How did you eat as a child?

Cereal for breakfast. Sometimes cake. Lunch was balanced (either home or at school - protein, veggies, small dessert). Lots of junk for snacks after school (it was France. Bakeries everywhere), and 'balanced' dinner.

I was a fat kid. My mom's cooking wasn't the best at all. I only liked the high calorie stuff she made. And cheese and bread. I always had a high calorie snack when we went somewhere.

My mother was a nurse and she fed us fairly closely to the Canada Food Guide.

Cereal for breakfast
Main meal at lunch - meat & veggies
Small snack after school - one cookie and milk
Light meal at 6 pm - sandwich or eggs on toast or something
Small snack right before bed - fruit

Small but reasonable portions.

Desserts only on weekends, or if we did have a dessert after the evening meal, it would be a piece of fruit or something really small.


I was a very slender child and remained slender almost my entire life. I only gained weight in recent years, and only temporarily.

I was never overweight as a kid, I was really active and ate overall healthy.

Breakfast- toast, eggs, bacon. Anything sweet would give me heck of a stomach so no pop tarts

Lunch- either bought at school (it was far less disgusting 10 years ago than it is today) or a sandwich, piece of fruit, crackers or chips, something sweet and water. In high school I packed my own lunch and instead of water took a soda pop.

Dinner- my dad cooked so it was meat, potatoes, beans or corn. EVERY NIGHT, until I got to high school and started doing some of the cooking. I made things like chicken stew, shredded pork, tacos, etc.

my mom made us each two softboiled eggs and a piece of toast on weekdays. school lunch in elementary school was a balogna sandwich - 2 slices with mustard - and i can't remember what else, but we had to buy a school milk. dinner was things like pot roast or meatloaf with a canned vegetable (mushy spinach, green beans or zucchini), mashed potatoes or rice with little butter and no other flavorings or gravy. always with a glass of milk and a piece of bread with butter. sometimes she'd make pasta shells with a scratch sauce and hamburger meat or a hamburger, van de kamp's halibut filets or a burger. i disliked my mom's cooking and food choices till i was 13 and my dad got her an electric skillet that came with some tasty recipes.

my mom did make some really great holiday meals, though - her turkey was superb - and we had a few "special" entres we only had a couple times a year - leg of lamb, some tasty roast beef or rib roast. and once a month we'd either eat out, get pizza from pizza man or get fast food - my mom loved jack in the box, and i found it a step up.

sometimes on weekends we had cereal or my dad made french toast. and on sundays we'd go to my grandparents' - if we went earlier, my grandpa would get a spread, and i'd always have a bagel, lox and cream cheese. later would be hamburgers and fries from johnnie's or my grandma might cook.

when it came to snacks, we rarely ate things like potato chips, and a serving of cookies was always 2 cookies, which always - always - made me feel deprived. we often had graham crackers as a snack, which i always disliked. at some point, my mom bought ding dongs or cupcakes. we had one snack a day at around 4 pm.

i also wasn't overweight till i hit puberty, and didn't really hit weight issues till my mid-twenties. but my constant disappointment in most of our food through my childhood may well have played a part in my problems with eating now.

Farm kid born in 81.

Breakfast: whatever. Sugar cereal. Oatmeal. White bread with jam.
Lunch: I honestly have no recollection of what I was sent to school with. I think typically a sandwich on Wonderbread and some kind of packaged snack. Maybe a banana.
Dinner: Meat, potato, vegetable. Nearly without fail. Roast, boiled, boiled.
Lots of home baking. No restrictions of any kind.

I was so skinny as a kid. I only gained weight as an adult as a result of having 2 kids (I could eat everything I wanted for 5 years or so, and I forgot to stop), decreasing activity when I moved from being a student into having a desk job, and developing a love of craft beer. I wasn't THAT active as a kid, either. More of a book reader. I just had a good relationship with my appetite.

I grew up in a European home so breakfast was usually an espresso with a lot of milk, sugar and animal cookies
lunch was a salami sandwich and dinner was usually meat and pasta (we didn't eat too many vegetables lol)

It's amazing how I still grew with such little protein. GH is amazing lol

fascha wrote: »

I grew up in a European home so breakfast was usually an espresso with a lot of milk, sugar and animal cookies
lunch was a salami sandwich and dinner was usually meat and pasta (we didn't eat too many vegetables lol)

It's amazing how I still grew with such little protein. GH is amazing lol

This has nothing to do with your post but OMG I want to snatch that burger out of your profile pic and stuff it down my gullet. lol

Lounmoun wrote: »

Age 12 and under, USA 1974-1986, below average weight, sahm, working father, 2 older siblings-
Breakfast was cereal most days. Sometimes oatmeal or malt-o-meal. On special occasions eggs, pancakes, French Toast.
Lunch at home would have been a sandwich or can of soup. At school the food was stuff like pizza, mac and cheese, fruit and milk. There wasn't a kitchen at the first elementary school I went to. I brought lunch sometimes and it was a sandwich. On Sundays there might be roast beef and such for lunch when we went to my grandmother's home.
Dinner was often meat, potatoes, canned vegetables.
Snacks were dry cereal, fruit, popcorn, cheese usually.
We had dessert on special occasions. We ate out mostly for birthdays or anniversaries.
At home we drank water, tea, hot chocolate, milk. Not pop very often.
No computer. No vcr. No cable tv. Not many video games. Walked to school and other places. We played outside a lot.

Age 13-18, USA 1987-1992, under a healthy weight, working mother, working father, 2 older siblings (working or away at college)-
Breakfast during the week I skipped or had a candy bar and juice box- parents not aware of this. On weekends it was leftovers or a can of soup often.
Lunch during the week I usually skipped- parents not aware of this. No one at school noticed or cared that the quiet, skinny girl wasn't eating. On weekends lunch was a sandwich, fast food or frozen pizza, frozen dinners.
Dinner- still meat and potatoes and canned vegetables. I was cooking for the family but made what my mom told me to make.
Snacks- same stuff, more chips, crackers, some frozen foods or maybe canned soup... I made up for not eating during the day after school and on weekends I guess
Drinks- same stuff, less milk
More tv. No computer or video games. Walked less. Rode bus to school.

I started eating more regularly again in college although still often skipped breakfast. I got to a normal weight during and right after college. I didn't become overweight until around 26 years old.

Pretty much my childhood in a nutshell.

I grew up in late 80's/90's. My mom was a stay at home mom and cooked every night. Every night we had "family dinner" at the table at almost exactly 5:58 PM (when dad walked in the door from work).

Breakfast - Usually instant oatmeal, cereal, pop tarts or something quick. In high school, sometimes nothing (by my choice).
Lunch - lunch meat sandwich, chips and grapes or school lunch.
Dinner - Generally meat, starch (potatoes/rice) and vegetable; or some kind of casserole; or pasta with salad. Always drank milk with dinner (it was a rule in my house).

We didn't really do dessert nightly. But, my mom made cookies about every 10 days or so and we always had ice cream in the freezer. So, we would maybe have that in the evenings, but not necessarily daily.

I was not overweight as a kid, no one in my family really was. My dad had a physical job and my siblings and I were involved in all kinds of activities/sports. We also had a pool in the yard that we used all the time in the summer.

My weight came in my late teens/adulthood when I started "fending for myself" food wise. In college I had too much booze, Chipotle and Ben & Jerry's. Bad habits formed and continued. Now I am working on changing those habits.

Was raised mostly by my grandparents until my early teens. Mediterranean diet (we live in the Mediterranean) and very traditional (since my grandparents were cooking). Usually just plain milk for breakfast (I hated breakfast, no one could force me to actually eat anything solid), sandwich as a mid-morning snack (always the same, basically bread, ham or chicken and cucumber), biggest meal of the day was lunch and most of the days it was vegetable-based with meat 2-3 times per week, afternoon snack was fruit and/or yoghurt, dinner was as a rule lunvh leftovers, or something really simple like pasta with tomato sauce or scrambled eggs or rice pudding, if no leftovers were available.

My family went through periods of eating absolutely amazingly to eating like absolute garbage and it really didn't seem to correspond to how much money they had at a certain time. My grandpa and dad (grew up with them + grandma) were both trained as chefs. My dad worked at restaurants most of the time I was growing up, so my grandpa handled the cooking. He's an amazing cook, so everything we had was always delicious. Amazing beef stews, homemade chicken noodle soup, beautifully done pork loin, osso bucco, spaghetti with homemade meat sauce, perfectly seared rare steak, and just in general, a really diverse range of food.

Almost every meal I can remember from ages 4 to moving out at 18 was served with a side of salad (iceberg lettuce, vinaigrette, tomato, raw onion, and seasoned with salt & pepper). I don't really remember ever being pushed to finish my plate and portions seemed pretty realistic. My grandma even had a garden, so we would be drowning in fresh tomatoes as the summer went on.

Other times, there was basically no cooking done at all and the house would be stocked full of boxes with Little Debbie's face on them. I still can't go near Swiss Cake Rolls, Zebra Cakes, Strawberry Shortcake Rolls, and Cosmic Brownies without wanting to barf. I got up to 155 lbs at 5'4 and 10 years old because I swear, this was all we had around sometimes beside a fridge full of condiments, so I'd just eat them pretty much nonstop because they weren't really filling. That + there were always at least 6 24 packs of Pepsi just chilling and waiting to be consumed

I think my grandpa was in the process of launching his second business and just didn't have time to cook. My dad and grandma both worked in restaurants at the time and grazed at work, so they never really noticed that homecooked meals went from daily to bi-weekly. I started eating dinner over at a friend's house and kept on horseback riding 6 days a week and started dropping back down to a normal weight in no time. My friend was only a year older than me and responsible for making dinner for her family of 4 people, sometimes 7 if relatives were visiting (Cinderella, Cinderella) and that was probably the first time it occurred to me that I could cook without adult supervision.

My grandpa taught me to cook, so I helped him make dinner for a few years and then when I went vegetarian at 15, I started cooking entirely for myself. I was only overweight from ages like 10-11 (which I can safely say wasn't growth-spurt fat because I've only grown 1 inch since I was 9 years old) and from August to now. Even now, I'm only 1.4 lbs away from a healthy range again.

My grandpa is slightly overweight now because he really likes to indulge when he's out to lunch for work and my grandma and aunt are overweight because they believe fad dieting is the way to go. My aunt has actually been taking a capful of some weirdly marketing product that's basically aloe (laxative) for the past 4-5 years and takes an extra capful every week at her cheat meal (Olive Garden, it's scary to witness) and won't be swayed that it's impacting the progress she wants to see. My dad was actually up to 400 lbs for a couple of years, but he's in the mid 200s now and is working really hard to get back down to a size where he's comfortable.

OP, I'm in the same age range as you and my meals were similar but I think we had more variety.

Most mornings Mom would cook something. Bacon or sausage & eggs, hot cereal, etc. Occasionally we would have cold cereal but not often. Lunches were similar. They also included tuna, egg salad, chicken salad, ham, pb & banana and if it was cold out, hot soup. Campbell's, of course.

Dinners varied.

Women during that period were encouraged to use convenience foods. In retrospect, I'm amazed Mom cooked as much from scratch as she did.

Also eating out was rare. Takeout was unheard of.

I was never fat as a child. Very few of my peers were either. By today's standards, none were.

Same age range here. Born in 61
My Dad was a navy pilot and home 6 months of the year if we were lucky. Mom was SAHM

Breakfast – you ate depending on your bus schedule
MWFS was cereal, hot or cold.
T Th was eggs.
Sunday was family breakfast and either pancakes, waffles or French toast.
Always milk and OJ or another citrus available

Lunch was usually either a school lunch or a packed lunch of sandwich, chips and a sweet – fruit, pudding, snack cake. Milk

We could usually snack in the afternoon as available – cookies, ice cream, fruit.

Dinner was sit down. Protein, veggie or veggies, rice more than potato, and for a long time bread. I remember if we didn’t have rolls there would be a plate of sliced white bread. And Milk.

Then dad was retired. 100% disabled – surgical error. Started retirement pay but not the same income as before. After life settled down Mom went to work and Dad begin to cook. There were five children and not much money to stretch. We had many experiments that did not last long (ones that really scarred my taste buds powered milk; tang) and some experiments that did last: do you know how many recipes there are for SPAM? Somehow, overall food did not change. The breakfast ritual never changed. However, we ate a lot more casseroles.

I never had a weight problem until I went out on my own and then it has just gradually increased as my life became more sedentary. My biggest problems are lack of activity, empty calories – like Rum and Coke – and food that is just too darn much in one serving. And I am still trying to fit in milk as much as possible.

Calorie counting is perfect for me and in the age of the internet it is so darn easy.

Yes, OP, I was a child in the 60s and my diet was nearly identical to yours. I was the oldest of four, with a stay at home mom and a working dad.

Cereal and milk for breakfast. PB&J or bologna sandwich on Wonder bread and a fruit for lunch. Meat (often fried), potatoes (often fried), vegetables (usually canned) and a slice of bread with margarine for dinner, with a glass of milk.

On the weekend breakfast might have been pancakes or french toast and lunch might include grilled cheese sandwich.

We didn't drink soda pop but we did drink kool-aid. Treats were usually cookies or popsicles- real ice cream was for birthdays. The occasional candy was generally Good N' Plenty or something like that- generally not chocolate.

I was beanpole thin.