What you've had to unlearn from childhood.

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We all had different environments growing up. And habits learned as a child can be some of the most challenging to overcome (even if you logically know they are incorrect). So what did you learn as a child that has been a hindrance to your weight goals? How have you changed it?

My childhood 'lessons' that I no longer follow:
- I have to clean my plate

- Diets are a few miserable cranky months to get ready for swimsuit season

- After a long day, the fastest appropriate meal is pasta from a box

-The first step to dieting is getting rid of everything unhealthy and stop socializing anywhere that involves food. You can not resist it.

- Exercise is work

- Diet foods are gross.

- A tablespoon of vegetables on your plate equals a balanced meal

EDIT: DISCLAIMER (how did I forget this): I am in no way blaming my, or anyone elses parents for my/their obesity. I am not stating my(or anyone else's) parents were 'bad.' Just that some of habits I (and I assume others) learned in childhood have required undoing in the quest for a healthier lifestyle.

Original Post by mrsunderstood82:

I too grew up with the motto, "you have to clean your plate."  I don't think that my parents taught me bad habits.  The did what they thought was best at the time, and besides, we were too poor to waste food or be fussy, what they preached at the time was right at the time.  I was never a fat kid, that has happened since i left home.  I believe that to successfully lose weight you need to take responsibility for your own actions.  There are a million and one reasons for being over weight and just the same amount of excuses of people to blame.  I am the person who made me fat, i had nothing to stop me and an income to pay for it.  I'm 100 percent responsible for it getting there and i'm responsible for getting rid of it... if i ever do.  Oh... did i mention that it's also cause being big boned runs in my family...

 YUP! I could have written that myself. We were poor. When we had something in abundance, I would binge on it-fried potatoes, eggs, black-eyed peas. There was a pecking order for eating. Being the second to oldest, I was one of the last to eat. In between the abundant times, I literally starved. I'm sure people thought I was anorexic. I was malnourished. As an adult, I packed on pounds, especially after having kids. I think it took me this long to address the issue of my weight because I kind of enjoyed being fat.

Sorry if I'm a downer...

I know it sounds absolutely stupid, but as a child and younger teen I didn't even know food had calories and that there were such things as portion sizes. I always just thought you could eat whatever you want and there were no repercussions, and if you wanted to lose weight you just didn't eat at all for a very long time.

OBVIOUSLY, this was very unhealthy, and despite knowing different now, my brain still has trouble getting over the fact that I can't eat everything I want. And it also has trouble realizing I can't just not eat and successfully lose weight. I think I've yet to fully "unlearn" this.

-It's not good to be going to bed completely stuffed with food.

-Food is not a replacement for affection and caring. My parents told me they loved me and everything, but buying sugar filled candy and chocolates, soda, and salty, cheesy, deep fried foods in abundance was another way they tried(and still do!) to show love.

-Just because someone insists on you having seconds(and thirds) doesn't mean you have to have it. You are not obligated to gain weight to make someone feel good about their cooking.

Here are mine:

-All things are made better with butter, bacon and/or salt.

-Peanut butter is a healthy food. Eat all you want.

-If it comes in a "snack" bag it's the correct portion.

-Deep fried is great. Covered in cheese is even better. Deep fried macaroni and cheese is heaven!

Thank goodness my parents didn't make me be a part of the "clean plate club." Although my problem is now trying not to clean my plate at every meal.

I was very sick as a baby and for the first 3+ years of my life couldn't hold meals down, was in and out of the hospital, and they didn't know if i was going to make it.  Once I was getting stronger and could keep meals down I was fed as much as possible whenever I wanted with no regards to nutritional value.  In my family, meals consisted of a large portion of some protein and then a large portion of potato and bread then desert every night.  Anything else was extra. Through school I ignored what was taught in health class because I thought my diet was normal since it was how I grew up.  It wasn't until I started trying to lose weight last year and researched nutrition for myself that I realized that something was even wrong with how I ate. 

Now that I've had a large amount of success my parents are willing to listen to my critique of their ways.  Everything I assumed was basic knowledge about nutrition seemed brand new to them.  Finally I asked my dad if he really didn't know anything about nutrition or if he merely never cared, to which he responded he always just thought you should eat what you want, when you want, as much as you want until you are satisfied. 

I'm not saying I blame my parents for being over weight.  I chose to eat what I did.  But growing with an unhealthy life style to believe it is 'normal' and the family is overweight because of genetics perpetuated the problem.  They were brought up that way because they were from farming families that could eat what they wanted from what they had available and burn it off in the fields each day.  But that doesn't carry over to a desk job and having all the junk food available nowadays that they didn't in such quantities 50 years ago. Just as I thought my eating habits were normal, so did they.  Now I have helped to show them what they need, its up to them to create a lifestyle around it as I have. 

For me, it was question of ignorance.  I was never taught that my eating habits were not healthy.  I am just glad that I realized what is needed for proper healthy nutrition and lifestyle as soon as I got old enough to provide for myself and have taken the steps necessary to invoke this in my life.

I have learned:

1. You do not need to clean your plate

2. Proper portions and nutrition

3. To enjoy exersize and how it makes me feel (even the soreness)

4. To enjoy vegitables and salads

5. To enjoy the taste of foods and appriciate them for their natural flavors without crap on them to 'make them taste better'

6. That taking care of yourself can be incorerated into a productive lifestyle

- Everytime you make an accomplishment and feel the need to celebrate, it should be done with piles of your favourite foods.

- Food is a reward.

These are two that I struggle to un-learn. I need to realize that 'food' and 'celebration' do NOT have a connection.

Other than that, I'm from the south, so you can just imagine how I learned how to cook things. Anything good is either deep fried or baked with cream of 'something' soup and covered in cheese!

i'm kind-of the opposite: i've had to relearn what my mom taught me.  she always had a great awareness of food and nutrition (farm kid, educated in the 50s): our meals were always balanced, and servings were appropriate sizes.  i resisted her efforts to "teach" me, and when i got out on my own, i lost the plot.  it took a few years to catch up with me, but contrary to appearances, i really couldn't eat whatever i wanted....

but it turns out that a lot of it did sink in, and now when i cook, i do well.  it's not the meals that are a danger for me; it's the extras. 

Like a lot of people who have posted, my family was poor and that probably led to some of these.  Here we go.  Things that I had to unlearn from my childhood:

--  The food won't be there tomorrow, you have to eat it all now if you want it.  (In my house, if you didn't eat it right then, someone was likely to have already consumed it by the next day.)

--  Pizza is a well-balanced, healthy breakfast because it has every food group.  This can be followed by pizza for lunch, pizza for dinner, pizza for a late night snack for the same reason.

--  It's not good to spoil my appetite.  (My mother was very insistent that snacks were NOT okay since they kept me from finishing my lunch/dinner.)

--  You can't have a meal without dessert.  It's mandatory.  (I don't really like sugary things and always ate desserts because I was told to.  All the wasted calories...)

--  Because it's home-made, it's good for you.  (Case in point: Grandma's cheesy bacon stew, close to 1,200 calories per cup.)

--  If you have soup, you must have tons of bread/rolls with it or it's just not worth the effort.

--  As long as you go to a "sit-down" restaraunt, you can have as much as you'd like.  After all, it's not "fast food".

--  If I don't eat what's on my plate, little children in China will starve.

Wow, that was a little cathardic!  Like everyone else, I don't believe my parents were bad because of what they fed me.  After all, they sucessfully kept me fed when there was very little money to do so.  I just have to learn new ways of relating to food and make sure that when I have kids, they pick up the healthy lessons.  : -)

Ah, I'm in the Poor-Boat as well. Although my mom was of the school that if she was going to spend what little money we had on food it was going to be "good" for us. Although we did have Mac n' Cheese with Hot Dogs, we also had to have veggies too (usually frozen from our garden). Pop was only in the fridge if someone was coming over for dinner. I honestly grew up drinking Milk or water the majority of the time. Mostly I just have to get over the feeling that if it's a treat like a cady bar I need to eat as much as I can because there won't be more later.

Things I love that my mom inadvertantly taught me:

-Salad is a treat, and only the rich people get to eat it all the time

-Iced Tea is the BEST! (unsweetened even)

-You don't HAVE TO have pop everyday

-Fresh Fruit is also a treat (other than apples because they grow locally and are therefore the cheapest fruit for us)

-Exercise is fun, and also funny if you are 6 and come down from your room in a burgundy leotard over your Sunday tights... with leg warmers (Mom almost died laughing at me on that one [well it was what they were wearing on the TV exercise show])

What I need to unlearn:

-Dieting is all about restrictions and being unhappy while everyone around you eats whatever they like

-Breakfast is ok to skip

-Eat a teeny tiny supper so you can gorge on dessert

-Grown-ups can eat whatever they want whenever they want

Let's see...

• A big plate of pasta with sauce is a meal.
• If it's fat free or sugar free, that makes it healthy to eat.  And it's ok to eat a whole bunch of them.
• Water isn't a beverage.  (Fortunately, seltzer was.  We didn't have soda in the house when I was a kid, but we drank juice or iced tea, never plain water.  When I got a little older, diet soda became the preferred beverage.  I swear, I've saved thousands of dollars over the years by only drinking water)
• It's ok to eat straight from the package.  Including spoonfuls of sugar free jelly straight from the jar.  Clearly, if you don't spread it on bread, it doesn't have any calories.
• A scoop of frozen mixed vegetables satisfy the vegetable requirement for a meal.
• Tuna fish is healthy.  (Oh, don't get me wrong.  Tuna is healthy.  But not when you mix it with a ton of mayonaise, and when you're ordering it in a restaurant, they use plenty of the full fat stuff.)

Fortunately, I didn't grow up with the "clean your plate" mentality.  If I didn't finish it, the dog would.  It wouldn't go to waste.  In fact, when I'm at my parents' house now, we specifically try to leave something on our plates for the dogs.

- Losing weight means drinking gross protein shakes for breakfast every morning and never eating pasta or anything "good" (learned this when my parents decided they needed to take off a few pounds and went on a diet together)

- Every accomplishment should be celebrated with my favorite foods cooked and/or going out to dinner.

- (One I taught myself) Reading books is great fun, but it's a lot better with a big bowl of cookies/crackers/etc to eat while you read. This is one I still have trouble with!

- You can't have dessert until you eat ALL your vegetables (never prepared in a way that I found appetizing) and you also can't leave the table. This meant choking down veggies that had gone cold. Uck.

Things I've had to unlearn

1) Cheap food isnt always awesome food.  (The health costs are more important as the financial cost.)

2) Only rich snobs by fresh foods.  (I know it sounds stupid, but for some reason I always believed that fresh food was for snobs.  "Normal" people ate frozen foods and prepackaged stuff.)

3) Only fancy, rich people cook food from scratch (I grew up really poor, so it was a lot of prepackaged foods, frozen foods, and fast food all through my childhood.  Both my parents worked all the time and were always tired, so I thought that fancy rich people were the only ones who actually chopped vegetables and marinated meats, etc..)

4) Only annoying hippies eat organic.  (My sister is an annoying hippie who first introduced me to organic food.   I thought she was a tree hugging whackjob.   Now I get it though.)

5)  Most families of 5 dont eat 3 lbs of meat a night.  (My dad is 6'6 and 300 lbs of muscle and fat.  My mom was always making enormous pots of whatever she was cooking.   I always just thought it was normal.)

6)  Caring about your body doesnt make you a snob.  (For whatever reason, I always thought that anyone who's parents were skinny were snobs.  I guess it was a mixture of jealousy and not understanding their circumstances.)

7)  Food shouldnt be the one source of happiness.  (My family tends to fight all the time and there have been some very traumatic moments in my childhood.   The only thing that everyone in my family can be happy about at the same time is food.  Nobody is fighting when we're all stuffing our faces.  Almost all of our family activities revolved around either going to a restaurant or having a picnic or bbq.  We never went anywhere that didnt have food.  Its kind of sad.)

I suppose I'm lucky I can't think of one thing I learned in my childhood that I'd like to unlearn. 

We ate at the dinner table as a family most nights and always had a balanced meal.  We didn't get snack everyday forget about multiple times a day.

The snacks we did get were healthy once in a blue moon there'd be sugared cereal or cookies. But normal snack was mostly fruits, jello, pudding, fig newtons.

We learned to exercise as part of life not an extra it was almost required definitely expected. 

Childhood lessons i'm still trying to unlearn:

1.  Food = love.  

2.  A woman's weight is the most important thing about her.   Way more important than brains, personality, kindness or anything else.

3.   Cooking food from scratch is really, really hard. 

4.  Toast is a meal.  Or all meals.  (OK, strictly that's a lesson from college.......)

And lots lots more!

Problems that stem from my childhood

1. Food is a reward for accomplishments AND food can cheer you up if you are feeling down;

2. If you are bored, a snack gives you something to do;

3. Meat is expensive so eat all of it when it is given to you (even the fatty parts);

4. If you do not clean your plate you are contributing to your family's poverty;

5. You eat what is on sale at the grocery store;

6. If you are out to eat at a resteraunt you are exteremely lucky and you must eat all that is put in front of you;

7. Anything off the dollar menu is an appropriate in between meals snack;

8. Meals do not have set times, dinner can fall anywhere between 5 and 9pm;

9. Salt belongs in every dish you make.

I had a very happy childhood and my mother was a great cook. However, there were five of us kids, so very penny had to count, food wise. These are some of the things that have been ingrained in my head that I am trying to overcome:

-If you don't eat everything on your plate you are rude and the person who made the meal will be insulted, even the chef at a restaurant

-When you are sad, a treat like ice cream or a candy bar can make you feel better.

-If you have had a hard day/achieved an accompishment, you deserve a treat

-A slice of buttered bread goes with every meal

-When you go out to a restaurant you (or someone else) are/is playing a lot of money for you meal, so you should make sure to eat it all.

I have to re-learn some too.

My mom tried really hard to teach me to eat fruit when I needed a snack (instead of seconds, left-overs or junk). I'm just now trying to wean myself of the "I need real food!" mentality.

Original Post by jbbandit:

Like a lot of people who have posted, my family was poor and that probably led to some of these.  Here we go.  Things that I had to unlearn from my childhood:

--  The food won't be there tomorrow, you have to eat it all now if you want it.  (In my house, if you didn't eat it right then, someone was likely to have already consumed it by the next day.)

--  Pizza is a well-balanced, healthy breakfast because it has every food group.  This can be followed by pizza for lunch, pizza for dinner, pizza for a late night snack for the same reason.

--  It's not good to spoil my appetite.  (My mother was very insistent that snacks were NOT okay since they kept me from finishing my lunch/dinner.)

--  You can't have a meal without dessert.  It's mandatory.  (I don't really like sugary things and always ate desserts because I was told to.  All the wasted calories...)

--  Because it's home-made, it's good for you.  (Case in point: Grandma's cheesy bacon stew, close to 1,200 calories per cup.)

--  If you have soup, you must have tons of bread/rolls with it or it's just not worth the effort.

--  As long as you go to a "sit-down" restaraunt, you can have as much as you'd like.  After all, it's not "fast food".

--  If I don't eat what's on my plate, little children in China will starve.

Wow, that was a little cathardic!  Like everyone else, I don't believe my parents were bad because of what they fed me.  After all, they sucessfully kept me fed when there was very little money to do so.  I just have to learn new ways of relating to food and make sure that when I have kids, they pick up the healthy lessons.  : -)

 --  Because it's home-made, it's good for you.  (Case in point: Grandma's cheesy bacon stew, close to 1,200 calories per cup.)

--  As long as you go to a "sit-down" restaraunt, you can have as much as you'd like.  After all, it's not "fast food".

Me too! Especially number one!

I grew up in a house with a single, workaholic dad where I could name the days of the week by the food we ate for dinner: Thursday was always pizza, Wednesday always Macdonalds, Mondays and Tuesdays we were on our own (which usually resulted in mac'n'cheese or shakeNbake chicken breast made in the microwave), Fridays was "treat night" (chips, chocolate bar, slurpees at the convenience store) and the one day he did make food for us, Saturday, it was spagetti. In the last decade I have had to learn so so much about taking care of myself, and about my relationship with food. I like to think of it in terms of what I want to teach my future kids about food and role it plays in life:

1. Food does not come from a box in a freezer, nor does it come from a plastic, colourful store. Real food is carefully, lovingly prepared.

2. Eating is not something we do in a big rush on the way to something else. Time is taken out of the day to enjoy a meal in a relaxed fashion, and allow your body and mind to process that you have eaten. Even the truly time crunched can take 15 minutes to savour rather than inhale a meal.

3. It is ok to indulge sometimes. But like other indulgences, eating processed, surgary or high-fat food, or eating at a restaurant, should be planned for, reasonable and rare.

4. While it is ok to stop eating if you're not hungry, food should not be wasted. Try not to take more than you want, and eat what has been made before making something new.

5. Fresh, local food is not only better for you, it tastes delicious. Splurge for the better health benefits and the better taste, when you can.

6. It does not have to cost a lot to eat healthy. If you truly are broke, whole wheat pasta, a can of diced tomatoes and some spinach and onions costs $4.00 for two full meals of salad and pasta.

7. Contrary to popular belief, it does not take significantly more time to prepare simple, healthy meals at home than to eat out.

8. Breakfast is not optional. You cannot run a car without gas, nor can you run a brain and body without food.

9. There is a huge variety of delicious fruits and vegetables at our disposal. Salad for dinner does not mean lettus on a plate. There is an infinate number of tasty fruit/vegetable combinations that with a little chicken, fish or beans makes for a complete and healthy meal.

10. Vacations and fun at home nights are not about what you ate. They are about what you saw and did and who you saw and did it with. Just because you are travelling does not mean you have to, or are entitled to, eat three gigantic restaurant meals in a day.

I struggle with weight and eating because I have to remind myself of these things daily. My hope is that when I have children, I'll be able to teach them all of this by example.

wow, reading these posts really makes me thankful.  Not that my parents didn't pass me any bad habits because they did a few, but they always taught me that vegetables were great.  Vegetables were an important part of every meal and were rarely covered in cheese/butter. they were usually just enjoyed for what they were. I'm surprised and sad how many of you missed out on an early love of veggies!  

Also, say what you will about the south, but I definitely live in the south and the only fried food my parents ever made was the very occaisional batch of fried okra.

- vegetables are something bland that we only eat because we're trying to be healthier

- don't snack/make your own lunch, especially not on anything that needs any cooking (don't know why using a microwave/stove before dinner was a no-no)