What was your diet like growing up?

AngInCanada

I'm curious what your diet was like growing up.

I am NOT blaming my parents for my problems with obesity since I am now an adult and make my own choices but we didn't eat a healthy diet...at all. Breakfast was your sugar laden breakfast cereal. Mini wheats, fruit loops, frosted flakes etc. For lunch at school my mom would give us $2 to buy a bag of chips and pop from the vending machines. The odd day she would give us a bit more for nachos or fries from the cafeteria (yes that's pretty much all you could buy). Dinners would always be a meat, some sort of potato (baked, mashed, cubed and booked) and usually mixed vegetables. We always had junk food in the house and quite frequently my after school snack was a huge bowl of popcorn or two grilled cheese sandwiches. Every Friday was pizza or subway (foot long mmm) and mom also bought us each a 2L bottle of pop. We would sit around watching movies and drinking from our bottles of pop.

cdpits

I ate a healthy diet and wasn't "allowed" sweets and candy like my friends, as I was a chubby kid. This made me sneak food and buy candy and chocolate bars from the store and eat at night in my room. It followed me into adulthood where I would eat very little around people and binge when alone. I am a "if some tastes good, more tastes better" !

mlinton_mesapark

My parents, especially my mom, did two great things for us, diet-wise, for which I will always be grateful:

1. We had family dinners practically every night. My parents are both decent cooks. My dad is really gifted with roasted meats and gravies, and Sunday lunch was something to look forward to all week.
2. My mom de-sugared our iced tea and cereal, and her coffee, when I was about 12. I was old enough to recognize that she was doing this for health reasons, and I was on board immediately. She talked about he sugar masking the real flavor of these things, and how you could enjoy them just as much without it. And she was so right.

That said, we had lots of processed ingredients, and bread, pasta, rice and potatoes were omnipresent. We were allowed copious amounts of sweets, aside from the beverage exceptions noted above. At one point during my teens, my mom took to treating herself and me to sodas in the McDonald's drive-thru; Diet Coke for her, Coke for me (for a long time, until I dabbled in diet soda myself.)

Mealtimes were enforced more when I was a younger kid. I was one of four kids, and I think the convenience foods gradually took over as time became ever more scarce for my mom to get it all done. As a mom of three, I have massive respect for how she pulled it all off!

So yeah, a mixed bag here, but definitely not all bad.


ETA: My mom also never got on the low-fat bandwagon. Seems like a miracle, given how pervasive that advice was! My mom would buy whole milk for us and half and half for her coffee, while my dad switched to skim milk and still drinks it to this day.

dessiepenn

I never got breakfast unless the school served it, so I was always starving by lunch time. Dinner was always TV dinners and junk food. I binge eat on sweets too. I never understood how someone could limit themselves to one piece of chocolate. Lol. Needless to say, I now try to rid myself of all unnatural foods and products.....

DittoDan

When I was a kid, I would put so much sugar on my cereal, it would form a slurry on the bottom of the bowl, add two bananas (4) bowl fulls of cereal and I would eat every drop. Candy and candy bars, breads, pastas, potatoes galore (any way I could get them), rice, fruits. Jello, Kool-aid, Cokes (they didn't have sugar free anything when I grew up).

Interestingly, the keto foods I love now, I hated when I was a kid. I blame this huge carb diet for creating the problems I have now. Some day, IMHO, I think researchers will identify the bad gut flora that thrives on carbs. And that leads to people getting diabetes and obesity. I know kids that I grew up with me ~ that ate the same thing I did, but don't have an ounce of fat on them. I didn't gain weight back then because we would go out and play hard all day, (unlike kids today in front of computers).

The reason I think it will be a gut microbe is that obesity seems to run in families. Both of my parents and my brothers and sisters are fat like me. I fear for my three children looking like me in 30 years.

I don't want to guilt anyone raising kids now, but if I had to do it all over again, (knowing what I know now) I wouldn't let my children eat so many carbs and especially sugar. I would go out of my way to teach them why we get fat.

Fat Head (the History of the Demonization of Saturated Fat)

That's my two cents,

Dan the Man from Michigan

Cheesy567

Fruit loops or bagels for breakfast, school lunch (which meant pizza every day during high school), frozen pizza, canned soup, or subway for dinner. Twizzlers and little Debbie rolls for snacks. Dad would cook on thanksgiving and New Year's Eve. Mom would cook "light chicken divan" about once a quarter. We were responsible for our own meals (purchasing, prepping, etc) from age 11 on or so, once we were old enough to do yardwork or babysitting for income. Grandma had a garden and cooked, I often went out to her place to visit

Thank GOD for a college roommate who grew up in a "cook from scratch" family. She taught me how to choose, store, and cook veggies and all kinds of meats and casseroles.

Kitnthecat

Growing up, we usually had home cooked meals. We had the typical toast and cereal breakfasts with bacon and eggs or omelets or pancakes on Sundays. We were not allowed to eat the sugary cereals except every once in a while. Orange juice and lots of milk.

For lunch we walked home from school and had soup or sandwiches, just something simple. Some lunch meat and cheese, and tuna, eggs etc. Sometimes some porridge for lunch. Or cottage cheese and fruit.

For supper my Mom or Grandma ( she lived with us) would cook a family meal with various meats, a starchy side dish and cooked veggies and sometimes a salad as well....or a one dish meal like pasta or a casserole or stew.... or homemade soup ! One of my favorites was pasta carbanera. Sundays were family dinners with a roast of some sort, beef, chicken, pork, maybe some roasted veggies. We usually had fruit for dessert or no dessert. There was always fruit in the house for snacks. Things like chips and pop were rare and only came out in small quantities on the weekends. Summer meant BBQ....the usual stuff but also things like a whole salmon on the BBQ with saffron rice and creamy pea sauce. Baked pioneer beans and BBQ'd turkey with zucchini cake for dessert. We always had a garden, so lots of fresh veggies in the summer. Special occasions might see something like paella or boulliabase and fresh homemade bread. My grandmothers made perogies and cabbage rolls, pickles, jams. Fancier desserts were for special occasions.

We might have eaten more of a "balanced diet" than some families. Not too much processed food or junk food. But we still relied on carbs a lot. I'm glad I never really developed a taste for pop. We had food in abundance, and we loved our food. Most of us were chubby except my Dad. But what I thought was overweight growing up, I never should have worried about looking back.

I think my trouble with food started due to my strict upbringing and having what felt like 2 mothers in the same house, and criticism about everything, including food was a regular occurrence. I can still remember some of the hurtful comments. It's a weird thing to me, thinking about it now. Why would we have had all that great food but received negative comments when it came to eating it ? I am sure that my low self esteem as a result of all the negative comments led me to overeat.

GaleHawkins

We grew 70% of our plant based food and kept it by canning and freezer and killed our own pork and beef.

Jello was our go to desert since mom worked out in the fields with the rest of us but she was a good cook and was good at making pies and cakes from time to time. I was gone from home before there was sodas and ice cream in the house on a regular bases.

Carbs and protein were our go to calories but did eat animal/dairy fats too.

DittoDan

Kitnthecat wrote: »

<Snip>

I think my trouble with food started due to my strict upbringing and having what felt like 2 mothers in the same house, and criticism about everything, including food was a regular occurrence. I can still remember some of the hurtful comments. It's a weird thing to me, thinking about it now. Why would we have had all that great food but received negative comments when it came to eating it ? I am sure that my low self esteem as a result of all the negative comments led me to overeat.

Great post Kitn,

That made me think of one thing my mom and dad said over and over:

"They're starving children in Africa, eat all that food on your plate!"

Dan the Man from Michigan

AngInCanada

That's one thing I struggle with in terms of my own children. My oldest son has many of my own eating habits prior to keto. If I made, say example, lasagna, he would eat and eat and eat until he feels sick. Or anything sweet or chips or carby. I don't want to restrict his foods enough so that he feels deprived and could lead to binge eating but I don't want to have food around that isn't optimal for health either. Does that make sense? Even if I were to just keep junk food for special occasions, I also don't want to teach them that all social occasions revolve around food either.

Sunny_Bunny_

I had a terrible diet as a kid. I somehow managed to keep from getting obese, but I was a bit chubby for sure. My parents allowed me to run around the neighborhood (though I typically ventured further than they knew) as long as I was home before dark, I could run all day long. That activity made the weight difference I guess. Plus, the weather was manageable most of the year in Texas.
However, they owned a pizza delivery business and when I was home alone every day after school and the parents were working, it was pizza several nights a week for dinner. And when I joined them at the restaurant, I would hang out with my 2 friends, 1 who's parents had a Mexican restaurant and the other who's parents had a convenient store in the shopping strip. This gave me an endless supply of pizza, nachos and candy!
We moved to Ohio when I was 12 and no more family restaurant for me. However, I had already been having stomach issues that continued for 4 years longer undiagnosed because my doctor never thought to consider that I might have gall stones. So, at 16 years old, I was my surgeons youngest patient for removal of gall bladder and I had over 100 stones! My sister had hers out many years later, in her 30's by the same surgeon and she asked if he remembered me. He said of course and he still hasn't had another patient that young.
I guess all that fat + carb eating isn't such a good idea huh? Lol

camtosh

DittoDan wrote: »

That made me think of one thing my mom and dad said over and over:

"They're starving children in Africa, eat all that food on your plate!"

LOL, my mom used to say that, too. I was a kid in the 1960s, when we lived in a small town, had a garden, so the food was good, mostly homemade and home canned. Sweets like cookies and cakes were homemade and we only got them on holidays, birthdays and so on. Every Sunday after church was a bacon and eggs feast, we always ate good meat cuts because my dad was a meat cutter at a butcher shop. I was a fussy eater, so survived on peanut butter, baloney and other basic stuff till I was about 12. Hated butter! Loved corn flakes, oatmeal or puffed rice cereal with spoonfuls of sugar for breakfast, had hot cocoa with extra sugar at night before bed... that all set me up to be a carb addict in my teens in the 1970s, when Mom started buying margarine and low-fat became the thing to do. I would come home from school and eat handfuls of cookies (feeling guilty), then fall asleep on the sofa. Wake up to eat shake n bake chicken with boiled potatoes and frozen peas and corn (bleah!), and Sara Lee cakes for dessert. Oh, and always a pot of tea on the table, which we had with milk and sugar. Mom always criticized her own weight and ours, yet she never managed to lose by eating low fat foods through the 80s. She died in 1991 after a stroke and heart attacks. I never realized the connection until reading Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat... now it all makes sense.

Kitnthecat

Yup, we had that comment about starving children in our house too. I can't remember which countries these starving children were from or how I could help them by finishing my supper.

I also remember having to sit at the table until our dinner was finished, if we didn't like something we were eating. We did not have a choice of what we wanted to eat, since everyone ate what was cooked that day. But I can't imagine forcing someone to eat something that doesn't agree with them. I'm all for having my kids try a little of everything and deciding whether they like it or not. Luckily my kids grew up with a lot of variety. We would try a new vegetable or other food item a couple of times a month. My daughter used to protest about Brussels sprouts and never wanted to try them, but when she did, she can't stop eating them. We buy some every week and cook them with bacon and a bit of onion.

Oh I strayed from the topic of my upbringing.... I always felt that there was an invisible line around all the food choices we had when I was a kid and it was hard to know what was acceptable regarding food.......should I show that I like something and risk being criticized for enjoying it too much and getting fat ? Or do I face a scolding if I just can't stomach something ? I was also the kid who got car sick on trips, so my tummy was sensitive. I felt like much of the enjoyment of food was taken away. Like it was a sinful thing to enjoy food. This topic seems to be way too complicated for me to even describe here in a little paragraph. I can remember sneaking snacks as a kid, in order to avoid the criticism.

I think it's taken me too long to try to sort this all out. I'm finally having success with my feelings about food, and gaining the most control I have ever had, and it's due to this WOE.

Sabine_Stroehm

AngInCanada wrote: »

I'm curious what your diet was like growing up.

I am NOT blaming my parents for my problems with obesity since I am now an adult and make my own choices but we didn't eat a healthy diet...at all. Breakfast was your sugar laden breakfast cereal. Mini wheats, fruit loops, frosted flakes etc. For lunch at school my mom would give us $2 to buy a bag of chips and pop from the vending machines. The odd day she would give us a bit more for nachos or fries from the cafeteria (yes that's pretty much all you could buy). Dinners would always be a meat, some sort of potato (baked, mashed, cubed and booked) and usually mixed vegetables. We always had junk food in the house and quite frequently my after school snack was a huge bowl of popcorn or two grilled cheese sandwiches. Every Friday was pizza or subway (foot long mmm) and mom also bought us each a 2L bottle of pop. We would sit around watching movies and drinking from our bottles of pop.

I'm 50 (to give context).
Breakfast was either Capn Crunch or Instant Breakfast (mom once yelled at my buddy's mom for feeding me bacteria aka yogurt).
Lunch was bologna and american cheese on wonder bread with a twinkie and a coke. Or school lunch
Snacks were cokes and potato chips
Dinner was something frozen most of the time, or something canned. Real meat a few times a week.
Friday was Pizza Hut
Saturday was a local Mexican restaurant.

I did not know how to make real mashed potatoes (i.e. not flakes) until grad school, and didn't cook a fresh vegetable until my late 20s.
It took my until I was about 35 to decide to learn how to eat FOOD.

BikerGirlElaine

My mom cooked most of our meals from scratch. We ate a balanced diet of protein, veggies, starches, fruits. I didn't have candy until I was about 4 years old. We drank a lot of milk and not much soda.

I got fat anyways

Sabine_Stroehm

BikerGirlElaine wrote: »

My mom cooked most of our meals from scratch. We ate a balanced diet of protein, veggies, starches, fruits. I didn't have candy until I was about 4 years old. We drank a lot of milk and not much soda.

I got fat anyways

Your mom and my mom were opposites!

BikerGirlElaine

Sabine_Stroehm wrote: »

BikerGirlElaine wrote: »

My mom cooked most of our meals from scratch. We ate a balanced diet of protein, veggies, starches, fruits. I didn't have candy until I was about 4 years old. We drank a lot of milk and not much soda.

I got fat anyways

Your mom and my mom were opposites!

Isn't it funny? We are about the same age. My mom made the bread from scratch even.

I was attracted to sweets from early on. I would sneak sweets whenever I could. Usually it was graham crackers, that was about the only thing there would be that was sweet. When I was allowed to have a peanut butter honey and raisin sandwich I was in heaven!

inspirationstation

Overall, it was "balanced". My mom SAH, therefore to save money, they had a large garden and canned/froze veggies and fruits for use during the year. My dad hunted, so there was always fresh meat in the freezer.

I would say our diet was "whole", although it was very typical of the time. Meat, potatoes/rice/starch, vegetable, and dessert. We never had sugary cereals- it was eggs, oatmeal, or Grape Nuts/Wheaties/Kix. We never had much sugary anything, as my mom insisted that we used liquid saccharine as a replacement. Yikes!

The only time we had soda was when we had pizza and that was maybe once a month. We rarely ate out, because we could not afford it.

My PCOS reared its ugly head in my late teens and I started having intense sweet/carb cravings and adding some weight. That was the turning point and I wish I knew then what I know now. I snuck sweets too, not realizing that I was perpetuating the cycle.

My parents fed us the best way they knew how. And I think they did pretty well. Thanks to them, I still love veggies and venison.

wabmester

DittoDan wrote: »

When I was a kid, I would put so much sugar on my cereal, it would form a slurry on the bottom of the bowl, add two bananas (4) bowl fulls of cereal and I would eat every drop. Candy and candy bars, breads, pastas, potatoes galore (any way I could get them), rice, fruits. Jello, Kool-aid, Cokes (they didn't have sugar free anything when I grew up).

Ditto, Dan.

I had forgotten about that slurry. For me, add poptarts and spaghettiOs. Pretty much daily. In college, I supplemented that with pizza.

Our generation will be known as the CrapEaters. In the future, people will read about us with dropped jaws....

professionalHobbyist

High carb junky sugar and pasta

Add greasy sausage and that was it.

Train wreck

Raynne413

My Mumm was always into health and fitness. Unfortunately, she was a Southern woman cooking for a Southern man and raising two children on less than 30k a year. So our diets were pretty bad:

Chicken & dumplings, spaghetti, lasagna, bread and biscuits with EVERY meal, pasta or potatoes with EVERY meal, bologne, American cheese, fried chicken, McDonald's, Captain D's, Taco Bell, pimento cheese, Kraft macaroni and cheese, constant sweets (my mumm baked when she was depressed). If there were vegetables, they had to be baked into a casserole or covered in some kind of sauce. LOL

Of course, none of that would have been too bad except no one in my family really had an idea of what a serving was considered.