How did you eat as a child?

glassofroses · April 2017

90s kid, teen in 00s.

Cereal or toast in the morning until I grew up enough and my mum, who worked two jobs, slept in would let me make my own, or not. I've always struggled with not being hungry and making myself eat in the morning. Particularly as I always woke up early and had to leave early to go to school and would often not eat from 6am till 12. Or get a crappy sugary snack when left to my own devices.

My mum always made my lunch though. Sandwiches (1 sandwich). Salads. Wraps, all kinds of good stuff. A drink, Capri Sun or squash made up at home, and then some sort of little treat. Penguins and Clubs were my favourite. My salads were always an experience because I'd open it and my mum might have put broccoli in it. Raw broccoli. I didn't even know that was a thing that went in salads.

Dinner, also made by Mum, was always some sort of protein, vegetables and a starchy carb. I really liked fish fingers*, mash potato and peas. Still do. I'm a bit fussy when it comes to meat just because I won't eat red meat, I don't like it but I love all the vegetables. *when we got oven cooked foods

We had snacks but I wasn't interested in crisps/chips and I was unknowingly struggling with IBS so I was in pain a lot and was really scared of feeling full and therefore the swelling pain of IBS so I'd pick at everything. When I say I existed on diet coke and angst, that's pretty much it 'cause on top of that I suffered two eating disorders from 11 to 14 (psychological coping mechanism to being bullied not poor body image). I was the only person who came back from Christmas holidays weighing less than I did in term time because I'd just eat my dinner, the one meal my mum insisted I eat because she knew I was a serial skipper and then whatever little things I fancied during the day. To this day, my family still congratulate me if I eat a decent sized portion of food.

I still keep this as my model of eating but I tend to just make it...less. I'll eat three meals a day but not heavy ones and snack more. It's funny, even at my biggest I couldn't eat big portions or things cooked in oil. It's just I was a serial snacker and that's how I gained it. Now I just keep them healthier.

marigold125 · April 2017

Grew up in the fifties. There were 7 kids and our meals were very plain. Tuna noddle casserole, spam casserole with potato chip topping (a real treat!). Eventually things eased up and we had the standard meat, potatoes and boiled to death canned vegetables. We all really loved the high school cafeteria food. Mom was a little miffed about that - heh.

beaglady · April 2017

I was born in '58, so most of my growing up was in the 60's. Mostly, we had home cooked dinners of meat, potato and over cooked vegetables. Dessert every day, even though it might be something simple like canned fruit or jello. Breakfast would be toast on weekdays, eggs or pancakes on Saturday and donuts or pastry on Sunday. Soda and chips were for special occasions, but my dad was a salesman for a cookie company, so we always had several kinds of cookies around.

For Sunday dinner, my mom would always make a 'special' vegetable for her and I. My dad would only eat corn, carrots and peas, so all the other vegetables were exotic treats for special meals. I learned to love vegetables. A few years ago, my mom confessed that she didn't actually like a lot of those veggies, but she succeeded at getting g me to like them.

incisron · April 2017

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.

When my mother and father were married, I ate pretty typical stuff, but a little too much of it, obviously, as I was a somewhat heavy kid, though I wasn't chubby or fat yet. All four of us kids were at pretty healthy weights at that time, though both parents were obese, but I was on the heavier side - my kid brother and sister picked at their food sometimes, while I ate everything. Cereal, cream of wheat, oatmeal, pancakes and sausage with eggs, grits, French toast, that sort of thing for breakfast. We had sandwiches, Ramen or hot dogs, or sometimes hot pockets, for lunch, and hearty dinners like pasta, fried chicken or fish, baked chicken, meatloaf, etc, with carbs and veggies. Special dinners were lasagna, Mexican food, or soul food like barbecued chicken, baked macaroni, yams and greens.
After the divorce, all of us kids spent a number of years living with each parent. We kids all started to gain weight. My sister was obese by the time she was in first grade. I was chunky, and my little brother was the last one to get pudgy. With mom, it was cereal or pancakes, and lots of baked dark meat or fried chicken or fish, pasta piled with cheese, and other stuff, plus sweet snacks and dessert in large portions and with seconds. With my step mom, portions were more controlled, sweets were limited and fast food was a treat, but after she left my dad, we ate large amounts of fast food and prepackaged food, and I had more sweets and ate a terrible amount of sugar. I remember one day in summer there was a huge can of powdered lemonade and a massive thing of sugar. I think I must have made myself anywhere from twelve to twenty cups of lemonade, syrupy with sugar! I regularly got two Whopper Juniors with a fry and a medium shake or a chili cheese burrito with two tacos for dinner.

ninjamere1 · April 2017

We were poor and mom worked many jobs to keep us housed.

We had cornflakes with milk (powdered with water added blech) and sugar almost every single day of my childhood.

Dinners were mostly pinto beans with a chunk of onion or "spaghetti" that was just noodles and tomato sauce. Usually Sunday she tried to get us a nicer meal like corned beef brisket and veggies or pork chops with veggies and those awful canned half pears with a dollop of miracle whip sitting on a lettuce leaf (I think she found it in a magazine and thought it fancy).

School reduced or free lunch was my main meat source - we had good cooks that made stuff like perogies homemade and other things. Summertime lunch was usually a pb sandwich rarely with jelly.

I loved potluck dinners at church just to get variety. Also a family friend would invite us over for omelet dinners. They'd have dishes of several ingredients we could add to ours for them to cook. We also sometimes got bushels of tomatoes or potatoes after the main harvesting was done in local fields. Farmers would open up to anyone that wanted/needed to pick or dig for anything leftover.

Once a year we'd go to Oregon and pick cherries until we were sick from eating them right off the trees and come home with many pounds of cherries that she would freeze and/or can jelly for special occasions.

I didn't realize how close we were to being vegetarian until I was grown. Very little rotation/variety of foods over all.

We ate massive quantities of these items at a time - entire pots of food shared between 4 kids - but were so active that I was underweight most the time. I only took off my roller skates for school, church and bedtime lol. Oh our treats were the occasional blow pops.

mlinci · April 2017

cerise_noir wrote: »

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.

Hello @cerise_noir ! So did I

you may be able to tell by my user name

cerise_noir · April 2017

mlinci wrote: »

cerise_noir wrote: »

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.

Hello @cerise_noir ! So did I you may be able to tell by my user name

:laugh: YES!!! Of course. Your name makes me hungry.

What foods other than those listed did you eat? I forgot to mention black pudding.

I seriously miss food from our homeland. I live with my in laws who are English/French. I did make burek (both meat and cheese) cevape and madarica for them on my mamas birthday last year (she passed in April last year, so I wanted to celebrate)They LOVED them!

I could go for mlinci right now. And some govedji gulas!!!

My cousins wife made the most horrible sarma. I can still taste it. I liked my mothers the best.

Ha. My spell check went haywire with the food!

malibu927 · April 2017

80s/90s kid here

Breakfast: cereal or Poptarts during the week, which turned to nothing in my teen years because I valued sleep more. Donuts on Saturdays. Sundays were usually homecooked since my dad wasn't at work and could eat with us. Probably once a month we'd go to Old Country Buffet for breakfast also.
Lunch: bought whatever was being served at school. Non-school days were standard sandwiches or soup. Fridays when my mom ran errands we usually had McDonalds afterwards.
Dinner: Usually home-cooked 3-4 nights a week-standard meals like burgers, casseroles, pasta. Wednesdays we either went to the country club to eat or shopped at the mall and ate there. Thursdays were frozen meals because my Mom had her bowling league. Fridays were (still are) pizza nights.

However, my parents were always obese and never taught my brother and me about portion sizes or healthy eating. My dad has always been a picky eater and will touch few vegetables (broccoli, corn, potatoes) and it took years to break out of that mindset. Fruits weren't bought often but I did enjoy them. And when I hit puberty boredom and secret eating became a thing. So yeah, I was over 200 pounds by 18.

Sp1tfire · April 2017

Oh gosh in elementary school it was horrid. Thank goodness for my child metabolism. At home we'd eat okay, but my school lunches and packed lunches some days were so unhealthy. White bread sandwich, chips, pudding, cosmic brownies, etc. I did enjoy it though!

How did you eat as a child?

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