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?

Quite. If everyone ate when hungry, ate slowly and stopped when satisfied, few of us would be overweight.

FIVE? If I ate five meals a day, I would be a perfect sphere.

That's brilliant then. The whole issue of childhood trauma and eating disorders solved in three simple and easy steps. Everyone else must be so stupid not to have grasped this. 🤔

Some sounds of its time. I’m older but 3 meals, tea at 5pm was norm. No just helping self to food. We would have been allowed supper eg a cream cracker with dairylea though.
Rules on sweet stuff I’d never have been allowed 2 cakes or two chocolate biscuits.
Sharing was normal. My mum calls a normal sized bar of chocolate a big block of chocolate and would share it, likewise sharing a can of pop or a bag of crisps.
If it was more extreme than the norm for its time maybe?
I’d focus on health now and eat in a way that’s mindful to your past eg if you can’t cope with feeling hungry due to past then eat lots of protein, volume eating etc.

Born in late 80s, I'm the youngest of four.

We had three meals per day and a snack at 4pm. We weren't allowed downstairs after dinner, which normally finished around 6:30/7pm.

One of my siblings has a massive eating issue. Three of us do not. Do adult food issues stem from childhood eating habits? I think it just depends on the person

In terms of how ‘skinny’ you were look at old school class photos. Most children were a lot thinner years ago. I know if I look back the couple of children in class who were seen as plump would be normal now.
It was also very much norm to say things like you are having tea in an hour, we’ll get lunch at home. I can’t recall ever really being bought food out and about unless it was a set treat like an icecream on holiday.

They would have grazed through the day when able if food was around.
Humans are not meant to eat 3 large meals a day every day. 5 smaller meals is far preferable

Then your meals are way too large and processed.
By meal, I would mean 1 egg and veg / tomatoes / mushroom and a small amount of meat or fish.

Or 1/2 chicken breast sliced with salad and some plain yoghurt with berries.

Or a 1 egg omlette.

Or 3 oat biscuits with some slices of cheese and cucumber.

My parents (mostly my Mum) had similarly strict rules around food. It's only quite recently that I realised that we were hungry pretty much all the time.

I had a very bad habit of eating paper, either tearing the margins off any book I was reading or eating tissues or (unused) toilet roll. This continued until my late twenties when I just stopped overnight. In hindsight it was a habit developed to satisfy an empty stomach and when I gradually got used to not being hungry all the time I was able to leave the habit in the past. My brothers school nickname was GeeDee short for garbage disposal because he could be relied to finish everyone else's unwanted school dinners and packed lunches.

with mum I think the rules were mainly cost cutting measures because money was tight and they were saving for a house deposit. But I also think she had undiagnosed EO herself and saw extreme portion control as morally superior to having satisfying amounts of food.

Unlike @Jasminecandle I didn't develop eating issues myself but many years later, in her early twenties my daughter did. It lead to a permanent rift between my daughter and my mum because when DD was in recovery my mum would persist in asking her for advice on how to eat less and lose weight. This despite DD and I repeatedly telling her this was dangerous and distressing for DD as she struggled to recover from AN. In the end DD avoided seeing her granny without me or her sister present as Mum wouldn't start those conversations when we were around . It was sad because they were close before then.

I’d forgotten that I used to eat tissues and paper! And I used to sneak into the art room at break time (it was a separate small building in the playground) and eat clay 🤮

Not eating issues - eating tissues - sorry op but it made me giggle

Neither do I yet here they all are, telling the OP how "lucky" she was to have had parents who deprived her of food and kept her skinny, because skinny is better than anything.

It's really depressing.

I use to eat paper because I wasn't allowed gum. My mum caught me and then I was allowed gum.

BTW If you were eating clay are you sure you weren't anaemic?

"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels"

And if you had read to her later posts, she admits that she was never measured as underweight, she's just going by her appearance as a child.

I was underweight as a child due to poor digestion. I can assure you that if she was clinically underweight, she would have been told about it (and blamed for it) at every single doctors appointment, and every single time the school nurse weighed her. There's no way in hell she would have been clinically underweight without her knowing.

She's just a typical overweight person who thinks that healthy weight looks painfully thin.

I was underweight as a child due to poor digestion. I can assure you that if she was clinically underweight, she would have been told about it (and blamed for it) at every single doctors appointment, and every single time the school nurse weighed her. There's no way in hell she would have been clinically underweight without her knowing.

I was never weighed as a child. I rarely went to the doctors and was never weighed by a school nurse. I don't think I knew what I weighed until I was an adult.

🤣🤣🤣are you suggesting they sat down for 3? Yes at least 5, probably grazing much more.

@shore School nurse in the 80s & 90s? Long gone from my experience! I was at school in the 70s and 80s and wasn't weighed at school. DCs were at school in the early 2000s and they weren't weighed at school either.

Perfectly possible to be underfed and it go unnoticed at school if the family didn't otherwise stick out as being a problem.

Possibly you were being weighed regularly because of the digestive issue.

In the late 50s there were nit nurses knocking about and weekly swimming lessons for primary school kids even in the dark satanic mills of the NW - someone would have noticed emaciated kids even then

We had a school nurse in the 90s. We were weighed and had our heights taken with some regularity. I was always told I was underweight by the nurse, and just about everyone I encountered would comment how little of me there was, but that's as far as it ever went. There was no intervention and I never got fed more.

You're lucky to get that I was lucky to get two meals a day. Sometimes I didn't eat anything I was too busy going out to think about food. I weighed at 5ft 4in just under 8 stone I was underweight. I made up for it later I love food now a little too much.

Sorry for entering your Zombie 🧟‍♀️ thread

I weighed 3 stone age 11, I think that is far too light and no one noticed/ said anything, this was in the 90s - 00s

I have no idea what I weighed at that age, but we were a very slim family, to the extent that more than once people hinted my Mum wasn't feeding us enough. She was very shy and found those comments so hurtful.

3 stone seems very light and I'm sorry no one cared enough about you to look into why you were so small. That's about the size of an average 5 year old.

They started the national schools weighing thing in mid 00s I think, so you were too early for that.