Dietary Restrictions and Social Events

I have just read a smidgen of a thing on Reddit about someone ASKING to bring their own food to a wedding and being told NO and then getting told "Just don't come to that piece of it." 

On the one hand, I kind of agree with people saying "Go scorched Earth on this person."

On the other hand, I never asked anyone ahead of time. I just showed up with my own food if I felt I needed to bring my own.

No one ever turned me away. People sometimes seemed a little weirded out but no one ever was like "You can't BYOB." (because the most common thing I brought was my own drink since people almost never had the thing I drank.)

"Tis easier to get forgiveness than permission" for minor stupid stuff that isn't actually harming anyone.

I typically tried to be as low key about it as possible and if people asked, I would make a generic remark about dietary restrictions or blood sugar issues or whatever and then try to change the subject and not LET my weirdo food habits become the center of attention.

I did everything I could to make sure this was NOT misinterpreted as me dieting for weight control -- because it absolutely wasn't -- and to make sure people didn't twist this into a bizarre claim that I was being a judgy bitch about their diet or their weight.

This means I absolutely did NOT use the low hanging fruit solution of saying something like "All the food here is so fattening." It may seem like the easy answer for protecting your medical privacy in a world where everyone seems to want to lose a few pounds, but there will probably be hell to pay, possibly for YEARS to come, precisely BECAUSE it's a world where everyone is obsessed with their weight.

I did everything in my power to make it clear it was for my HEALTH, not my vanity, and to say things like "This is just what I need to do for me for today." Again, I immediately tried to CHANGE the subject and not just keep answering personal questions about my diet and my health and why I was eating that way.

I have a very deadly medical condition and naming it goes weird places because people act like I've just loudly announced "I'm DYING of CANCER!!!!!!!! Waaaah!!!!!" And there's no way to walk it back and avoid drama once I've named it.

So I learned to tell the truth without saying anything that clueless strangers could wildly misinterpret as a dramatic statement and I learned to use the most banal, uninteresting descriptions to downplay it.

I came up with a list of completely TRUE descriptors that nonetheless made it sound as "no big deal" as possible:

Blood sugar issues.

Gut issues.

Dietary restrictions.

Respiratory problems.

And I learned to do the opposite of my norm. I'm normally very informative and try to answer everything comprehensively, but for dietary stuff I tried to be as uninformative as possible without lying and tried to NOT let one thing lead to another until innocent questions dragged my medical history out of me publicly.

So I didn't want to make statements that left openings for additional questions or inspired curiosity. I did everything I could to answer things in the most "Nothing to see here." fashion imaginable.

Tone of voice is part of that. You don't want to sound enthused about the subject or overly warm and friendly. You want to sound flat and bored and like you are checking out of this incredibly stupid conversation that no one in their right mind would find interesting.

I'm actually really bad about being warm and friendly and inadvertently EXCITING people. I gave up on reading bedtime stories to the kids and let their dad take it over because they would start jumping on the bed instead of getting ready to sleep.

I'm also terrible about over sharing. I've been on public forums where people just kept saying "TMI" to me and it took me a long time to learn to scale it back and say less.

So I worked at this and got reasonably good at it over time. If I can pull it off, I'm inclined to feel like anyone can learn to do this if they really want to.

If you carry a purse or similar, stick food in your bag, be as low key as possible about pulling it out, try to go as unnoticed as possible and try to not allow people to MAKE this a thing. 

Last, I will note that at one time I carried a single very dark chocolate bar (at least 70 percent cocoa) in my purse in place of an inhaler. It's probably not an adequate substitute for an epi pen, but sufficient caffeine absolutely is a good substitute for drugs that open the lungs, plus chocolate, colas and coffee are vastly more socially acceptable than "rescue" drugs while protecting your medical privacy and preventing people from asking invasive health questions.

This was before I learned that the reason I absolutely hated my inhaler is because I was allergic to one of the ingredients, so for ME, chocolate was actually a BETTER solution than the drugs I was being prescribed. YMMV.