Realising how things weren’t normal for me growing up

[Jasminecandle]

I have a real issue with food now as an adult. I am overweight and I eat too much of the wrong things. I also use food as a comfort.

When growing up we weren’t allowed to help ourselves to food. I was so so skinny as a child and teenager and I don’t think it was particularly healthy.
My parents would feed us three meals a day, but usually quite small portions for me, even as a growing teen.
I remember being hungry in the evenings as we used to eat our dinner about 5/5:30pm. Of course I was growing, but I can’t even imagine helping myself to a piece of toast before bed. So when I became an adult and moved out, I was shocked that people I knew including partners would eat whenever they liked.

Even now, as an adult if I go to my parent’s house I don’t ever help myself to food without asking … I bring my own food and keep it in the bedroom where I’m staying instead.

I even remember my Nan trying to feed me extra of her homemade cakes to put some meat on me as a teenager, but my mum would insist I only had 2 of these small homemade cakes, no more as I need to stay slim.

AIBU to believe my parents controlling attitude with food has lead to my issue with food and my weight as an adult?

I think @Jasminecandle is allowed
to feel bitterness and assign blame. Not to remain in that state indefinitely but to be free to acknowledge anger she might have about the restrictions placed upon her as a child.

Its a bit rich expecting other people to instantly heal over difficulties they’ve suffered.

OP is trying to do something about it. She’s trying to identify and understand the source of her problem.

@Reugny, I’m not really arguing with anything you’re saying, so I’m not sure why you’re saying “did you miss the part…” Three meals and no snacks is fine if that keeps a kid full.

Exactly. I keep thinking of comparable situations where most of Mumsnet would find “quit blaming your parents, you’re an adult” to be a tremendously callous response.

Curious if your sexual issues stem from your parents’ attitudes about sex? “Quit blaming your parents, you’re an adult.”

Curious if you keep gravitating towards abusive men because your dad hit your mum? “Quit blaming your parents, you’re an adult.”

The main point is that the OP ROUTINELY WENT TO BED HUNGRY and that her parents WOULDN'T LET HER EAT MORE WHEN SHE WAS HUNGRY.

Well you shouldn’t be that hungry if you’ve eaten three meals a day but I’ve not read all the thread yet. Were they not proper meals?

@Daylightsavingscrime it's in the opening post!

These were small portions even when she was a growing teenager.

She can see that she was skinny as a child and as a teenager.

But I think that’s the point PP was making - if someone is an alcoholic because their parents were alcoholics, you could also just tell them to stop drinking.
Does that make it easier for them?
Same with disordered eating - most people who are overweight know they would lose weight if they ate less, but sometimes certain behaviour patterns take time to overcome.
I think by trying to understand those patterns and where they come from, OP is doing something about the issue. It’s a first step.

OP, I hope you have read all the replies confirming that you ANBU. I wish you the best in moving forward from this.

I think a lot of the people waxing lyrical about the beautiful slim people of yesteryear forget how many people smoked, and this was their “snack”. It was not uncommon for women to be open about smoking as a way to control their weight.

I only ever had three meals a day growing up. It was the 60's/70's and there were never snacks in the house. Maybe some biscuits in case we had visitors but I would have got a smacked hand if I helped myself to them. No other children I knew could just help themselves to food whenever they felt like it and three meals a day was the norm.

JFC nobody is suggesting kids should have unfettered access to food. Not being starved and treated unfairly is a pretty low bar.

Does nobody even bother to read the opening post now?

This isn't about three meals vs three meals plus snacks!

This is about 3 small portioned meals with no opportunity to get more food.

This is about the OP going to bed hungry.

This is about parents controlling food so that OP would stay 'slim' when she can see that she was in fact skinny.

It sounds to me as though, because your parents regulated the food that you ate, you never learnt how to self regulate. I can relate somewhat to this. I also know a boy whose parents were very strict about his diet (no sugar, treats, chips, burgers etc at all. Not even on occasion). Now he's reached secondary school he's gone mad and gained weight.

It's hard though to ever get the balance right. Times change too and parental practices differ. There are all manner of experiences besides just our parents that contribute to how we are. We are bombarded constantly with marketing and messages. Mental health issues also lead to overeating. To lay the blame at your parents door is an over simplification. It also allows you to escape responsibility for your own overeating. Blaming others takes away your own control over a situation. By taking back responsibility you also get to take back control and do something about it.

It's far more constructive to look forward rather than to the past in most cases.

No it’s not normal we had the same kind of home life

I was on a diet from 3 been all different weights had eating disorders all my life and had a gastric sleeve last year due to how my mum treated me in regards to food I wasn’t massive when I had the op either even the surgeon said we don’t normally get your size in here

we weren’t allowed to eat after a certain time food was hidden constantly spoke to about diets I could go on but I won’t

It's far more constructive to look forward rather than to the past in most cases.

@TheSnakeCharmer This is avoidance. You cannot move forward in a healthy way until you accept and process what has happened to you. This is not dwelling on past trauma, it’s processing and integrating it so you can move forward without the same old patterns and problems cropping up.

Once again for the bad parents trying to minimise. It is NOT NORMAL or acceptable to regularly enforce hunger on a child. They were wrong to do so. No debate.

If you're trying to defend enforced hunger throughout childhood seek counselling. This is child abuse.

No bullshit about different eras makes enforced hunger acceptable. If they were too poor to buy food that's different. They weren't.

All eras allowed their kids to snack if they had access to food and were hungry. It's a lie to pretend otherwise.

Good parents make healthy snacks available for their children. Abusive arseholes enforce hunger and try to defend it.

No. The actual feeling of hunger doesn't harm anybody. It is a normal sensation that everybody should feel sometimes. If she was not underweight (and there's no evidence that she was), no harm was done. Hunger doesn't mean you're starving, it means your stomach is currently empty.

Some people have a very poor tolerance to the sensation of hunger. These people always think they are hungry, and are very prone to being overweight. If a parent never lets such children feel hungry, these children will simply be overweight or obese. This is unhealthy, and allowing your child to destroy their health is far closer to abuse, than practicing moderate food intake.

Children shouldn't be going to bed feeling hungry I don't know how anyone can try to justify that

All children are born intuitive eaters, their bodies know what they need. If they are hungry it’s because they need food. Overeating is caused by restriction, first externally by parents and later to themselves as adults due to a learnt mentality. Hence why dieting has been proven not to work long term.

I would disagree with this. Research suggests that once your metabolism is messed up from being overweight then you have to work harder than other people to keep weight off. Hence why people who were once obese and now a healthy weight need to dedicate a lot more time and energy into going to the gym and eating healthily. I was a slim and very active child and although I have eaten a lot of junk over the past ten years or so (and regularly have huge portions, lots of carbs etc) I have just about managed to stay in the healthy weight BMI zone and I believe this is due to my healthy childhood. Parents who have overweight kids are 100% causing long term challenges and health issues.

Your upbringing sounds grim. I was born in the sixties. We often started the day with porridge with milk and sugar. Lunch might be tinned spaghetti (it was the 60s after all) or a boiled egg with toast. Fruit eating as a snack was positively encouraged - kiwifruit or tamarillos soaked with sugar. Dinner was meat with vegetables and potatoes. There was always a pudding of sorts - maybe custard and stewed apples or a rice pudding or the dreaded sago. There would be a big Sunday roast dinner as well. My mother also baked cakes and slices.

This might have been humdrum cooking before my mother discovered garlic and proper pasta. Still we were never hungry and I grew up very slim and have largely stayed slim. So the idea that everybody in the old days ate three miserly meals a day with no snacks is not universal. Or that children with free access to food necessarily grow up fat. There was less ready made processed food of course and stuff like chocolate was fairly rare for us.

Most of my contemporaries had a similar upbringing and were on the thin side too.

Quite the opposite actually if you are enforcing hunger it will deprive them and make them seek out food secretly

your view on this really worries me. No one said the sensation of hunger is bad it’s a signal. A signal to eat

@slore you only had to read the second paragraph of the opening post:

I was so so skinny as a child and teenager and I don’t think it was particularly healthy.

That suggests underweight to me.

So many of our attitudes to food are set in childhood. Having no control over food, not being allowed to feel sated, going to bed feeling hungry. This creates lots of negative emotions around food. Feeding children is one of the ways we show them love. Depriving them of food may have felt like depriving love.

If @Jasminecandle can pull this out into the light she may then be more able to move forward.

It’s a balance. Feeling constant hunger is not right. But never feeling hunger is also not right. Some people seem to be afraid of ever feeling it.

Do you really think our neolithic ancestors ate five meals a day?

Also ‘meals’ are an arbitrary creation of modern-ish society. We should only eat when we’re hungry.

I imagine they grazed on whatever was available and gorged on the gluts.

Oh no, the horror! Snacking!