Excaloricate
Jonas lived with someone who had never needed to think about food. His partner, Nils, ate what he wanted, cooked generously, and stayed exactly the same size he'd been for a decade. Jonas didn't have that body. He had eleven kilos he wanted gone and a kitchen that was, as far as he could tell, working against him.
The two-diet problem
The first attempt was the obvious one: get the household on board. Jonas asked for smaller dinners. He asked for the biscuits to live somewhere else. For about nine days it worked, and then it quietly stopped working, because Nils hadn't signed up for anything. He wasn't sabotaging — he just cooked the way he'd always cooked, and the pasta pot held what the pasta pot held.
Jonas took that personally for a while. It felt like a lack of support. But nobody was doing anything to him. Two people were eating the same meals and only one of them needed a different amount.
Where the calories actually were
When he finally started logging instead of arguing, the picture got specific fast. Jonas used Excaloricate because it didn't need a scale or a recipe breakdown — he could type "bowl of carbonara, big portion" after dinner and get a number back.
Three things showed up, and none of them were the ones he'd been fighting about:
- Serving size, not the food. The meals Nils cooked were fine. Jonas was eating a portion built for someone who didn't need to lose weight, and going back for the rest of the pan because it was there.
- The evening tail. Two beers and a shared bag of crisps on the sofa, four or five nights a week. Neither of them thought of it as eating.
- Weekends. Saturday out, Sunday brunch. Two days were undoing most of five.
The house wasn't the problem. His plate was.
What he changed — and what he didn't
Jonas stopped asking anyone else to change. He served himself first, at the stove, before sitting down — one plate, no pan on the table. He kept the shared dinner exactly as it was, because eating together was the point of it.
The sofa hour got a small edit: he kept the beers on two nights instead of five, and stopped eating out of a shared bag, because a shared bag has no size. Weekends stayed social. He just logged them, saw the number, and let the weekdays hold a bit more slack to absorb it.
Nils changed nothing at all. He still cooked big, still kept biscuits in the cupboard, still ordered dessert. That turned out to be fine. Jonas had been treating a household of two as if it needed a single shared policy, when what he actually needed was his own portion and a way to see it.
A year later
Eleven kilos took Jonas about fourteen months, with a long flat stretch around month six that he now describes as the part where he learned to keep logging when nothing was happening. He never had the confrontation he'd been building toward. He never asked Nils to eat less.
The thing he says about it now is that living with someone who eats freely isn't a disadvantage — it's just information you have to hold. Nils's plate was never a plan for Jonas. Once he stopped copying it, the kitchen stopped feeling like an opponent.