Some people eat a lot. Especially teenage boys, chubby or thin they are extra-hungry from growing.
My one sister had a teenage-boy-type growth spurt from 14-17 (went from 5’2" to 5’10") and she approached that level. Gallon of milk a day, large pizza to herself, etc. She still eats more than the average person, as does my other sister, and they are both very slim.
I’m 26 and I have been known to polish off two Chipotle burrito bowls in one sitting. Metabolism is a funny thing. Has to slow down sometime…
My mother, with three daughters, talks about the barbeque she had with a girlfriends family. Her girls and her friends three teenaged boys, plus two sets of parents makes for ten people. Ten people means four pounds of hamburger. Turns out four pounds of hamburger is not sufficient for three teenage boys, and no one else ate (I think we got the jello salad). It didn’t occur to the boys to take one hamburger and wait until everyone else had them - they were inhaled coming off the grill. And the boys were looking for more.
I think it was the last time my father allowed that family over for dinner.
Haha, yes. I have had three teenaged boys, so this I know. My youngest has scaled way, way back on the food since having his ADD med changed to amphetamine, and for that I am very grateful!
I was skinny as hell until about 25 years of age and always ate obscene amounts of food. I still can and would but I’ll get fat now. I’m 6’3 185 now. But in high school I was 6’3 and around 150!
My teenaged brother has been known to eat similar quantities though he eats worse quality (replace the ham sandwiches and chicken with an entire carton of moose tracks ice cream and a box of fruit snacks and you’re probably just about right.) Somehow, he still manages to weigh far less than I did at that age with a better diet and similar levels of excercise.
I think it’s fairly normal for teenaged boys to eat that way. I wouldn’t say all of them do, but for any given boy, it wouldn’t shock me if they did.
When I was a teen/early 20’s I used to go to McDonald’s and order a Big Mac, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Large Fries, and a Large Coke. This was my snack to hold me over between lunch and dinner. I was very active and never got over 130 lbs.
My family still laughs about how I once asked politely after finishing the three pork chops they gave me if anyone was going to eat the last six on the platter… they didn’t, I did.
Now I’m 50 and can’t finish an entree in most restaurants.
Quite normal. Sometime after meeting my future wife she took me to meet her parents at some family gathering. She had two sisters, and a 13 year old brother. She told me to make myself a sandwich in the kitchen where there a few cold cuts left on a platter. I made an ordinary sandwich. Shortly after that my love came to me upset because her mother asked why I ate all the cold cuts. I told her I made a sandwich and asked what the problem was. She said I had three pieces of meat and a piece of cheese, you only need one of those. I laughed and explained what I had was a small sandwich. Someone else listening in laughed also and said “That’s the way young men eat”. The discussion turned into an educational affair about how to make sandwiches and what boys eat. Her younger brother had the obvious look of gratitude, he had been starving trying to survive on girl’s sized servings.
Later my wife would recount the story of a family trip. Her mother used up a loaf of bread making baloney sandwiches. They didn’t know how they would pack them until my wife suggested putting them all back in the bag the bread came in. With just one slice of baloney between two slices of bread, they fit right back in that bag without a problem.
At one point a few years ago, I had three boys: two 16 year olds and one 15 year old . All three were playing sports in high school. In the 2 hours between getting out of school and dinner, the three of them would go through an entire loaf of bread and package of lunchmeat. Then they would sit down and have two full plates of food with the rest of the family. Ater dinner snacks were usually huge bowls of cereal and milk. It was amazing!
When I was around 12 I ate more than I do now as a 6’ 2", 220 lb man.
I remember eating a dozen hotdogs at a birthday party. I ate 28 pancakes for breakfast, once, but they were small, about the size of a DVD. I always remembered that because my birthday falls on the 28th of the month. I remember eating two pints of Haagen Daaz back to back. And a half dozen donuts before we left the parking lot. And I was a rail.
It takes a lot of fuel to turn little boys into large men over a handful of years.
I’ve read all the stories and all I can say is, WOW. It sounds like the cost of feeding a teenaged boy likely rivals your mortgage payments!
Oh, and yes, when I compared this kid’s eating to a starving wolf, it was only about the quantity. He had decent eating manners (like, used utensils, chewed with his mouth closed) and he didn’t snarl at us when we helped ourself to some of the food on the table.
Honestly, some of us girls wouldn’t have survived on those servings.
As a teenaged girl I once ate half a loaf of bread, an entire chicken, two potatoes, and a lot of carrots and green beans washed down with a half gallon of milk for a meal… but I was a *very *active teen age girl. And I still couldn’t match most of the boys in either appetite or capacity.
I was driven crazy by old biddies who tried to limit my eating to “ladylike” portions.
Active teens can eat incredible quantities of food.
As a teen I loved peanut butter on toast. I remember once standing in the kitchen between meals making slice after slice. I couldn’t get enough. By the time I decided to stop (not ‘had to’ - I could have gone on) I’d eaten ten slices. Then I had my dinner.
I wasn’t overweight, and nor am I tall.
I still love peanut butter on toast and I suspect I could repeat the feat now, but restrict myself to just one slice a day.
“Nava, you almost haven’t eaten any chicken!”
“Mom, I ate a chicken leg.”
“But you used to eat a whole chicken!”
“That’s when I was fifteen, Mom.”
FTR I’m female and at the time this conversation took place my then-teenaged bros would eat a chicken and change each - that’s after a first dish (say, something light such as spaghetti carbonara), plus salad and before dessert.
My wife and her sisters were very thin. I managed to get some meat on my wife’s bones eventually. Her sisters can still slide through a mail slot. Even for girls this seemed unnatural to me.
Totally normal for a teenaged boy. More if he’s doing sports. I used to put down upwards of 3200 calories as a 140 lb. 5’6" or 7" swimmer in my first year or so. It was probably closer to 4000 calories a day by the time I got my full growth. If I knew then what I know now about nutrition, it would have been better quality food, and possibly even more of it. I was still too skinny and could have used more fat and protein to put on muscle.
I work out fairly regularly now, and even at my age (late 30s) still need about 2400–2800 calories at my current weight. If I wanted to put on weight, I’d probably have to bump that to 3200+.
You’re kidding, right? Four pounds of hamburger before cooking is just barely enough for 10 people to have a single small hamburger apiece. Even if you’re saying a single quarter-pound hamburger (post cooking) per person, that’s pretty stingy. At a normal barbecue in my neighborhood as a kid, everyone would be expected to bring stuff — their own meat to grill, sides, etc. — but kids would be expecting to eat probably a couple burgers, couple hot dogs, piece of chicken, a kebab or two, plus sides. Even girls would eat a couple of different grilled items. As a teenaged boy, I could easily eat two of everything, no matter how many of everything there was. I don’t think I would ever have come back to your house for dinner if you’d invited me over and fed me so little.
Man, I feel so sorry for that kid. I’ll definitely bet he was glad you showed up that day. I’d feel like a cheap ass for making a sandwich with less than 4 slices of meat on it if I were serving a guest. My standard sandwich is 4–6 slices.
Me too! Me too! I used to make chocolate cookie dough, however much it says on the package of Toll House morsels, eat it, and then have dinner. (No point in baking the cookies, that’s just wasted time.) Can’t do that anymore. Although I still do like to have dessert before dinner.
It’s been hard for me, too, to get used to eating than I did in my youth. And part of it is because I still eat more than the average, but people still want me to eat like I was a teenager. Calm down, people.
FWIW, as a rail-thin (140 lbs. at 5’11") teenaged boy, I would drink a minimum of three liters of milk per day and inhale entire loafs of sliced bread with a half-inch of butter and cheese on top in one sitting. On occasion I’d ‘cook’ myself, and down 30 fishsticks and a kilo of fries for dinner. That’s 4.2 lbs. of solid food plus drinks, yet only a slice (heh) of the daily intake.
I already dread the days my 2-year-old son hits 13, budget-wise…
