Do you blame your parents if you are overweight?

[familiesarrggghhhhh]

So I’m 45 and I’m overweight - size 16/18

ive always been big, especially during primary school. I slimmed a little during secondary school but have been consistently overweight all of my life

My DNiece is 10 years old and is very overweight (Niece by marriage). I really feel for her as she reminds me of me when I was her age 😞

I mentioned this to my mum a few weeks ago and she got very defensive and rather rude. She said oh here we go, I’m blamed for everything aren’t it. Then she said “you’re 45 years old now, I’m not the reason why you’re still fat”

To say I was gobsmacked was an understatement. She denied I was even that big so I showed her a picture of peak fatty at around 8 years old. I told her that I certainly wasn’t buying the food that I was eating at that age so I didn’t know what else to say 🤷‍♀️

I do feel like being overweight from a very young age has left me with a very unhealthy relationship with food.

I have 2 daughters now and I’m very keen on healthy eating and exercise as I don’t want them to have my childhood.

so my question is, if you have been overweight since a very small child do you blame your parents?

to be clear I hadn’t blamed my parents until my mums very strong reaction when discussing my niece, but the more I think about it the more I think why wasnt it addressed?

The problem is, some people are just greedy (I'm one of them) and children are included in this, some people (including children) also gain weight more easily. You can become overweight on normal, healthy food if you eat too much of it. So parents can provide a healthy diet and a greedy kid can become overweight.

It's said that children and babies naturally self regulate and won't overeat, but that isn't true, many don't. Even infants can overdo the breast milk and become enormous if they are that way inclined.

I think it's a bit simplistic to assume it's all down to what you are fed. People can eat the same and do the same things and put on weight differently ( my own DC for example).
I don't 'blame' my mum as she fed us as well as she could on a budget in a time when we didn't know as much about food as we do now.
I think I'm responsible now for what I eat and how I exercise but I know I can eat sensibly and exercise as much as I like but I'll always have a certain physique and a tendency to carry weight in a certain way.

Similar to other posters yes and no…

I was on the verge of chubby as a child. I get on well with my parents now, but if I’m honest (and I wouldn’t admit this to them) I think my parents parenting regarding food was really poor.

My father worked long hours with a long commute, so they rarely ate before 9pm as he wasn’t home any earlier. This meant that we never ate with our parents. So my mum (a housewife/part time WFH) cooked two separate meals for us.

I’ll admit, I was a really picky faddy eater as a kid but I wonder whether that could have been different if we’d had family mealtimes… to make life easier she cooked us things we’d eat- basically beige food - pasta with butter and cheese, oven food with chips, pizza (grated extra cheese on it -for the protein apparently!) and carbonara ready meals. I am sure I didn’t like vegetables (I think carrots or baked beans and occasionally mushrooms were my staple vegetables), but if I’m honest, looking back at it as an adult I think she could and should have tried harder. My parents ate ‘normal’ home cooked meals, nothing fancy, bolognese, curry, stews, meat and two veg, salads etc.

Once I moved out, at 18, I tried to make myself eat ‘real’ food because I was embarrassed by my palate. Slowly but surely my tastes adapted and I’d say I have a fairly normal pattern of likes/dislikes now, altho I really dislike spicy food.

At the same time, sweet food was used as a reward/pick me up if something good or bad had happened.

My mum unfortunately did seem immersed in weight/body shaming. Even now she will look in mock horror at others’ portion sizes/weights etc. I’m a healthy BMI, usually hovering just above or below 24. On the rare occasion weight gets talked about she makes out that my weight- 10st or a few pounds either way, is ‘so heavy’ for someone of my height, cue super raised shocked eyebrows. She engages in performative eating but isn’t slim herself. I try not to engage but sometimes it’s difficult.

I have made a conscious decision to try and avoid following her behaviours with my children. They have never been picky eaters, they eat with us and almost always what we’re having (personal likes/dislikes aside). How much of that is luck I don’t know.

I blame my mother for having a lifelong obsession with weight. She still, at 76, goes on and on about weight, and it's the first thing she comments on about anyone. It's her own obsession because she became overweight as a teen due to poor nutritional education & still says 'I've got to stop eating! I'm fat!'.

It's made me so self conscious, now I've gained a bit, I wear baggy, shapeless clothes and hate my body. I'm a size 12. The irony is that she bought all the bad foods for us as kids & teens and I had to make my own decision to stop eating it or I would be fat. I never have been because I am careful, but it's definitely influenced my life.

My MIL set DH on the road to beng fat, and tried to influence my own DC, as she was obsessed with sugar. She was morbidly obese. However, SIL went the other way & and is skinny as a rake because she's obsessed with image.

My friend's kids are all adults, all morbidly obese, (in their 20's), like her. They don't understand you have one chocolate, not the whole box and then a slice of cheesecake for lunch. They all blame medication or health.

I can see a clear link between my parents and my eating habits and how it has influenced my relationship with food. My mum cooked healthy food and we never had many snacks in the house. Saw my dad eow and he had nothing but crap at his house and db and I were pretty much allowed to eat anything we wanted, whenever we wanted. So I basically had a huge w/e long binge eow. Surprise surprise I struggle with binge eating! Generally eat healthy meals, cook from scratch most of the time, portions sizes are pretty reasonable etc just like my mum did it. But binge outside of that.

That's not to say it's not my responsibility to fight it and try to fix it myself (and I have tried many things including therapy), but yeah I absolutely blame my dad for me having the struggles and bad habits in the first place. And to top it off he would insult me calling me fat (destroyed my self esteem), but yet never tried to restrict any of the crap he happily provided for me to put in my body 🤷‍♀️

I am a total sugar addict with mucked up blood sugar levels. I am very very overweight. A couple of years ago it came up that when there were milk/formula shortages in the 70s and I was a baby, I was given condensed milk instead as my mum couldn't breastfeed. I mean, I obviously have free will as an adult but it kind of makes sense now how reliant on sugar I am 😂

Honestly to be fair I think parents can't win in this area.
I've seen parents criticised for daring to mention weight to their kids and vice Vera for not stepping in when children are eating too much ( even if it's healthy you can still eat too much)
Having healthy weight siblings is also a indicator that it's not a straight forward issue S

Bluntly I think the fact that you're overweight now at 45 is down to you and not your mother.

My mum became overweight since having us. She has had many health issues linked to that. We've always told her to try dieting but she didn't seem to make a connection between eating and gaining weight! She was convinced it's genetic and the same fate awaits us - her daughters (we are all slim).
I think the main reason she was overeating, in addition to the stress of having children and working, is because as a child she was deprived of a lot. Her mother was fairly well off but wouldn't give her treats, apparently.

My nephew is also overweight. He's 13. He eats absolute rubbish, doesn't do any sport, spends his time gaming, unless at school. I blame the parents - yes. And in this day and age when most of us should know better it's really hard not to judge them. I feel so sorry for the boy.
My sister thinks that as soon as he hits puberty he'll get taller and lose the weight. I think the unhealthy eating habits (created during lockdown) will stay with that poor child forever.

I think your mum's reaction is very telling - the idea that she parented you badly in terms of food is obviously very much in her mind (and it doesn't sound as though you put it there!). She is turning her guilt outwards into anger at you.

My own mum has a terrible attitude towards food - disordered, I think - she was uber controlling of what we HAD to eat (like it or not) and also hypercritical of anyone overweight. My sister and I unsurprisingly developed eating disorders.

These days I'm overweight, but not too overweight and not anorexic. So I count that as a win. At some point I hope to lose weight, but I'm not going on any kind of noticeable diet until DD leaves for university. My kids have a healthy attitude towards food (and are a healthy weight) and I'm very proud of that.

If a child is fat it is the parents fault. End of.
Unless there is a medical reason of course.

Yanbu

i was 4 stone at 4 years old…. And 12 stone at 12 years old…

my mother insists she did her best and gets upset and wails about how it’s so easy to blame the mother if I try and discuss it.

Apparently I was strong willed and obsessed with food as a child😑

my brother also has horrendous weight issues no mention about his strong will….

I was obese as a child ... Up until age 15. It was completely my mother's fault!!!

Anyway, I sorted myself out and am no longer overweight. Thankfully. I think parents can be blamed when you are younger but not now.

Yes.
We always had to clear out plates.
Felt very full after meals especially Sunday lunch.
Mother a feeder.
Treats and rewards were sweets and chocolate and food treats.
Puddings after every meal.
Chocolate on a Sunday afternoon.

A bit, yes. I'm not very overweight now and was only slightly solid as a child/teenager, but the "finish your plate" mentality didn't help as I didn't learn to regulate my appetite and had to ignore being full and carry on eating. They also overfed our cats and dog. My cats are slinky (as they are supposed to be for their breed) and DDs are slimmer and lighter than I was in my teens as the food I make for them is much healthier and more balanced. They still eat plenty of sweet stuff and crisps but are active and slim. If you are overweight when young it does make it harder to keep your weight down as an adult.

I blame my parents for me being a fat child.

They fed me the wrong foods and too large portions.

I became a fat teenager and then a fat adult and having been fat since childhood with a fat binge eating dad (who died at 64 from a catastrophic stroke due to a lifetime of binging and smoking) and a laxative abusing skinny feeder mum who seemed to want her daughters fat so she was 'better' I have always had a very complex relationship with food.

Is it my parents fault I was a fat child? Absolutely. 100%.

Is it their fault I'm fat at 50?

No. While they gave me a shit start and a horrible emotional addiction I've been fighting all my life, as an adult I am responsible for my own choices.

My childhood has made it bloody hard and I started out fat but it's still ultimately my choices and behaviours that kept me fat. I used food to fill an emotional hole. Binging was a coping mechanism. But it was still my responsibility as a adult to be in control of my food intake and food choices.

This time last year I was 33 stone and 6 pounds with heart failure, liver disease, COPD, and at that point undiagnosed but later confirmed stage 3 kidney failure. I was not expected to live. I was fine with that.

Then at the beginning of this year something snapped and I decided I'm done with this shit. I'm going to take control.

In February this year I started losing weight.

Scales today read 21 stone 8 lb.

Which is still fucking massive! But it's a loss of 11 stone and 12 pounds - over 35% of my start weight.

I'm still not going to live very many years, people in heart failure don't live that long. Maybe 10 years tops, I don't know. But I'm going out fighting.

At the very least I refuse to have my coffin brought into the church on a fucking fork lift! 😁

I’m not overweight, but of 6 siblings, I think there are 2 of us who are not. One at least is morbidly obese.

Family events are very much centred around food. I don’t live close, but if my mother is relating a family event to me, it will be all about what food people made and ate.

I think it’s is partly genetic, but I also think we learn bad eating habits from our parent - and try not to pass them to our children, with varying degrees of success.

Sort of...
My mum definitely had some kind of eating disorder.. she never went about a UK size 6.
She also hated cooking and would mostly just eat out when possible.. so there were no healthy snacks around ever..
There was just bread and condiments.. I used to eat entire loaves of bread
And use my pocket money to buy sweets
I remember thinking I was fat I'm primary school and trying to restrict what I ate and ending up binge eating. Definitely was raised with an odd attitude to food.
Had a lot going on in my childhood an often turned to binge eating for comfort.
So there's an element of it having something to do with my parenting yes...

However now I'm a mother I see there's a lot that's got to do with nature too.... one of my kids is rake thin whilst the other is official overweight according to bmi. My skinny child regulates his own food intake naturally and easily whilst my daughter is constantly ravenous.. they've grown up together being cooked and offered the same food and doing similar amounts of physical activity...

I completely agree with you. I bet if you watched your mum eat 3 huge meals a day with a load of snacks inbetween you'd have a completely different attitude towards food...

No. They weren't overweight and my siblings aren't overweight. Just me.

Nope. Down to my own greed.

I have disordered eating. The patterns of behaviour were set as a child. I am also autistic, which doesn’t help matters as there are sensory issues at play too.

Do I blame my parents? Hard to answer. They were piss poor, and food wasn’t great, but it was there and I never starved. Very potato and bread heavy, chips five nights a week, lots of bread and butter.

Mum was always on some sort of fad diet, which we were all expected to join in with, but it was always limited by funds, so was never successful.

I have had therapy, and am awaiting referral for a different type.

I don’t blame my parents for my current weight, but they certainly have some culpability for the way my attitude to food became cemented. I’ll hopefully manage to get over it at some point though.

@IncompleteSenten just wanted to acknowledge your post and achievement 👍

I know the feeling, op.

I used to have a full adult portion of fish and chips when I was eight - I used to be so full I had to lie on the sofa for an hour!

Not good for children at all

I don’t think blame is the right word because at some point we have to take responsibility for how we feel about things and our actions. But obviously children learn from what they see and experience, and if that’s crappy eating habits then that’s what they learn.

my mum has a poor relationship with food, though obvs to her she’s the normal one 🤷‍♀️

she is very picky / fussy and doesn’t like vegetables / salad, anything strongly flavoured, anything that’s ‘all mixed up’ on the plate (like pasta etc), anything ‘too fatty / oily (she has that 70s / 80s total fear of fat). She cooks more now, but during my childhood she’d always reach for a processed version of something rather than making the real thing. We ate a lot of processed crap as children. And because she is basically insecure she feels the need to establish that her way of seeing things is ‘normal’ and anyone who disagreed is weird. So washing leaves, chopping veg, making your own salad dressing, making a sauce from the pan juices, making your own béchamel - all of this was utterly dismissed as ‘making a big fuss’ over food. Anything more than a white bread / spread / cheap ham sandwich at lunchtime was considered ‘a fuss’.

So I grew up believing I didn’t like vegetables or salad, being suspicious of unknown foods etc. It was an absolute revelation when I left home for uni and saw how other people eat, and actually I love veggies and am an adventurous eater! I honestly thought I was over it, then I had children and when it came to weaning them I fell right back into the habits id learned in childhood. Never offered them a carrot stick - didn’t think was any point as obvs they wouldn’t want them, and only weird hippies do that, right? It took a real effort to get over that ingrained belief.

she also taught me to hate my body. she and I are basically the same shape (top heavy, broad back, big boobs) and I grew up watching her grab parts of her body and say how much she hated them, how’s horrible and disgusting they were, how ‘if only’ she didn’t have them, she would look good. Funnily enough these are exactly the parts of my body that I look at / notice first in the mirror. She was not actually overweight at all (from looking back at photos) but she was always doing Cambridge diets or cabbage soup diet or something.

so yeah, old habits die hard. And the core beliefs that get hard-wired into your brain as a child are very difficult to change. It’s often part of who we are. I can do it to an extent but I slip back, often.

luckily DH is a real foody plus we live in France, so my kids have grown up in a very different food environment than I did.

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.