DID YOUR MOTHER MAKE YOU OVERWEIGHT?

Ahhh the blame game. As much as Parents are an influence when you get to a certain age you can make your own choices and educate yourself. Why look for someone to blame? It's happened your working on it no point dragging personal issues through the mud.

I am too old to play the blame game, it isn't healthy to place something that only you can control on another person.

+1

My mother did the best she could. All parents make mistakes, but I'm a grown woman and I don't blame my mother for the decisions I made as an adult.

It was all of my family really. My father passed when I was 6wks old so my mom was always trying to 'make it up to me' by spoiling me-food, toys, whatever. She worked a lot so when the sitter was there it just a make sure she doesn't die capacity. I usually ate breakfast, lunch, after school 'snack' (which was soup and sandwich) and dinner and often before bed was cereal or ice cream. Weekends at the aunt and uncle was country style-a table full of food to choose from, all greasy (and delicious).

The view was I'd out grow my weight, the rest did, but what they didn't consider was my activity level. I didn't grow up and run track or grow all the veggies we ate and constantly work in the garden. I was the tv watching, video game playing lazy girl. Yes they allowed me to become this way BUT I continued the cycle after I knew better. I knew how to change it but didn't make the effort.

My mother is always trying to force feed me, adding more food on my plate when i eat with her.. it's pretty scary and i do love her but she's never really helped my diet. She's always insisted on fruit and veg but at the same time piling my plate as a kid, adding in the extra bits when she cooks for me isn't "nice" it's a weight..

I love the woman to death but she's so heavy handed with the old salt too!! Ever since I started feeding myself I dropped two stone like no mans business.. pretty odd how love turns into obesity!?

No my mum didn't make me overweight. But she did teach me to view food in a way that helped me make myself overweight.

I posted this in another thread yesterday, but my mum was of the wartime generation, and I was born in the 60s, but her wartime habits stuck with her, "waste not,want not" and so on, so it was a cardinal sin to waste food! I still have a lot of her kitchen habits, like if I make custard or gravy with powder, I save a bit of the milk or water to swill out the bowl I mix it in!

I've carried a sense of responsibility and obligation, and a real hangup about leaving food. So that's meant I'll always eat more than I needed to. I still struggle to leave food - either on my plate, or on the serving plate! Eating with friends is hard - at home I just cook my portions.

My mum was the opposite in fact - we never had much money, so couldn't afford much in the way of sweet treats. We'd have them on a Sunday only! And often home bakes, so not as exciting as shop bought. So on the rare occasion when we ate tea at an aunty's house, there would be all these wonderful goodies - Penguin or Club biscuits! Battenburg cake! Mr Kipling cakes! Mmmmm. But we knew we could take ONE and then no matter how much our aunty plied is with seconds, we knew we couldn't have another, on pain of death! And mum would be sitting there watching. So we politely declined, weeping inside. So when I got older, and could buy my own, that restriction wasn't there any more and I could sit and eat the whole packet if I wanted, and did. And gained weight!.

Also, I've copied my dad who used to put a thick layer of salt all over his food, and butter on his bread by the slice! - I've tried and tried, and I can't taste my food without adding salt and I can't eat bread or crackers or scones without a thick layer of butter. (so I eat very little of them now!)

I think we pick up things from our parents that they aren't trying to impart. My mum was trying to teach me good things about not wasting food - the flip side is that I've taken this sense of obligation that's caused me problems.

The other thing to remember is that in the war and post war years, food was totally different - no processed food, everything cooked from scratch, and much less unhealthy, and sugar after rationing was a luxury! Your mum couldn't conceive of a world like ours, where we're bombarded with sugar and fat! She was probably motivated by her experiences of privation in the war, not wanting you to be deprived and denied - we're looking with hindsight with our experience of overeating and overweight.

ed: Just thought too, I'm the one who piled the weight on. My sister has always been slim. Same mother, same experiences, different outcome!

Oh definitely. She always doubled or tripped portion sizes. She always made me clean my plate and veggies always consisted of a half a plate of fried buttery veggies with sauces on them. I never had a chance growing up. And I never understood why other ppl could eat what appeared to be the same foods of me and not be fat while i was always bigger. Well, mainly portion control and yup, grew up poor and of course macaroni and cheese, cookies, granola bars, candy , chips, pop, tuna and mayo, all those things for sure made me fat. And when you don't understand portion control, it's almost impossible to properly diet.

As a child, I wasn't overweight until about 3rd grade. And that was due to my mother not saying "no" to me when I wanted more food, but didn't need it. Now, I took control of how I ate (somewhat) and became more active as a teenager and became healthier, so go me. But, I ballooned back up when I hit my mid 20s. I have no one to blame but myself for my former adulthood obesity. Yes, it was from learned habits I had from childhood, but I made the choice to not do anything about it.

I am scarily like my mother. I don't recall her ever not being on a diet, and her weight fluctuated considerably throughout my life. I remember her trying to talk to me about my weight when I was about 16 (and way too sensitive to talk about that sort of thing!) and saying that it was killing her to watch me go through the exact same thing she had gone through. My weight has fluctuated constantly throughout my life, I'm also constantly "on a diet" and have been conscious of my weight since I was about 9 years old.

The funny thing is, I have two sisters (non identical twin and two years older) and they are both tiny and have never had a weight issue in their lives. In saying that, both of my sisters are petite, have small frames and are pretty narrow. By contrast, I have wide hips, shoulders and big feet. I have always felt bigger than I probably am because I was always surrounded by tiny people. My frame is more like my mothers though and we have so many similarities now - in mannerisms, our sense of humour etc. When I go home, I'm often referred to as her mini-me. So maybe a tendency towards certain eating habits is learned. I don't know why I'm so much like my mum and my sisters are so different though. My weight is totally down to me though and my tendency towards gluttony - we always had reasonably healthy food (rarely had chocolate or chips or soda in the house) but I remember binge eating - in secret - when I was in primary school.

I can't even imagine how it's a theory that could properly be tested as there are so many variables - and circumstances that disprove the rule.

My mom was heavy for her height. She also was a heavy smoker. Somehow, only one of us six kids ended up with a weight problem in our teens-- my brother. He was a chubby, overeating baby and grew into a chubby, adolescent and teen. He got teased and bullied a lot for it (looking back, it was wrong of my dad and my brothers to call him "moose"), and ended up with an eating disorder.

I was just thinking about this topic the other day. My mom, despite her own weight issues, managed to sneak in healthy eating habits and food choices without our realizing it. Snacks were tomato slices with mayo (gross now, but yummy then), no pop in the house, and junk food was an occasional treat.

My mom and dad are depression era survivors. My mom came from a wealthy family, so she always had food to eat during the depression. One of my favorite stories from her childhood was the "Peanut Butter v Pork Roast" story. Her mother refused to allow peanut butter in the house, because that's "what poor people ate" during the depression. My mom LOVED the "forbidden fruit", and begged and pleaded for my grandmother to buy some for her. Since she wouldn't, mom got very clever. They would always have some big roast for Sunday, and mom would take pieces of roast into school and trade them for peanut butter sandwiches.

The other funny story here is what my mom used to say to me regarding junk food: "You better watch what you eat, because when you're 25, your metabolism is going to come to a screeching halt and you won't be able to eat so much of it anymore without gaining weight" (I was a VERY skinny, gawky, kid. One day, I grew tired of hearing her lecture, and I called her out on it. I said, "Mom, I'll stop going to Burger King when you take that cigarette out of your mouth as you lecture me about poor health habits". That shut her up.