Sorry if I was unclear. She WANTED to eat huge quantities of food, and very easily would have if I let her, but I certainly didn’t. I made very sure she stayed at a healthy weight. But once she was in high school, she quickly discovered that she was able to pig out away from home, or at home when no one was watching. I stopped giving her allowance because she would run out the door to 7-Eleven to buy junk food - the entire allowance. I’m a cook, and a good one, and she detests any food that’s good for you, and only likes crap like macaroni & cheese, pizza, bread, etc. She can eat more at a meal than any three people put together, and is “hungry” again in an hour or 2. I haven’t been able to serve pasta at home for years because she only eats the noodles and slips the meat and vegetables to the dog.
My pediatrician says she sees this in her practice. Some kids are abnormally obsessed with food from the earliest age. In Frank Bruni’s autobiography, he relates how as a baby, he became hysterical when his mother wouldn’t give him a third hamburger in a row. No “normal” baby can eat that much. You or I just can’t.
Have you heard of Prader-Willi Syndrome? It’s a chromosomal condition whereby parents have to literally chain their refrigerators shut to keep their kid from stuffing themselves uncontrollably. (Insatiable hunger is only one of many symptoms, including mental retardation and very little muscle tone.) It’s thought that “People with PWS have a flaw in the hypothalamus part of their brain, which normally registers feelings of hunger and satiety. While the problem is not yet fully understood, it is apparent that people with this flaw never feel full; they have a continuous urge to eat that they cannot learn to control. To compound this problem, people with PWS need less food than their peers without the syndrome because their bodies have less muscle and tend to burn fewer calories.”
The point is that I believe that someday the cause of “everyday” obesity will be better understood as having a physical cause, not just a weak character. (Such as being gay is now considered to a physiological imperative, not a lifestyle choice.) Some people can successfully fight the this abnormal compulsion to overeat, but many can’t.
And, again, I recommend reading Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s not a fad book or a diet book. He’s a science journalist who spent 7 years researching the supporting data from nearly every diet study done since the 1800s, trying to determine what makes us fat. Very eye-opening book.