I'm only thing to lose a couple of pounds  To most people, the idea of dieting to lose just a couple of pounds is unfathomable. For them, any diet is at least 20lbs (if they want to go from super obese to less super obese) or 50-100+ lbs to get to just slightly overweight (no one seems to aim for the low end of normal BMI, because their perception is so warped that they can't understand that their "beach body" idea is still a land whale, and that anything remotely human looking is "unrealistic").  but they're acting like I'm starving to death  That's the other thing they don't understand. In order to lose weight, you absolutely must eat at a deficit in relation to your TDEE. To them, any deficit is the literal definition of starving. And they truly think you will die from that. For having so much extra fat, they are amazingly unaware of how fat actually works.