People I live with make my diet very difficult. Advice?
I've been overweight for quite a long time, which I don't beat myself up for but I am striving to be a healthier weight. I've done tons of research and even created a tracking system that actually worked for me for a while. When I seriously decided that I would start managing my weight, I was able to lose 16lbs over the course of three months. It was so easy once I got started.
But then the holidays came around... Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc, and I started taking a "break" so I could enjoy the holidays with everyone else. When I say break, I mean I went from losing weight to just *maintaining* weight, which is still ideal. I decided in January that I would start again... then I did the same in February, then again in March, and here we are again in April. I've been telling myself "I'll go back to dieting tomorrow" since Christmas, and instead of losing or maintaining, I've gained a bit of weight in the past 4 months.
My main problem, I think, is the environment I live in. It's clear that I'm capable and I don't lack the knowledge to be able to lose weight, considering I did it with no trouble before. The two people I live with, however, make dieting so so difficult. My partner has an addiction to fast food that he doesn't want to acknowledge, and he's fairly overweight. He isn't interested in dieting, which would be fine, but he also gets uncomfortable and weird whenever he sees me dieting. Any time I mention calories (my own, not his), he makes some joke about how I shouldn't count calories or else it'll drive him mad.
Meanwhile, his grandmother (who we live with) makes dinner every night. A few problems here, but to be clear I don't dislike that she makes us dinner all the time. I really appreciate how much she does for us. But even though she makes dinner for us all the time, my boyfriend prefers to go get fast food and bring that home for himself to eat. When he does this, it leads to us having leftovers, and grama takes it as a personal attack as if he's saying he hates her cooking (which he doesn't). When we have a bunch of leftovers, which we normally do, grama gets really antsy if we don't eat it the next day, which means it's on *me* to eat it since my bf always prefers to go eat fast food. The other difficult part about her making dinner is she uses a LOT of processed stuff, and I also have no way of knowing exactly what she puts in the food so I kind of have to guess the calories or else make my own food (which would, as you might imagine, make her feel attacked).
Not to mention, grama also loves to bake and make desserts and bring ice cream or other sweets home. I've mentioned that I'm counting calories all the time, and her favorite line is a very silly and sweet little "oh this one is calorie free". She knows that's not true, and that's not how calories work, especially for desert, but I think she's just trying to ease my guilt? She brings me these sweets unprompted, so I could have already had 900 calories from breakfast and lunch, she comes home with a blizzard worth 700 cal, and we still haven't had dinner yet. I can't plan around these sweets, and I'd rather fill up my calories with unprocessed foods anyway!
I've suggested just letting me make my own dinner and she got so depressed about the idea that she started lashing out at bith of us for a week. She has such a weird relationship with food in her house, that she started getting weird about the bf having his *own* bag of chips in the basement we rent from her, as if he was hoarding food from her. Part of our rent agreement is also that I buy the groceries for the house, so making the food non-communal would just be a nightmare in and of itself.
TLDR I don't know what to do. I live with a boyfriend who is addicted to fast food and a grama who unintentionally guilts me into eating way more calories than I intend, plus it's impossible to properly count calories when she makes all of our dinners for us. Is it possible to change my environment so that I can go back to losing weight? Is it me who needs to change? Any advice or recommendations would be awesome. Thank you.