How did you eat as a child?
Replies
-
Born in 1966 to a stay at home mom and postal worker father. The fourth of six kids. We lived the life of that facebook meme: kids outside from the time chores were done (right after breakfast) right up to the time we heard my mom calling through the neighborhood for us for dinner.
Breakfast for me (as a relatively "non" eater): A piece of peanut butter toast and water (I didn't like milk)
Lunch was always (whether home or in school): half a peanut butter and butter sandwich and some carrot sticks
Dinner was: whatever mom put on our plate and she was a great cook, albeit a creative one. She liked to try "new" cuisine. Needless to say, my parents had the rule that you ate what was on your plate. Many days I tried to feed my veggies to the dog, but he was not having any of it.
Desserts were served on birthdays and holidays, eating out? didn't happen. We even packed a cooler on our "road trip" vacations.
I didn't have my first piece of franchise pizza until I was in high school. When I finally began to make a little money from babysitting, I discovered chips and sodas and other wonderfully high caloric morsels of deliciousness.
I was bone thin, through my childhood, teen years, early married life and even after I had my own kids. My parents died when I was 27 and shortly after that the weight started accumulating. Depression and stress. Because I am 5'8 and started out thin, the weight crept on slowly and my body actually carried it well. For a while. When I hit menopause early (age 45) it began to look ridiculous. So...found mfp, joined a gym, made friends with another gym rat who became my workout partner and accountability person. I am still about 80 pounds over weight, but I am on the road back to my normal weight and healthier lifestyle. Life still likes to put up roadblocks and knock me down, but you just have to get up and dust yourself off and keep going.
I often think about my relationship or non-relationship with food when I was young. I sometimes wonder if the lack of "treats" made me want them even more. But it is what it is and I am quite happy that for about five years we (my family) have been a non-processed food household. All meals/soups/sauces etc. created from whole foods. Back to basics is the way for me, I think.0 -
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.0 -
Thank you for this post. I have never thought of myself as an emotional eater, but I guess joy is an emotion too. You made me think about it. My food memories are all happy. Family, joy, fun, feeling loved and being around loved ones. My love for food apparently has its roots. I derive extreme pleasure from eating for a reason and it's not just because it tastes good (it does)... Something to think about.2
-
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...0 -
Canadian born in 1984. I had a terrible diet. I'm an only child and was raised by a single sahm.
Breakfast: Cereal (the most sugar coated kind possible) with full fat milk or bacon.
Lunch: Whatever my school served, which was way better than anything my mom could have made. School lunch was provided by a community school cafeteria, I was very lucky in this respect. If it was the weekend refer to what I ate for dinner.
Snack: Freezies or chips or a chocolate bar from the corner store.
Dinner: Mac and cheese with hot dogs, or hot dogs or a deli meat sandwich or something else cheap, heavily processed and easy to prepare. I rarely had anything of true nutritional value.
I have three kids now and there is no way I'd give them my childhood diet, ugh makes me cringe reading this back to myself.
2 -
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.
0 -
1991 in Canada. We were pretty poor so nutritionally things were a little off but our mom did the best she could and we ate a mostly balanced diet (hotdog corn chowder still haunts me though). I only started to gain after I met my husband because ridiculous food choices plus sedentary living.
I do remember if there was any treat type food in the house I was all over it (cough the chocolate chip jar cough) because who knew when those would be around again. So I got bad for attacking calorie dense foods young, I just didn't get fat until later on because I was active as a kid and not so much as an adult until I got my shiz together.
All of this makes me a lot more conscious of the dietary decisions I make for my own children which is the blessing0 -
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.0 -
Most mornings we had eggs and toast. Sometimes bacon or sausage. Some mornings oatmeal or cream of wheat.
Lunch was usually packed with a turkey and cheese sand or baloney or tuna salad, carrot sticks or an apple or a banana. I liked pizza day or Mac and cheese day and spaghetti day so I bought lunch those days.
Supper at home on weekdays was usually meatloaf, pork chops, steak any meat that was real no chicken nuggets or pre made. Real mashed potatoes. My father was not one for instant. Potatoes every night unless we had lasagna or spaghetti some nights we had fish and potatoes. We had a vegetable or salad every night. Sunday dinner was usually a pot roast with potatoes and carrots or roast chicken. We usually did not have dessert. Sometimes tapioca or ice cream. We would have pizza night with moms friends about once a month. We kept chips in the house but I wasn't a big fan on them. We had cookies that we baked at times. Especially Christmas time. Pumpkin pie around holidays and sometimes Apple blueberry and cherry. We had tasty cakes for our lunches at times but they weren't for sitting around and eating just any time. I liked to eat blueberry yogurt for a snack or a can of peas. We had fruit trees and kept fruit at the house also so we didn't do much snacking on junk. Occasionally we made popped corn or had cheese curls or cake. Grandparents took us to Mc Donalds and ice cream. My father wanted meat and potatoes daily so we didn't have things like casseroles and nachos or burritos. My husband likes to cook and likes different things. That has made an entire new food choice for me. There's so many foods I didn't know were around
0 -
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...)
0 -
1960's!
Breakfast: Cereal with milk and toast with butter. Weekends: bacon and eggs or pancakes and sausage
Lunch: Sandwich, fruit, cookies. Always.
Dinner: Meat, potato/rice, green veggies, green salad.
Mom and Dad's date night: TV dinner or Mac and Cheese or Campbell's Soup and Grilled Cheese
Hamburgers, Pizza and Donuts were rare.
In the 1970's, Mom stopped making fried chicken, or anything fried. And no more gravy Tab and Diet Iced Tea replaced milk
Thanks for inspiring the trip down memory lane!!0 -
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.1
-
lthames0810 wrote: »Just curious about what you were typically fed as a child and were you over weight back then.
lthames0810 - Awesome@Three Stooges Lunchbox ... A great chunk of my childhood was spent enjoying those
Born: Mid-70s in a Sikh dominated State in Northern India as the surviving eldest.
Description: Location 1: Oceania-Pacific (Toddlerhood - Childhood)
Family of 5, with full-time working parents and 3 children (me, my sister and our brother).
Breakfast norms in the City:
Mum's selection:- Pawpaw (Papaya) w. squeezed lemon juice
- Orange juice
- Yoghurt (Plain) or Hot milk
- Oatmeal or Sago or Tapioca/Breadfruit grated warm/hot breakfast porridge or Cream of wheat
Dad's selection:- Pikelets/Crepes w. seasonal fruit toppings or store bought or homemade jam and cream
- Milo (hot) or Hot cocoa
- Continental style: Eggs, 2 bangers, toast (or fried hash from yucca or taro or sweet potato), orange juice, (wild) lemongrass tea
- Southwestern omelette
School lunch (Packed in those stackable stainless steel round lunch containers). * This was exclusively our late father's domain/responsibility by preference.- Chicken quiche
- Sausage rolls
- Roti parcels (w. lamb curry or potato/bhindi/saag paneer/ matar aloo)
- Meat pies
- Samosas w. tamarind chutney, raita or chinese parsley (cilantro) dip.
- Burritos *
- Quesadillas *
- Fresh fruit
- Fresh fruit juice or smoothies - iced overnight, so it'll be sloshy and drinkable throughout our school hours
- Hot milo (in a thermos) throughout wet/rainy/cold seasons.
After-school snacks (My sister and I would assist each other in the kitchen).- Jaffles (w. cheese, sometimes we'd add pineapple chunks)
- Milkshake
- Fruits
Mum's- Melting moments (Cookies)
- Cheesecake (Traditional)
- Chocolate flavoured milk (Anchor from Australia lol) YUM
- Creamsicles (Always strawberries or mangoes)
Dad's- Farm-fresh cow's milk, fresh off the stove - hot and creamy - YUM
- Beignets - no sugar but a lemon with cane sugar syrup, heavy on the lemon - Awww
Mon-Fri School Days Dinner Menu: Vegan/Vegetarian 5 days a week with our father - mainly; Our Mum cheated - always the salads with her fish.- Main course (Mum's): What is recognisably similar to California Asian Salad w. tuna and cashew nuts or peanuts or fish/meat stuffed spinach cooked in coconut cream
- Main course (Dad's): Dhaal/Chickpeas with a medley of fresh/frozen vegetables (loaded)
- Side (Dad's): Accompaniment always was a tribal choice. Usually a boil-up of either taro or kumara or wild yams or cassava; The odd day would be rice. The native rootcrops always were suncooked.
- (Dad's): The assortment of what looked like Israeli salad was our salsa to go with the main dish and assorted chutneys
- (Dad's): We'd always have what looked like parantha/soft tortilla but it was made out of a pulse flour (2 each)
- (Dad's): Pakora made from pulse flour with spinach or eggplant or pumpkin leaves (Mini ice cream scooped balls@3 each)
- Beverages: Lemon flavoured water/Chilled fresh coconut water
- Dessert (Dad's): Jelly with homemade ice-cream and fresh fruit salad
Before bedtime snacks:- Banana each
- Horlick's (Hot)
Description: Location 2: Oceania-Pacific (Tweens - Teens)
Boarding School - NZ Breakfast (We both sang in our Choirs so we weren't encouraged/permitted to eat anything oily or is dairy or sugarloaded)- Dried toast
- Cold water
Boarding School Lunch, NZ- Summer - Cold meat or cheese sandwiches
- Winter - Hot meat or cheese sandwiches with a cup of soup
- Fruit
- A snack like a Nougat Roll or a Fruit Roll-up
Boarding School, NZ After-school- One fresh fruit (Seasonal)
Boarding School, NZ Dinner- Traditional British Dinners
- Atypical Homestead British Feeds
- Water
- No dessert
Boarding School - Before bedtime ritual after Preptime- Daily international call from parent(s): Spent complaining that they'd paid a whole lot for us to eat like Oliver Twist ROFL
We were never obese. I was an atypical vegan looking child. Not emasciated and not fat.5 -
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.
0 -
Wow I find this very interesting to see how the meal have evolved over the years. Growing up I was very thin (only gained when I went away to college), but never ate very healthy. Very nutrient poor meals lol.
Breakfast was a cream cheese filled giant donut or giant cinnamon roll with cream cheese frosting or waffles with powdered sugar/canned strawberry sauce, or sugary cereal and milk with a small carton of OJ
Lunch was usually pb&J with a hoho/snack cake, water, canned fruit cup or sliced apples, bag of chips, and pack of gummies (my favorite were scooby do or gushers)
Snack when I got home was usually poptart/more chips/corn dogs/gummy fruit snacks of some kind, sometimes the ice cream man would come by so I would have ice cream
Dinner was usually tacos or spaghetti or 13 chicken nuggets (I liked a specific number) or a whole dinner plate of french fries or pizza or chili. Mom usually made me eat some baby carrots as my veg. I never grew up eating the "starch meat veg" family dinners. Never ate plain chunks of meat, veg and potato as a kid. Very interesting to see how most born before the 90s had this staple dinner.
Snack before bed was usually ice cream sundae or poptarts or cheese/crackers or pita bread with peanut butter
I ate like crap but was always very thin until after puberty it started to catch up with me.0 -
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.2
-
I was not overweight until I had my 3rd child, and after my 4th, I was doomed. I was a latch-key kid as a child and my brother fed me most dinners. I hardly ever ate breakfast, but if I did, it was cold cereal. Usually corn flakes or rice crispies. I ate whatever was served at school. Dinners were usually fish sticks and french fries, frozen pizza, or grilled cheese. Sometimes he made spaghetti. I hardly ever snacked. But I do remember having cheese and crackers or pnut butter crackers sometimes.0
-
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.0 -
This content has been removed.
-
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.4 -
When I was in Primary school we used to have wheatbix for breakfast, with sugar and whole milk. Milk as a drink. Our school lunches were usually a piece of cake or a biscuit, a piece of fruit, and either a jam sandwich, or a ham sandwich with lots of tomato sauce and margarine. Afternoon tea was usually custard and some kind of pudding. Mum used to cook sausages and vegetables, rissoles and vegetables, meatloaf and vegetables or Bolognaisse for tea usually. We were usually made to eat everything on our plate, even if we were full, so it didn't get wasted. Meanwhile, my mother wouldnt eat the food she had cooked. She was always on a diet. Cabbage soup,diet, cottage cheese diet, Atkins diet, blood type diet, weight watchers etc etc.
I didn't eat alot when I was very young, so,I wasn't an overweight child. It wasn't until grade 6 or 7 I started to gain weight and got a bit chubby. When I entered highschool I was unhappy with my weight. Ended up researching how to lose weight and that was when my eating disorders also developed. I was diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia, after hiding it for a long time. Since then, I have always struggled with my weight, going through periods of restriction, bingeing or overeating.2 -
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.1
-
Mostly Croatian foods such as sarma, pasul, fileki, paprikas, gulas, kisela juha, zgance, kobasice, burek, cevape, mlinci, krpice, and many other dishes as well as roast meats with potato and salad made with lettuce dressed with oil and vinegar. A few sweets, too, smoked meats and cheeses, breads. I only started gaining weight after puberty.
For snacks there would be oil popped popcorn, pretzels, dried meats, grapes and various fruits.2 -
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??2 -
When I was a kid I wasn't a big eater. But I was a picky eater I didn't like any veggies sep corn. I ate what ever there was i had healthy or unhealthy food. I was very skinny and healthy.as i left high school my appite change and now im a big eater and of course my weight went up1
-
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.
1 -
cut out drinking my calories, not worth it1
-
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.1 -
Grew up in the 80's in Oregon. My family has a history of heart disease, so we avoided red meat, eggs, salt, and high fat foods as was the recommendation at the time. I was "chunky" from 2nd-6th grade (mirroring the years my family was the most financially strained). At age 13 I dieted and was of normal weight until a took a stressful sedentary job at age 24.
Breakfast: milk, cereal, fruit. Sometimes oatmeal.
Lunch: throughout all of my school years my dad lovingly packed my lunches. Sandwich (pb&j or cold cuts, veg, sprouts, cheese), apple or carrots (something healthy), fruit rollup or pudding cup (something fun), juice box.
After-school snack: quesadilla or bagel or snap peas
Dinner: My parents alternated between working nights and days so it varied whether one, both, or neither was home. TV dinners or pot pies (the aluminum kind because we had no microwave), chicken and veg* wok stir fry, or baked chicken or fish with veg* or salad and potato or rice.
*veg= brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, peas, carrots, corn, etc. When my family was doing better they'd garden and/or shop at farmer's markets. The TV dinners were heavy during the hard years. But no matter what, my dad always packed that awesome lunch. For the record, I started out with a Snoopy lunch box, then a He-Man lunch box (both metal). When I got older I had an insulated nylon one with straps and zippers.1 -
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.0
This discussion has been closed.
Categories
- All Categories
- 1.4M Health, Wellness and Goals
- 393.4K Introduce Yourself
- 43.8K Getting Started
- 260.2K Health and Weight Loss
- 175.9K Food and Nutrition
- 47.4K Recipes
- 232.5K Fitness and Exercise
- 426 Sleep, Mindfulness and Overall Wellness
- 6.5K Goal: Maintaining Weight
- 8.5K Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
- 153K Motivation and Support
- 8K Challenges
- 1.3K Debate Club
- 96.3K Chit-Chat
- 2.5K Fun and Games
- 3.7K MyFitnessPal Information
- 24 News and Announcements
- 1.1K Feature Suggestions and Ideas
- 2.6K MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions