how were your eating habits when you were a kid?

Lately I've been thinking about how I ate when I was younger, I mean around 7-12 years old. For some odd reason I hated eating real meals, like I loved candy like any kid but I hated eating breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was so traumatizing to me that would cry and plead my mom so I wouldn't have to eat it. Now I see myself and I love eating all of the things that made me upset once. Just wondering what your eating habits were like? Have they stayed the same?

I was the ultimate human dustbin.  Given that I'd hit 5'2" by the age of 10 I was a one-girl machine for seeking out any and all available edible substances!  I had to be a dustbin because my mother is the world's most terrible cook and, not being a wealthy family, it didn't pay to be too fussy about the burnt bits....

Unfortunately, like a lot of people I went from a skinny kid that ran around and could eat anything to a less active adult that couldn't afford to do the same thing without getting fat!!  And it's a battle I suppose I'll be fighting my whole life... sigh...

my parents raised me on a completely organic diet with hardly any meat, being over weight runs in my family so both of my parents were concerned with making sure my brother and i ate very healthy. However, college ruined that for me and after gaining 30lbs between freshman year and now I know why they pushed healthy diets on us so much!

my habits were awful- i know it sounds like passing the buck but i blame it on my mother . when i was growing up my mom would keep snacks like chips, candy, cookies etc. in a basket near "her chair" in the living room which we were NOT allowed to touch EVER, and also ice cream that was FORBIDDEN. we werent allowed to eat junk food. so my sister and i began sneaking it- hiding food under our pillows- eating it at night. i guess closet eating. my sister became very overweight and im sure i would have had i not been in dance but when i quit the habits came back the weight piled on and now that i have acknowledged everything that happened ive developed a better relationship with food and have lost 45lbs. sometimes i still have struggles but i think it was a lot of bad learned habits based on our rules not to eat junk while our mother (whom was over weight) gorged herself nightly while we watched.

I was a weird kid because I would try pretty much anything at least once.  My grandfather still likes to tell the story of how that when I was 5, we went to this one seafood place and he asked if I had eaten steamed clams before and I said no.  He said that he would order some if I said that I would try it and I said sure.  He thought that I wouldn't like it but I ended eating about half of the bucket.  There are some things that I didn't like then that I like now, for example beans (would only eat the New England style baked beans), blue cheeses, potatoes that weren't fried.  My excuse for the potatoes in the US, unless you grow them yourself they taste like cardboard and they taste like potatoes in Europe because I still don't like baked potatoes in the US.  There are some things that I don't like as much anymore though too, I don't like eating meat that much.  Fish is great, but I don't eat much red meat or poultry.  I won't eat hot dogs or any finely ground sausage for that matter.   

Holy cow, I was a food vacuum.  We weren't allowed snacking usually, but during meal times, holy cow. I figure I must have been a lot more active than I thought I was.  There were times I'd have 5 bowls of cereal, and was out eating my dad at 12.  I also never had a growth spurt,I just kept getting bigger.

I also tended to shovel during the entire meal. Less than a happy household, so I'd pretty much eat through out dinner to avoid the daggers.

Atrocious.

My mother thought I was going to die of malnutrition because for years I just wouldn't eat anything substantial.  She says I lived on air.  I recall going quite a while eating nothing by peanut butter and honey sandwiches and drinking milk.  Nothing else.  Ever. 

I diversified a bit as I got older, but I left home still an extremely picky eater.  I ate large portions of the things I liked, though - chips, french fries, chocolate, peanut butter, pretty much any meat. 

My husband loves to cook and he's opened my taste buds to many things I wouldn't have touched before I met him.  But, there are still lots of things I don't even consider eating - including any non-liquid cheese.  lol

Oh i was a fat little kid. Always eating "Bad for you snacks" especially after schook like twinkies, hostess cupcakes, etc. and then i remember my mom used to buy us burger king "kids meals" all the time... Fast forward 14 years, I am at a healthy weight now, but i hated being a heavy little kid (as you can imagine, kind of tramautizing!) so when i eventually have my own i am not going to stock up on any of that junk!

i was always terribly underweight when i was a kid (between 30~40% underweight until i hit puberty), but i ate junk like nobody's business-–i ate ice cream and chips/candy first thing after school every single day, and cookies/biscuits/chips were a staple... i'd wolf down the mega-sized cadbury bars, then another whole bag of candy and keep going wherever my pocket money could take me. >"<

I was never really a picky eater though. I ate whatever my mum put on my plate (and she was trying to make me gain weight too!)... but i preferred all the snacks and condiments, which were like bonuses on top of my main meals... come think of it, my pre-puberty metabolism must have been totally whacked.

oh but the strangest thing is that i absolutely loved broccoli. i even drew pictures of it when i was 5 to remind my mum to buy them whenever she went grocery shopping...

I'm into all the the 'healthy eating' stuff now, which would have been totally unexpected for me as a kid/teen, when i was still quaffing down 250g chocolate bars on top of my supersized fast food meals and ice cream on a daily basis... i can't even imagine what it'd be like to do that now!

My parents tended to use going without meals as punishment, so I learned to sneak food from the kitchen very early, and I always had a stash of food in my bedroom for if I was sent to bed without dinner.  I also learned to eat as much as I could when I could in case I was deprived later.  I guess thats where my problems came from.  It was mostly healthy food, I just eat too much of it.

I TOTALLY blame my mother. It was ignorance. She just wanted to make us happy, but our cupboards were always overflowing with junk. Sugary cereals, fruit roll ups, oreos, sodas, candy bars....I remember coming home from school every day and eating like, 8 oreos with a huge glass of 2% milk!! I am lucky that I have learned how horrible that is. My siblings, on the other hand, still eat junk all the time.

When I was a kid we had veg with meals 5 times a week.  We never had sweets or ice creams.  Everything we had was home made (bread, biscuits, puddings, pies) we were thin kids.  So when we got pocket money we bought sweets.  It's not always the best restricting your kids, as soon as they get their independance they can eat what they want.

My mom cooked everything fried.  Here is a sample of what our week would look like:

 

Fried chicken , french fries & corn on the cob

Pan fried hamburgers with gravy,  mashed potatoes & green peas

Spaghetti with meat sauce, huge amounts of pasta, white bread and butter

Fried porkchops, french fries, & green beans

Roast Beef, potatoes, gravy, carrots, peas

 

This is disgusting....almost all of our meals were either fried or had gravy.  I was a thin child and was a thin teenager.  I must have had a metabolism of steel....but it caught up with me later in life.

 

I also ate lots of sugary cereal, chips, cookies, ice cream, brownies, popcorn, etc. as a kid.

Well, sorry to say but I blame my mother for this also. She used to buy my whole pizzas, a lot of other savoury meals that were for two or more people, as well as giving me money at the age of ten or so to go to the shop and buy myself unhealthy snacks at an age where I didn't know any better.

She never cooked anything! And I developed an awful eating habit of takeaways (Chinese, burgers etc.) and other fatty greasy foods, although as she used to boast "she never bought me chocolate" - well it didn't matter anyway because I was obese by the time I was ten years old.

I would eat ANYTHING when I was a kid.  I loved (and still love) trying new foods.  The few things I didn't eat were foods I had eaten so much of before that they made me sick.  I kind of thought I could just eat anything I wanted and it wouldn't matter if I was fat.  When I realized I didn't like being overweight, I didn't really know what to do about it so I just kept with the same bad habits.  

I went on Weight Watchers with my mom and sister when I was 16 and that helped a lot with portion sizes and I lost about 20 pounds, but I'm here now because the points system is so abstract and counting calories seems more concrete and less complicated to me.

I think the issues i have with sweets, is that we were not allowed them when i was a kid, we occasionally had icecream, or a cookie but we werent allowed to have Pepsi or coke etc. As soon as i got old enough Pepsi was all that i would drink .. and i kept that up for 10 years ...I actually never drank a glass of water in over 10 years untill i started this new lifestyle.

You can imagine that if Pepsi was forbidden .. so was places like Mc donalds etc... and once i had my own money that was all i wanted to spend it on, FOOD, food that i wasnt allowed to have while living with my parents.I lived off junk Mc Donalds, take out chinese, wendys etc for about 10 years too.

I was also forced to finnish everything that was put on my plate, I was not allowed to leave the table untill i ate everything, I wil say tho that my mom always made healthy meals, always had veggies and meat, potatoes, pasta, salad, good food, but i was forced to eat everything that was on my plate .. and even to this day I have a hard time leaving anything on my plate. It makes me feel very wasteful, but i am getting better at it. Most of the time i dont leave anything .. cuz i only portion out ONE serving to begin with =)

I think that there are 2 extremes, the parents who allow no junk food, thus creating a horrible cycle of the forbidden fruit once the child is out on their own or has its own money, or the opposite, parents who allow too much junk food .. and dont teach their children good food choices.  Its a very fine line imo.

I can only hope that if i ever have kids ... I will be able to walk that line, and teach my kids good choices that will last a lifetime so that they dont end up struggling with weight issues like i have.

K

I have always been one of the world's slowest eaters (apparently even as a baby it would take an hour to give me one bottle) and I hate to eat until I actually feel full. Portions were not large at home when I was a child- we weren't poor, that was just my mother served us food because it was probably how her mother served her etc. 

There was very little in the way of fried foods, sauces and dressings- my mother was not a good cook and our meals were variations on the theme of meat and three veg.

Soft drinks were only bought for birthday parties, I remember being amazed to see that at friends' houses there were large bottles of coke and Sprite in the fridge. I hate the sugariness and artificial flavour of sodas and the diet versions just taste awful.

We only got sweets at special occasions like Christmas or Easter and when we went to our grandmother's house about once a month. I have quite a sweet tooth but I know not to overdo it so I don't eat huge amounts of sweets. I definitely have something sweet about twice a day though.

Partly as a result of this upbringing, I have never been overweight. (I came to this site to find nutrition information to make sure my diet was balanced.) 

Particularly important I believe were the portion sizes we were served. When my mother remarried and we moved in with my stepfather and stepbrothers I was astonished at how huge their meals were- of course the boys were growing teenagers, but they ate 2 to 3 times the portions my family did- and guess what? They were overweight. 

I was underweight, addicted to caffeine by around 4years old (by way of soda and chocolate) and had a terrible issue with texture and smell.  I was allowed whole cans of Pepsi and we always had sweets, candy bars and sugary cereals in the house.  I hated veggies and a lot of stuff.  When my mom started to work (I was around 8 or 9) we began to eat a lot of TV dinners. 

I went hungry a lot because I simply couldn't eat a lot of foods.  When I did get something I like, I ate tons of it. 

Fast food was a treat because we lived in the country. 

On top of that, my parents were yo-yo dieters, my dad has been obese most of his life.  So, there would be trends of diet food, arguing over baked goods and then normal stuff.  It's part of the reason I delayed even starting a weight loss program because they tried every diet under the sun and failed. 

Such an interesting topic! Well, my mother struggled with her weight throughout her life and when I was shaping up to be a chubby kid, well, it wasn't fun. We dieted together! Awful crash diets that were unhealthy for anyone, especially a 8 year old kid. sigh. I just knew my mother hated herself and I really wish she would have embraced herself for what she was,,,,a totally wonderful person who happened to struggle with her weight. She was always on a diet, trying various fads, before i came along she was strung out on prescribed amphetamines...like many women in the 60's. But I was swigging pepsi from the time I was born, we had a soda machine in our house (we had a in home beauty shop)....so I never drank water. I slimmed down when I got taller, after puberty. But the irony of it all.....I am now much larger than she ever was. But I am working hard to change that. And i embrace the person that i am and i've learned NOT to hate myself for being overweight.

but yeah, we ate gravy on everything, homemade pies, hostess after school everyday....everything fried. Fresh veggies from the garden, drenched in bacon grease and butter.

Awe yeah, bring on the bacon grease!  My mom always had a coffee mug in the fridge with cold hard bacon grease in it...ready to pull out for vegetables.  LOL

 

And she would buy a big can of Crisco Shortening every single week.  I cannot believe that we used that stuff. 

i can remember when we made the switch from lard to crisco.

yeeechh......