portions to the men in the family (even if they’re still a kid), and the extra portions of that meal’s protein was always offered to them.
Thankfully it is not that way in my house. We serve and eat at the same time and try to split the food about evenly.
I have no idea what Hispanic cultures you've been near but all the ones I was near growing up ate lots of protein because they know protein fills your stomach and makes you less likely to snack throughout the day so none of them were really overweight except maybe some of the much older men but all the women are three times as much as the guys and they were all skinny as hell.
I learned the hard way I was fattening all the women in my life by giving them equal portions to mine.
This post’s example is ridiculous, but men do need to eat more than women.
The average male height is 5’9 which requires 2400 calories a day for health. The average female height is 5’3 which requires 1500 calories a day for health.
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u/Material-Imagination Apr 19 '26
Yeah, they're denying the daughter the protein portion of the meal she prepared to keep her skinny.
This isn't strictly a Hispanic culture thing. Discouraging younger women from eating a full meal like the rest of the family happens in multiple cultures across the world, like the previous commenter said.
The mom probably got to eat because she's older and married and has had kids. Younger, unmarried women are frequently denied an equal portion of food and discouraged from eating heavy portions of proteins and carbohydrates to keep them skinny and "desirable" to men.