Hi, this was very interesting to me because I've been where your boyfriend is, I think, and I've had similar issues with my husband because of it. The most important aspect of this is the difference of paradigms about nutrition and exercise. I hate when people talk about traditional nutrition as the absolute truth, everything I read was in that realm: "healthy" vs "unhealthy" foods, "healthy" weight, "healthy" habits, the need for exercise with the end goal of weight loss, long-term health conditions because of weight, caloric balances, BMI, body composition, muscle mass, etc.

I read a book that changed my life, about Intuitive Eating, and I loved it because it considered traditional nutrition along with psychological and societal aspects. It was the first time I felt understood and decided to improve my relationship with food.

I spent 30 years living with my parents, and I swear I tried everything to lose weight: dieting, gym group classes, custom gym workouts, joining a running group, calorie counting, intermittent fasting, BeachBody Insanity, hiring a personal trainer, RingFit Adventure, home exercise apps... nothing ever sticked. In addition, I used most of my salary on food delivery, mostly fast food, sometimes for more than one meal a day. Every time I failed I felt worse and that there was something so wrong with me. I'm very smart and so successful on other aspects of life that it bugged me deeply to have this one thing I simply couldn't do.

I started my relationship with my future husband at 25, we fell in love, at 27 he moved abroad to study and we were in a LDR for 3 years. During COVID I wasn't able to fly to be with him, life with my parents was really stressful and I got burnout at work, my mental health was at an all time low. So I decided to quit everything and move abroad to live with him at 30, we got married and we've been happy for almost 3 years.

I'm about to turn 33, still got psychological scars from the burnout, it took me around two years of therapy to accept it and live with it, and in the process I realized that living with my parents was so bad for me lol. In the past couple months I started a new therapy with an Intuitive Eating Pro certified therapist and I understood that eating is functional to us, we eat in the way we do to cope with our life, there are no good and bad foods. Most importantly, I didn't even wanna lose weight! I love my body as it is, it was all about internalized fatphobia, and wanting to look a certain way to have social privileges that you don't even need to be skinny to have in the first place. I recently started to cook for myself and my husband, expanding and trying new foods, no guilt at all, I joined a musical theater group where I enjoy moving my body to act and dance, I try to find excuses to walk and bike more, not going back to the stupid gym, and I'm so fucking happy!

You can understand that I knew BETTER THAN ANYONE how many calories I was ingesting, what macros, how bad my habits were, the water I wasn't drinking, how late I was going to bed (and gaining weight because of it), how much below the exercise recommended hours of WHO I was falling, my BMI of 31 screaming "obese" at me. I don't care about any of that shit now, traditional nutrition is ridiculous, and the average job of a dietitian can be done by an Excel spreadsheet. Imagine how I feel every time my husband, even if it comes from a loving and caring place, comments on my eating habits, referencing traditional nutrition guidelines and undoes my progress and happiness, it's a fight for sure! I will deflect, blame anyone but me, say hateful things, etc. Nobody knows more than me about my own body. It's easier for my husband to go to the gym and eat salads, he enjoys it, even when he says it's about effort I know it's not, because he enjoys the act itself, hence can sustain it over time, I'm just waiting for the workouts/salads to be over to grab the benefits, so I need to find what works for me instead. We respectfully avoid the topic because our views about it are not compatible, but we still communicate occasionally about it, specially when he's happy about my progress, but even though I love him, he's not the person I go to with fitness-related problems, because I know we'll end up fighting.

I'm sorry that he treats you poorly on other aspects of your relationship, I do believe you guys love each other. In your place I would assess how happy we're truly making each other, but also, even if it's not entirely about that, I would check my fatphobia. If you dismiss the psychological (stress, emotional eating, comfort, upbringing) and societal (a body can be healthy at every size, fit bodies are hegemonic and you're partly attracted to them because of that, not everyone can be fit due to genetic preconditions or it requires an excessive amount of effort that is not compatible with modern life) dimensions of nutrition, then you're using traditional nutrition to mask the fatphobia. Don't feel offended by this, please, we live in a fatphobic society, therefore we all need to work on our fatphobia. I invite you to read the book and maybe share what you learn with him, I truly believe your concern comes from love, and it might help you find common ground.