Upbringing and weight

My early childhood experiences were ideal really. Mum and dad were never overweight. Dad was very active and so was I, Dad cooked our meals from scratch, most of the fruit and veg coming from his own garden. It was when I reached teenage years I began to notice how critical they both were of overweight people and what they ate and this made me uncomfortable. Dad would voice his opinion privately and was horrified that people would risk their health. Mum made remarks about people’s appearance and didn’t have much of a filter so they often overheard (she was later diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum but this wasn’t something that was heard of in adults in the 1970s) Me being an anxious and embarrassed teenager never rebelled in the usual stompy grumpy way, my “rebellion” was to eat junk food. I’m not blaming my parents at all, but I can look back to see how this was part of me creating my own bad relationship with food.
Edited to add - so in reply to OP, I don’t think your upbringing would usually directly affect your actual weight but it can in many ways affect your food related thoughts and behaviours as an adult.

Love=food=love, why is that such a hard notion to break free from??? People always think of food as a way to show love. I used to get caught up in that many times and maybe still do from time to time. I know when any of our 3 kids comes back home, I try to bake something special I know they like or at least have items I know they like available in the house, in case they want to cook.
And then there's the sabotaging mindset where people want to indulge so almost push it on you to help alleviate their own guilt. But that's something different.

Side note: My mom was a wonderful cook and baked a lot of treats! I distinctly remember begging her to help me lose weight and she said 'just don't eat it'. K, thanks. I also remember begging a Dr. to help me as well and her suggestion was eat carrots, not cookies. K, thanks. Again. It all boils down to the fact we gotta do this for ourselves and not expect it to come from others. Hopefully, inside each one of us that wants this, will be a strong enough inner self that gets us where we want to be. I mean, when we grow up we have no excuse except for ourselves. Our parents' feeding us is done with but it's hard letting go of habits and changing our mindset.

I was an unathletic kid, partly because I'd rather be reading a book than, well, anything, and partly because of what we now know is the kinesthetic difficulties that are common with autistic people. It took me longer to learn physical sequences, and that shuts you out of group sports quickly.

I pudged up just before puberty really hit and my mom panicked and put me on a strict diet. If she'd left me alone, a year later the pudge would have relocated to curves, but it pretty much damaged my ability to leave food alone if I wasn't hungry. I was always ravenously hungry. This is not surprising as during the worst of it I was doing things like changing shoe size every three months and growing two inches a year. That degree of ravenous, unsatisfied hunger bites deep. But my requests for seconds were met with denials. I'd had enough. I didn't need to eat like a laborer, my mother would say. Be a lady. I also lived in a house where anger and frustration were not emotions that we kids were allowed to have. I piled food on them to keep them down.

And I like food. Food is tasty. Food is fun. Food opens up other cultures in accessible ways. Food practices are deeply linked to everything from family to religion to commerce to cultural constructions of gender. This was and is fascinating stuff to me. The combination of that bottomless pit within me and my straightforward enjoyment of food meant that I was not thin when I got married.

And then when my eldest son was two years old, I was in a car wreck, and mangled a foot. They rebuilt my midfoot with pins and screws and it took me two years to walk normally again. This doesn't help you have an active lifestyle.

We were poor, and ate a lot of starch-based but tasty poverty food. I became a very good cook because, well, one has to eat, and I'm good enough that my experiments were always edible if not always what I was aiming for.

After I left my first husband and moved in with my boyfriend, I learned a lot about expressing emotion in a healthy way. I wrestled the bingeing habit down to a minimal point, which is where it is now; these days, a binge is an extra dessert eaten in a certain mood. He and my girlfriend were amazingly supportive of me getting better, as I am of them. So when I went to the doctor and the scale said 296, I knew that I needed to do something.

I am still autistic. I still have ADHD. They impact the day to day weight loss issues. The doctor said I would have arthritis in my midfoot by my forties, and he was right, I do. So I have to spend a certain amount of my time non-weightbearing, because I'd like to be able to walk tomorrow. But I have lost 55 pounds so far just with diet, and as I add in weight work, I feel better, my body is tightening up, and I'm beginning to feel like myself. I'm not thrilled that it took me till 50 to reach this point. But at least I reached it, and I'm still working on it.

I go back to the doctor for the first time in person since the revelation of the scale in January 2020, tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what she says.

very early childhood i am told we didn't have much food. we lived in poverty and my parents weren't around much. sometimes my older brother would make us ketchup sandwiches.

my dad remarried and my step mom cooked throughout my childhood but was very strict on portions. i remember one time i got seconds at dinner and my mother was so mad and cried bc that meant my dad couldn't eat. our church would sometimes donate food to us around the holidays. there was a lot of body shaming in my family. ive never been overweight but my stepmother would tell me i was fat and should eat less.

currently i struggle with portion control/binging behavior and disordered eating. i eat too fast and im not picky at all very few things i won't eat. i will literally pull food back out of the trash and eat it im a mess.
still struggle with body image issues bc of my upbringing.

I have two tales.

First: My husband. He is a decade older than me, and has a family of origin that put the fun in dysfunctional.
By which I mean horrific neglect. Bare cupboards were the norm, and parental supervision was nearly nonexistent.
My husband was the oldest of four (who were still in mom’s custody. There were others) and frequently had to beg neighbors for food. Or just straight up shoplift.
Please don’t judge. He had to start doing this kind of thing even before he began grade school. And if he didn’t? His younger brothers wouldn’t eat.

Now he has dementia. And a big part of my job is making sure he can physically see that we have food. Milk in the fridge. Bread. Some cheese. Cans and cans and cans in a full pantry. A stuffed chest freezer.
And meat for dinner every night.

If he begins to think we don’t have enough? He gets very agitated. It’s no joke.

Eating out? It doesn’t matter where. It might as well be the Ritz. Restaurant food is his Big Safe Emotional Spot.

So yes. His relationship with food in childhood has had a lasting effect.

Me? We were really poor after my dad’s heart attacks. And after he died when I was 13? We went from poor to “will the electricity be on when we get home from school? Who knows?”
But somehow my mom managed to always have something for us to eat.
No Little Debbies of course. Those were for rich kids. But we had fresh veggies from friends. Actual government cheese in the 10 lb loaf with the block printed cardboard box. Hamburger helper with no hamburger.
And free lunch at school.

The best, though, was every year at the end of the school year, the lunch ladies at the school where my mom taught always “accidentally” made too many ham salad sandwiches on the last day. And they’d give my mom a massive box of them to take home at the end of the day. I mean a massive box. And their ham salad sandwichs were chef’s kiss perfect

So, my only food related emotional issue from my childhood is the feeling that the sword of Damocles is somewhere above. But also that literally anything that’s actually edible has a place at the table somehow. Which makes me like big batch cooking, and buying in bulk. I’ve even developed a very good recipe for a nutritionally complete dehydrated soup that we now have packed in big boxes of seal a meal bags.

The restaurant supply house is one of my favorite places to shop because of this. And also because it means I can give food to anyone who is going through a hard patch.
Giving back, and paying it forward.

Exercise wise? I was a reader. All day if I could get away with it. And painting, model building, etc were top activities. When I was old enough I got a paper route, which burned calories daily. I rode my bike everywhere when I was a kid. And my unicycle that I got when I was 11 was my favorite thing until I had to sell it when I was poor and 19.
But I was utterly useless in team sports. Or on a group hike. I was the kid picking daisies in the outfield. Always picked last for the team. Hated gym because literally everyone was better than me, and usually my gym teacher just gave up on me.
Dodgeball in third grade I was nothing but a target. More than once I would just sneak away from the field and no one cared at all that I was gone. It didn’t help that I needed glasses and couldn’t see ten feet in front of my face. That wasn’t discovered for a couple more years.

High school though…. I talked my gym teacher into letting me ride my unicycle around the gym while everyone else did whatever it was they did and that was fantastic. I think that gave me a sense that I might be an autistic clumsy useless to any sports team kind of athlete - but it didn’t matter because I could do my own thing and that was good.

I was always skinny. The weight didn’t start piling on until my thyroid took a nosedive when I was in my early 30’s and my doctor back then absolutely refused to increase my thyroid medication until I’d gained 50 lbs.
I’d work off 30, the thyroid would give me a couple middle fingers, I’d gain 50…. Lather rinse repeat. It was a decade or more before I could get a doctor to listen to me about my thyroid issues. And a few more years even before one recognized I needed more than one thyroid med.

I finally worked almost all that weight off…. And here comes the balance disorder….
That’s been steadily getting worse for 12 years now. No doctor has seemed to care enough to figure it out. But here I am. Now diabetic with neuropathy because of a neurologist who I would sue for malpractice if I felt like going to that trouble. I’d probably win…. Off topic.

Anyhow. Ya.

Upbringing has some lasting echoes for everyone, I think. And I’m lucky mine aren’t darker than they are.