Dopers overweight as children: What would you criticize your parents for?

In My Humble Opinion
21

My mother was a poor example for good health. She was morbidly obese and never ate anything but spaghetti, chili and Taco Bell unless we ate at my grandparents’, where my grandmother cooked a lot of fried foods and veggies in lard with sugar as much as salt. There was never any sort of physical activity, no encouraging me to try for any sport, and she started dying of congestive heart disease when I was 12, but lived until I was 25 without ever doing much other than a few extreme fad diets where she’d lose a little water weight and give up.

And guess what I’m like now at her age!

I can’t blame her for this, not completely. I am lazy and I eat bad things. But I do wonder if I’d been taught better habits from childhood like a few of my friends, if maybe I wouldn’t have this constant struggle with binging and such a low opinion of myself in general.

22

I was aware of the fact that I was fat at about age four or five. My dad put me on a diet around then. Yeah, that worked. He constantly nagged me about it from then on.

Do as I say, not as I do doesn’t work for eating habits on a five-year old. I think that if my parents had decided that the entire family was going to eat healthier, then it would’ve gone a lot better. That’s not how it went. I resent being told when I was 10-11 that I had to lose weight, or I couldn’t go to Disney World. My dad constantly went on about it, and, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that my mom’s occasionally calling me “tubs of fun” was not exactly kind, though she stopped that when I was quite young, and I chalk it up to “well, she was getting about three hours of sleep a night for four years.”

But, yeah. I resent basically being told at a super young age that I had to be the one to exercise willpower, and that, rather than finding healthy things I did like, I simply couldn’t have delicious things. My entire life, I had exactly one family member tell me that how I was was okay, and that I could be happy with it; that was my aunt who’s struggled with her weight her whole life. (I did have grandparents who never really addressed it, though my grandfather really told my dad off when he found out about the Disney World thing).

I also resent being put on a diet at that young of an age, and knowing that it was a diet. Because, you know what? I grew up not knowing what normal eating was like. Teaching myself that as an adult has been really freaking hard. It’d be so much easier if I could do that intuitively, rather than having to logic through everything.

So, basically, don’t treat them like crap, and lead by example, not by fiat.

23

It’s interesting that the negative responses by dopers are on both sides of the the line with

“I resent them for making me diet, stigmatizing me as fat, and telling me I needed to lose weight”

and

“I resent them for not realizing there was problem, and not helping me to exercise and diet”

24

I was always a skinny kid. Mostly because eating meant that my stepdad would notice me. When I went to grade school, it was amazing to me because I got a big plate of food and nobody touched me. At middle school, I didn’t eat during the day because I didn’t have money to buy a lunch ticket. High school…I was living in a car, and feeding my cat was more important to me than feeding myself.

I totally blame my birth mother for my current eating problems. I own my own home, I pay my own way, but that big white box in my kitchen is still scary. Eating means pain and humilation.

25

I noticed that too and that’s why I struggle with how a parent is supposed to help an overweight kid.

I’m also trying to reconcile all the stories in this thread with my own. I was a latchkey kid with detached parents, neither of whom knew a fresh vegetable if it had hit them in the face, both obese and inactive. I got a couple of cooking lessons, but they were in how to bake a chicken or fry porkchops. My father did most of the cooking, and let’s just say his meals were very creative. One of my favorite memories is being sent to the store to buy a bottle of Nehi to serve with dinner. Blue. Daddy always mandated that it had to be blue! And he’d often run up to the Krispy Kremes and bring back a dozen of hot glazed. Almost every Sunday we’d go for a ride around town and stop by the Zestos for ice cream cones on the way home. My mother slept when she should have been making sure we were eating breakfast and not packing crap for lunch. I remember eating a big bowl of cold spaghetti, coagulated grease and all, for breakfast more than a few times. I grew up thinking families having sit-down breakfasts every morning was a TV invention.

And yet neither me or any of my siblings turned out fat.

So it’s confusing.

26

I was a fat kid who turned into an obese high schooler, who dropped about 60 pounds in college as a result of a combination of diet, racquet sports, and what I would in retrospect qualify as an overly critical disdain of my weight.

My family is all fat. They eat badly and too much. They’ve convinced themselves that so long as food is made at home, it cannot POSSIBLY be bad for you in anyway, despite the fact that we make our own sausages, and fry next to EVERYTHING.

Now that I’m the active, thin one in the family, I try to impart my healthy eating habits on everyone, but instead it’s become “**Antonio **the nag” who finds hidden potato chips and nutella and Ice Cream bars all over the house…

I cook dinner as often as possible to try and mediate what they eat, but it’s BEYOND frustrating to try and fix people you love who don’t care enough about their health to try anything. I already went down this road with my dad’s smoking, so I guess I’m used to it by now!

27

Dealing with overweight kids does seem to be a very tough issue, and I have no idea what I would do if I had a kid who was gaining weight. I don’t have kids and I’m not really planning to, but I have actually thought about this before without coming to an actual conclusion.

I was a pudgy kid and teenager (although far from obese) and my mother focused a lot of attention on my weight. Everyone else in my family was thin and athletic, while I preferred more sedate activities like reading and drawing. My mom signed me up for every sport under the sun, monitored my eating very carefully, and tried to encourage me to lose weight with little rewards and stuff. She made good homecooked meals and there was seldom pop or candy in the house. I hated the sports and dropped out as soon as possible, snuck food when she wasn’t looking, and resented the fact that she bought bathroom scales specifically for me (and tried to make that seem like a treat).

After I left home I gained a lot of weight with my new-found freedom (hello freshman 15, plus more) and while things are under control now I was pretty heavy for a while there. For a long time I resented my mom because I felt that she had put me on that path (and damaged my self esteem doing it), but eventually I came around to seeing that she wanted me to be healthy and active and she was doing that the best way she knew how. I don’t think she did all the right things, but her intentions were good.

If I was a parent I’m not sure what I would do. Encouraging your kids to go out and do stuff and providing them with healthy food seem like obvious choices. But I don’t know what you do with kids who dislike exercise or are sneaky with food. I don’t know how you control their weight without giving them the idea that your making a value judgment on their appearance. I guess I’d say the biggest mistakes my parents made were in making weight the focus instead of just general health, and in controlling food to the point that us kids were never making our own choices or learning self control.

28

There’s also (IMO) a timing issue here that unless you start kids REAL early (toddler stage even) proper diet and exercise will not become ingrained habits. In many cases you really don’t know if kids are going to be tending to be obese until they are getting into their adolescence and early teens and that is way too late to try and change ingrained eating and exercise habits. Any parent taking on a weight loss and exercise program for a kid older than 7 or 8 is going to have a long term battle royale on their hands.

29

OK, so let’s get down to healthy ways you could help these kids? One thing would be to take them to your local mega produce market (Whole Foods or Wegmans in my area) and let them try out different kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables. Let them pick out one of each kind of apple, orange, plum, each color of grape, etc. Get them a parsnip and some carrots and a rutabaga, and some purple potatoes, and the little red bananas.

Experimenting and finding fresh fruits and vegetables that they do like could make all the difference for them.

Also, just taking a walk with them whenever possible. This serves the double goal of getting some easy comfortable exercise, and getting them talking with a trusted adult. If they are stuffing emotions through food, there is probably a lot that needs to come out.

Too often parents think about which foods to take away, instead of helping kids get excited about healthy foods. And they rush them into desperate spurts of painful out-of-breath exercise, which does no good in burning fat, and reinforces to kids that video games are better.

30

I remember one time our mother made us cream of wheat for breakfast. With a side of toast.

How many carbs do you want with your carbs, yo?

31

I want to point out that a kid doesn’t have to be eating a LOT more to become obese: an average of 100 excess calories a day results in ten pounds of fat over a year, and ten pounds of fat is a lot on a little kid. After five years, that’s 50 extra pounds.

So if you have two kids who have the same metabolisms, weigh the same at 5, and eat the exact same things except one kid gets a granola bar in their lunch every day and the other kid doesn’t, or one gets a glass of 2% milk or juice before bed and the other gets sugar-free kool-aid or water–well, the first day of kindergarten, they look the same. The last day of 4th grade, there is a 50 lb difference.

32

Cinnamon-sugar toast.

33

The fact that this is considered a radical idea is why we have so much obesity in our country. Of course you shouldn’t have junk food in the house when you have kids! You really shouldn’t have junk food in the house, period. The type of processed crap Americans eat as a matter of course is killing us.

34

I so wish we could do an experiment like this. Damn human research ethics committees!

I have wondered about one thing. I’ll often hear about schools allotting time for snacks in the afternoon. I remember snack time in kindergarten. Graham crackers and juice, provided by the school. But after you hit first grade, all that stopped. At least where I went to school it did.

Are snacks really that necessary? At least for older kids? I mean, I remember being hungry when I would get home from school, but that was because I would have to take an hour-long bus ride home. Hunger wouldn’t sent in until after that. I could see how eating a small something-something would be necessary then. But I’d be fine after the first couple of hours after lunch. So if a kid has lunch around noon, are they really going to go into hypoglycemic shock if they don’t have another small meal before 3:00 (or whenever school lets out?) That’s just two-three hours. And if they aren’t doing PE as much as they used to, then that seems like even more unnecessary consumption of calories.

It seems like parents today are constantly going on and on about the importance of snacks. Nutritional or otherwise, it just seems weird to me because it wasn’t like that when I was growing up (in the 80s).

But I guess it’s not just a generational thing because I see a couple of people around my age stopping for snack breaks (not junk food but not light fare either). I guess I’m just never hungry enough, but I’m also thin and they are not.

35

Enjoying reading this.

I worry about my daughter- I mean she’s only 2, and a tiny little thing, but irishfella and I are diametrical opposites in terms of weight and attitudes to diet.

I come home from work and make a nice meal, and for me it might be all I eat that day, bar a scone and a few cups of tea. Irishfella, meanwhile, will have had breakfast, lunch, and a snack as well.

I’m slim, he’s overweight (but working on that).

I’m fine letting irishbaby eat whatever she wants at the moment, which, thankfully, is mostly oatmeal, fruit and toast with peanut butter. She eats with us at dinner, and gets whatever she doesn’t eat that evening for lunch the next day.

I think irishfella’s idea of healthy eating (which is basically to cut out unhealthy food) is going to be easier to work with a child than mine (which is to eat whatever you like, but in moderation).
What do you think?

36

I think Americans snack too much. To look at some of us, you’d think we were ruminants. Always chewing on something. Grazing on popcorn, nuts, crackers, chips, granola, grapes, seeds, all day. Yeah, some nutrition experts say we should have 6 small meals or whatever, but come on. The majority of us are sitting on our asses all day. Do we really need a near-continuous influx of calories just to type emails, fiddle with spreadsheets, and read reports?

IMHO, snacking trains you to be want more food than you need by stimulating your appetite. Mindless eating then becomes a habit. Snacks become a solution to a self-created problem, and that problem is psychosomatic hunger. Life would be much easier if that hunger wasn’t there in the first place.

Kids, from a young age, need to be taught the difference between true hunger and false hunger caused by boredom, habit, the yearning for something tasty, or emotional stress. When the house is stocked with junk food, it makes it that much more easy for kids to confuse true and false hunger, because junk food is desirable regardless.

37

Nothing.

38

I’ve debated whether to answer this or not, because I really wasn’t overweight as a kid, but my mother treated me as though I was. I was a sturdy kid - muscular, and larger than my siblings - but I absolutely wasn’t fat. However, my mother absolutely obsessed about my weight (and mine only,) making me grow up thinking I was fat.

In hindsight, I recognize that my mother truly wished that someone had educated her about nutrition and helped her with weight control when she was a kid, and she was projecting that on me. What she viewed as “helpful hints and mindfulness,” though, came across as nagging and criticism… It was really common to hear the question “Are you sure you really need an extra helping?” at dinner time - directed only at me. My brother could and did eat like a field hand, and looked absolutely emaciated through most of our childhoods. Even if I had been engaging in the same strenuous activities as my brother, he was encouraged to eat more and more, and I was encouraged to watch my weight. (To be fair to my mother, yes, I did tend to put on more fat than my brother. But to be fair to me, this became the dinnertime refrain more and more as I was becoming a teenager - when I was supposed to be putting on more body fat!)

As a result of the nagging, I became the kid who sneaked food, felt fat, and felt terrible about myself. I look back and realize now that I was a normal, healthy weight, even though I wasn’t a size zero. A muscular size 10 - which now seems to be called a 6 or 8, thanks to vanity sizing in the women’s fashion industry - not supermodel material, but at my height, absolutely healthy. Yes, I was larger and weighed more than my sister, but I was also 7 inches taller, and just overall built larger! (Her - 5’2", 105 to 110 pounds. Me 5’9", 140 pounds. She was a ballerina. I played drums in the marching band and moved furniture for my after-school job. Yeah, I felt like a huge blob when compared to Miss Tiny and Perfect!)

Fast-forward to now: I have two children at home who are old enough to be aware of their weights. My son is overweight. My daughter isn’t. As a result of my own sensitivity about how my mother treated me as a kid, I try not to nag about weight. My son realizes he weighs too much, and I try to cook healthy meals and keep healthy snacks around, and I don’t buy soda. I also don’t let my daughter tease the boy about his weight - home should be a place safe from attack and bullying. All I can really do is model healthy behavior - I can’t manage my son’s weight for him…

39

Juice. I should have mentioned juice. It really has next to no nutitional value, and yet parents in the USA are trained to believe it’s the be-all end-all of nutrition.

Teaching kids to default to water when they are thirsty and treat soda and juice as desserts can make a huge difference.

The same with sugary cereals. Celtling does have her own box of cinnamon toast crunch cereal, and it’s one of the choices for dessert after dinner.

40

what I would criticize for:

weaning early onto food (and not just food, but bacon, jam, and CAKE at 4-6 months - I was horrified when I saw the notes my mom had from the Dr) - although OTOH it’s hard to criticize for this one, because it’s what our doctor said to do.

not investigating other reasons for the sudden significant weight gain (I was being sexually abused)

ridiculing me, when we were alone, in front of family, in front of friends, on vacations, and family days out

putting me on fad diets and crash diets, and having my older brother police it when she wasn’t around.

when I wasn’t on a fad diet or a crash diet, having me as an accomplice in her eating. Yeah, a donut and muffin and coffee (double cream, and double sugar) is a great breakfast on the way to school/work daily. As is that cinnamon bun for lunch, if it’s the only thing you eat.

Reality is, I have insulin resistance. I do best on a low carb, high protein diet. It’s hard enough doing that when you have a sweet tooth, even harder when you have no control over what food you have available.