How did you eat as a child?

I basically ate nothing but carbs growing up (US, late 80s and 90s). Cereal or white rice or plain pasta with milk for breakfast, though the cereal was always no sugar added. Lunch was a strawberry jelly sandwich, chocolate milk, and an apple because I pretty much refused to eat school lunch and there are very few room temperature foods I can stand. When I got home, I'd have cookies or crackers with milk as a snack. Dinner was meat, vegetable, starch. And then I had a glass of milk and a small snack before bed.

I was surprisingly not overweight. I was a little overweight during puberty, but not before and not after. And my blood lipid counts are perfect. I will say that I'm naturally very muscular.

I was born in 1979 in the U.K.

I am the oldest of 5 kids and my mum was a single parent who didn't work. We had cereal and milk (if there was enough milk left) or toast for brekki

Lunch was either skipped or a bag of chips from the Chinese at lunch break.

Tea was usually meat, potatoes and veg or freezer food. Very rarely a pudding was on offer.

I was a skinny kid and as I grew up I was very slim until I got pregnant with my first child. I was only 6 1/2 stone (91lbs) when I went on maternity leave and I started to love food!

The rest is history...

I ate a pretty balanced diet...for the most part: meat, veggies, bread, etc. (80s/90s). However, my whole family drank an excessive amount of soda and ate an excessive amount of sugar. I was an overweight kid; the whole family was overweight. It was not uncommon for me to eat 3 donuts or a half gallon of ice cream in a sitting.

I did develop a taste for healthier foods, b/c I was exposed as a kid; but I had a MAJOR sweet tooth and bad sugar habit that I had to break as an adult.

My kids eat very well. They aren't picky eaters. The only veggie they dont like: brussel sprouts (oh well). I'm not overly strict about sweet treats, but the rule is 1 a day (and it's usually a small serving). They seem satisfied with small portions of sweet treats...so it is working for now.

1990's. Breakfast was milk and cereal. (now that breakfast upsets my stomach lol)

For lunch it was a standard school lunch or packed lunch of campbells soup, bag of chips, a brownie and an apple. I mostly drank milk.

After school it was a pb&j and chocolate milk all the time. As a teenager it was ramen noodles and brownies. Haha

Dinner was usually pizza or mcdonalds, when with my grandparents it was biscuits and gravy type stuff. Lots of gravy meals with potatoes and meat and a canned veggie. Drank milk.

Now I eat way differently. I still love gravy though. I was always bigger than kids my age. First i hit puberty early, was taller, just bigger. I played outside a lot, jumped on trampoline for hours plus rode bikes with friends. I got muscular calves to this day, but after i got into TV and video games...then I slowly got fat, I ate a lot of processed and packaged or instant foods when I was in my preteens and teens. Stopped playing outside.

Now I cant hardly stand that stuff, plus i love taking walks now. Oh, and milk and I no longer get along sadly. It hurts my stomach.

From the mid-sixties to early 70s in the U.S.

Breakfast, weekdays and Saturdays: usually cold cereal with milk, maybe a banana, rarely berries, and a small glass of orange juice (we used small empty jars that originally held spreadable flavored neufchatel cheese). But sometimes my mother would make hot cereal (not so much oatmeal as cream of wheat, which my brothers liked, or Ralston whole wheat cereal, which I preferred); sometimes she made hot chocolate from scratch, and served it in a chocolate pot, so we could refill our cups, and made buttered toast, and we would dunk the toast in the hot chocolate like people dunk doughnuts in coffee, and you'd get a lovely buttery film on the hot chocolate -- like bulletproof cocoa ! And sometimes she'd make poached eggs with toast, which I really liked. Looking bad, I wonder if her repertoire of weekday hot breakfasts was influenced by always having a baby or toddler to feed for the better part of two decades, and just making the same thing for whatever older kids were around, and we got to like it.

Breakfast, Sundays: this is when we might have pancakes or french toast with bacon or sausage, maybe fried eggs. Not every Sunday, but pretty frequently. But if for some reason or other people didn't get moving in time to do that before church, we might stop after church for doughnuts -- a couple of dozen in the years I remember best, when there were six or seven people in the house, and two to four of them, depending on the year, were teenage boys.

Lunch, on school days: If I brought lunch, it was usually a peanut butter and jelly or egg salad sandwich. I would take a sandwich made from deli meat, if there was any in the house, and when I got old enough to wield a knife I'd make a sandwich from any leftover ham or roast beef/pork/lamb/chicken in the house, but my mom either wouldn't cater to or didn't understand or I didn't explain my deep loathing for fat on meat, especially cold fat, so I wouldn't take regular (non-deli) meat sandwiches when I was younger and she was making my lunches. I liked tuna salad sandwiches at home, but my mom made it too wet to take for a lunch sandwich, because the bread would be all soggy by the time I got to eat it. Sides were usually fruit of some kind (apples, tangerines, grapes), maybe cut veggies like carrots, celery, bell peppers. And I would buy milk, and sometimes an ice cream sandwich or cookie for dessert.

I would also buy the school lunch sometimes, if it was something I liked. The woman who ran our school cafeteria made insanely good garlic bread when spaghetti was the lunch, so I always bought lunch on those days. And some days I would walk home for lunch, because we lived close, if there was something especially good to be had, like homemade soup leftover from dinner the night before.

Snacks: I don't remember having after school snacks very often. If I was really hungry, I might have graham crackers and milk, a piece of fruit, a slice of bread and butter, especially if there was homemade bread around, or a bit of cheese, but it was after three when I got home from school, and we sat down to dinner around 5:30, so it wasn't encouraged to ruin your appetite.

Dinner: Usually some kind of meat, a starch, and a couple of vegetables (sometimes salad, vegetable-based soup, or V-8 juice would sub in for a cooked vegetable on your dinner plate). Meatless dinners on Friday might be fish or grilled cheese or scrambled eggs with cheese, usually with tomato soup. Always served with milk, whole milk when I was a child, then reduced fat by the time I was a teenager.

Dessert: not an everyday occurrence. We often but not always had something on Sunday (layer cake and brownies were frequent, but also simple things like pudding from a mix, and then my mother went through a phase of making trifles, although that was more of a special occasion dessert). Then as my brothers got to be ravenous teenagers who had to fuel themselves for football and other sports, my mother started keeping more calorie-dense ready-made snack and dessert foods (a.k.a. "junk food") on hand, like cookies and ice cream, and I of course wanted to have some too.


I was healthy, and usually did a fair amount of running around/biking/skating, but my mother always seemed to be worried I was going to get fat -- well, roughly half of the females on her side of the family were obese at some point in their lives, so it wasn't an irrational concern. Anyway, there was a certain amount of her discouraging me from eating the snack foods, which led to a certain amount of my sneaking the snack foods, which I wasn't precisely forbidden to have. Photographic evidence tells me I was never fat as a child or teenager (but never skinny), and my memory of my height and weight from the age of about 12, when being warned about getting fat had me actually start paying attention to my weight, tells me that until I went to college, I was always in the "healthy/normal" BMI range. Oddly, I was never overweight until after I started going on "diets." (Atkins, cabbage soup, the diet of the month from magazines, some "meal plans" that were perfectly sensible other than feeling that one had to eat exactly what was on the plan for that day...)

The earliest I remember, mom served burned pancakes every day. Later years I'd get up early to have my dad fix bacon, over easy eggs and toast with coffee before he left early for work. Somewhere in there also I ate a lot of Frosted Flakes with milk.

60s and 70s
Parents had a little farm so sometimes we ate our own meat from the freezer: pork, beef, sometimes chicken, and lots of eggs.
We had home picked strawberries and grapes and blackberries and watermelon in the summer.
Also home grown zucchini, tomatoes, asparagus, pumpkin, black eyed peas, blackberries, and cantelope and . . . . .We froze lots to eat in the winter
Father was away in the military 75% of the time.
Mother was home.
Breakfast: cold cereal & milk & toast Sometimes oatmeal or pancakes or eggs.
Lunch carried to school: Sandwich with fruit. Sometimes peanut butter and jelly, sometimes bacon sandwich
Snacks after school: homemade cookies or cake or fruit. Kool aid. Some milk.

My siblings were involved in sports by middle school so they were thin.
When we were twelve or thirteen, sister and I took over some of the cooking jobs: baked chicken, baked potatoes, big salads, homemade pizza, . . . sometimes desserts like store bought ice creams or home made baked goods. I put on weight when I left home for college.

We were pretty bad off so it was a lot of stuff out of a box, beans and rice, ground turkey (it was cheap back I. the day), and times when we just didn't have enough so we'd head to bed hungry.

lthames0810 wrote: »

Just curious about what you were typically fed as a child and we're you over weight back then.

For me this was in the US in the 1960's, a family of four: stay at home mom, my dad worked days so was home in the evening and I had a younger sister.

Breakfast was cold cereal with banana and milk in the summer, or oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar and milk in the winter.

Lunch was either a peanut butter and jelly or a bologna sandwich with an apple. (In my Three Stooges lunchbox on school days.). Milk to drink. Always whole milk.

After school was a snack to tide us over until Daddy got home of one cookie and a little milk. Don't want to spoil you supper!

Supper would vary much more than the other meals, but typically included a meat, a cooked vegetable, potatoes or rice and a salad. Milk or water to drink. Not usually a dessert, but if we had one it was something like canned fruit and a cookie. My dad insisted that we clean our plates (never a problem for me but a constant battle for my sister who hated vegetables and still does to this day), but I learned that if I ate too quickly, he would pile more food on whether I wanted it or not and he would insist that I eat all of that as well.

Both my sister and I were skinny little kids, but as was typical in that era, we were sent outside to play after school and on weekend mornings and not allowed back in the house until we were called in for a meal or if there was bad weather.

I still have this way of eating in my head as the model for good health.

Ditto both for the era and the menu. Occasionally an egg salad sandwich. More tuna-salad than bologna sandwiches in my mom's repertoire. Vitamin D milk (which was new at the time). Iodized salt. No afternoon snack.

If you wanted to go somewhere you either walked or rode your bike. Mom was not a taxi service. As a consequence my grade-school world was a little over a mile across, bounded at its edges by major roads with speed limits over 30 mph. Within that world was a 7-11 at the far edge next to an antiques (junk) store, and a creek with its easement, the elementary school half a mile away, a swath of orchard, a railroad with its easement. The rest was suburb. It was a daring adventure to follow roughly a mile along the 35 mph road at the edge of my 'turf' to go to the major grocery store (Safeway), which was not only a mile trek but required crossing the fast road and walking an additional ~2 blocks to reach it.

Everything was healthy, healthy, healthy when i was a kid. I used to get teased at school for having my pumpernickel bread with ham and bean sprouts, all i ever wanted was a damn peanut butter sandwich lol My mum used to make us fruit and veggie smoothies all the time, and there were veggies at every meal (She still loads me up on them when i visit her).
We had take away maybe once a month, we could have dessert if we wanted, but i can't remember ever having it unless guests were over for dinner..
We could spend our pocket money at the shop on the way home from school if we wanted on whatever we wanted. So it wasn't a strict only healthy food thing, but the vast majority of our meals were healthy and home cooked, no ready meals or anything like that.

My mum worked full time, did all the grocery shopping and cooking. I have apologised to her a hundred times over the years for not helping her more. She was/is certainly wonder woman in my eyes

ETA: None of us were ever overweight. We all played a lot of sport too.

I was fed pretty good. Mac and cheese, milk, hamburgers, hotdogs, veggies. My mom made a lot of homemade stuff. I didn't start getting over weight til around my 20's especially after my 5 pregnancies. Plus with depression with losing 2 of my daughters in the hospital due to being preemies.

I grew up eating everything. My parents have always been big on dining out, and my stepfather is Vietnamese, so we were always out at Asian restaurants, and brought a lot of snacks home from Asian markets. There was tex-mex food and regular fast food occasionally. Family dinners at home usually involved grilled meat and seafood, lots of fresh fruit and veggies, and rice or potatoes. (My favorite memory is opening up fresh young coconuts with an old meat cleaver.) We also ate crusty breads, cheese, cured meats, rich pastries, and wine. I experimented with cooking a lot, and often cooked for the whole family starting at age 12. Lots of roasted chicken, stir fries, sauteed veggies, and pasta. I was also big on smoothies (and milkshakes, haha). Blessedly, my mother didn't keep soda, sugary cereals, or candy around the house. But I knew how to bake sweets, so I knew if I wanted desserts I could have them.

I took an interest in nutrition at a young age. It was hard to reconcile that with the fact that my family would spend entire weekends just gorging on international cuisine. But I was lucky that most of it was reasonably nutritious, even though we were eating too much of it.

Edit: Also lots of Mediterranean and Persian foods, come to think of it. Hawaiian foods when my brother got married, since his wife's mother is from Hawaii. Did I mention I ate everything??

I could care less about food as a kid, sent me to school and I didn't eat lunch, not breakfast either, ate snack when I got home and some dinner, Mom was a good cook. I just didn't get into food as a child, I was into having fun, being active, loved outside playing. No fast foods back there but maybe 1 Kenny Burger. Yep, fast food was probably my downfall later now I think about it. I was skinny until 16.

Things changed for some reason, my metabolism, growing up stress, boys, peer pressure. I turned to food about 16 years old and now 63 and same struggle. My Mom used prescription drugs a lot. I turned to food. She seem to fall apart all the time and always took pills. This made me nervous. She is 90 and still going and lives in so much drama, still drives me crazy. She has a 63 year old caretaker she calls her boyfriend and 2 other caretakers that I am sure she drives nuts, amazing what they will do for her for money. Anyway when life gets hard I want to eat, I guess I need to go play more like I did when I was a child.

I ate more or less like OP, except my father was never so cruel as to force-feed us if we happened to finish sooner than the rest of the table. Not that ever did. I was an extremely picky eater and disliked anything with the wrong texture or too strong a flavor I didn't favor.

We sometimes had soda, but only for an occasional treat and never with dinner unless it was a party of some kind, like a barbecue with the extended family. Snacks were also available in limited quantities: Fritos were my favorite. Candy almost never. If I wanted any, I had to find some money and then walk or ride my bike a mile each way to the nearest general store. (And after it closed, it was 3 miles to the next nearest one.)

For most of my elementary school career, I was underweight for my height according to the growth charts of the time.

Grew up in the70's & 80"s. I have zero recollection what, if anything! I had for breakfast as a kid. Ate school lunches, usually burgers and fries. Pretty much everything my mom made for dinner was terrible and started with cream of mushroom soup and hamburger. But when I was home alone after school I made the most delicious snacks. Like popcorn with a stick of butter, or broiled wonder bread with butter and sugar, or -- well, you get it......Then when I got chubby, and my parents locked up the food, I got really crafty.