RYL Forums - one odd quirk of mine causes more trouble than it should

Next week I will fly to California to start my second year of college. Last year I stayed in a dorm with one roommate. For this year, three friends invited me to live with them in their apartment, so long as I buy my own food. They also recommended that I sign up for meals at the dinning hall. It bothers a little me that these are the things they want to discuss when accepting me as a roommate.

My odd quirk is that I eat a lot, so much that it sometimes annoys my friends. I grew up in a family that ate a lot. We ate five meals a day which didn't seem odd to us at all. It didn't seem odd to me at the time. We had breakfast, lunch at school, lunch after school, dinner, and a bed time snack. None of us are fat. It may just run in our family or maybe it is caused by growing up that way but my body wants a lot more food than all my friends. It likes food and I feel right when I eat a lot of food.

You would not imagine there would be a problem with this but there is. When I first moved into the dorm I started to severely miss my bedtime snack so I would order late night pizzas. On about the third night my roommate started to think it was a little strange. We got refrigerator. I found out that my roommate was worried about gaining weight. Sometimes she would just make a small salad instead of going to dinner. One afternoon she found me making a couple of sandwiches. She asked why I was eating all our food, "didn't you eat lunch at the dinning hall?" I said, "sure, but that was three hours ago and I'm hungry." Even though I paid my share she got very frustrated with this sort of thing. We started to keep separate food supplies. Even so she was still bothered by my eating sometimes.

One day I forgot to buy groceries and and all I had before bed was a slice of bread. Hunger pangs woke me up around 3:00AM. After a while my roommate woke up to go to the bathroom. I asked if I could have some of her food, "I'll replace it first thing." She said, "Go ahead." I was famished. I ate two breakfast bars and three lean cuisine entrees. When she saw that she kind of flipped out and started telling me that something was wrong with me. "you're always hungry... you're always eating... you just eat and eat and then you're hungry again and eat even more... where does it go?... maybe you should see a doctor... nobody eats like that..." It did make me feel weird especially since, embarrassingly, I was still a little hungry.

In fairness to myself, there isn't much food in a lean cuisine meal. I was unusually hungry for some reason and I hadn't eaten anything in 10 hours. It didn't seem like that much. But I just ate most of my friend's food, she is raving about how I am always eating... and I am not even really full. It made me feel abnormal.

I did see a doctor. He wasn't too concerned since there was no recent change in appetite but he ran many tests. All came back negative, He said there was no problem but I probably could eat less. I'm not so sure. I can skip a meal now and then but eventually I get very hungry.

This makes me feel weird but it goes further than my roommate. Camping trips and staying at other peoples houses can be awkward. Everyone is surprised by what I eat (if they're around me long enough). Everyone wants to talk to me about it. They wonder if I am really hungry and ask how much I eat a day. They want to know how much I ate as a teenager. They tell me about their friends who eat a lot. People ask all kinds of questions and they even joke about it. I find it really annoying and I don't know what to do about it.