I really agree with everything JayEll said above. The mom in question sounds like she is probably depressed; not to mention, at that weight and on that sort of diet, she is undoubtedly feeling constantly out of energy, exhausted, irritable, foggy-headed, achey, and hopeless simply due to the biochemistry of eating that way. She sits all day because that is all she feels physically capable of doing; and the honest truth is that she is probably only capable of doing about 5 minutes of continuous activity of any kind (even just standing), at the moment.
People who are depressed and miserable don't need judgment, nagging, and haranguing. None of those things will help them feel supported enough to start even considering change. Expressing unconditional love and acceptance toward them, however, sure can't hurt.
On another note...I spent a few years being pretty alienated from my mom, in my 30s. Eventually we reconciled, due to her drawing me back in with loving actions. Now that she is in the process of dying from pancreatic cancer, oh how I wish I had those years to do over. I was stupid to neglect her and take her beautiful presence in the world for granted. I will always regret those lost years in our relationship...always.
Parents aren't perfect, not by a long shot. But often, they're doing the best they really can. They need love and forgiveness too.
Reading your post as an outsider to your situation, I actually felt a lot of sympathy for your mom (and therefore my mom). You know, people do the best they can and cope the best they can. We can only see their external actions and do not know their internal feelings or struggles. You see your mom eat ice cream but you can not see the sadness, fear, hopelessness, frustration, etc. that cause her to do it. I bet she punishes herself every time she opens the freezer for not knowing how to break the cycle.
Anyways, I am not judging you or saying not to be frustrated/vent. Lord knows, I have a lot of issues with my mom and upbringing.
I agree with Beach Patrol. I also went through a stage of blaming my parents. I was five years old when I became fat, and I was put on my first diet in kindergarten - it had to be their fault, right?
So very wrong. They could have "bad" food around the house - and I was the only one who would gorge on it (even though they both had food issues. Dad was skinny and could eat whatever he wanted - and did. Mom was overweight and couldn't always control her eating).
My parents sound a lot like yours (Creepy how much). As a child, it seemed like my dad (skinny) was the "nice" and sane parent, and my mother (overweight) was the "mean" and crazy one.
As I'm older I now realize Dad is passive-aggressive. Nothing is ever his fault, he's "just trying to help...." yet he feeds into and even aggravates my mom's irrationalities (including her short temper, and her poor eating habits).
My mom uses food for comfort, because she's afraid of almost everything else that would take her out into the world. She has social phobias (fears people will think she's stupid) and I suspect has depression or bipolar issues (though when I suggest she talk to her doctor about it, I'm just the over-educated psychologist daughter telling her she's crazy).
Some of my food issues were learned from my parents, but they did the best that they could, and I have to accept that (even if sometimes I regret that their best "wasn't good enough").
My mom has made progress (she lost about 80 lbs with weight watchers and has kept 60 off. She still has "bad habits" that sometimes frustrate me, but it's a lot easier to blame her than to look at my own issues (especially without blaming her for them).
My parents have four kids. The oldest two (my brother and I) were adopted (not biologically related). The youngest two (our two sisters) are my parents' bio-kids. I am the only one who was ever obese (or even for that matter, overweight) as children. My youngest sister has my mom's personality and my dad's physiology (maintains a healthy weight, easily). My other sister is the reverse. She's quite (and sometimes passive-aggressive) like Dad, and her weight has followed mom's pattern (thin until late 20's and then gradually adding weight in her hips and butt, only starting to becoming overweight in her 30's).
My mom's problem foods and mine are carbohydrates. I do think to a degree that I learned this from my parents, but I think to a much larger degree it's genetic. Because on the spectrum, my mom can control herself around "bad" foods to a greater degree than I can.
The more I read, the more I believe that high-carbohydrate foods have immense "addiction" potential. I'd beg you to read "The End of Overeating" and then pass it on to your mother. "Refuse to Regain" is another book that
changed my perception on what is needed to really lose weight and maintain the loss.
It's taken me 4 years just to get 80 lbs off. I will never be able to keep high sugar foods in my house. Because my history is so different from my parents and their bio-families, I don't think that is their fault. I think I probably inherited the potential for carb-addiction. Learned or inherited though, blame doesn't have to enter the equation (If you can blame your mom, I'm sure she can blame hers).
Good luck to you both. This isn't an easy journey no matter how it became necessary.
I do want to be able to have those things in my home, because i just want my kids to learn "hey its ok to have this as long as its in moderation". My DH grew up in a house like that and I look at their family and wow! the twin sisters we're models, the brother could be a model, the mom and dad are healthy weights, one of the twins is a nutritionist, they all seem to have a great idea of how food is and that its OK to have garbage but ONLY in small amounts.
I want my kids to learn self control, its taken me a few years to just KNOW what portion sizes are.. i have control i dont need to eat the junk food but its good to know i can and just have a small portion. Not only that they will be faced with going to friends houses and parties where i'm not there to stop them saying "it isnt our treat night you can't have that" I just want them to think to themselves "ok, i can have some but ill just have this much" and feel satisfied with it.
I just have to put this out there, I do see my moms sadness, i do see her hopelessness, frustration... All of it.. I see it. I just know the reason its there, SELF INFLICTED.. I know the reasons she is sad/depressed because she reminds me almost every F'ing day. Blames EVERYONE but herself. It comes down to some family issues, that SHE inflicted. She just continues to blame anyone around her, if she isnt happy she tries to drag others down..
I used to think to myself. "oh poor mom.. etc etc" I dont anymore, because i see what she does with the people around her. I just feel sorry i guess for her in someway, i figure she is eating to deal with her guilt.
If I were a parent, that would really motivate me. Not.
Jay
I went on to say that it doesn't work, and that I do it out of frustration and anger. I'm not perfect and everybody knows that when it comes to parents it's not unusual to revert back to your immature self when dealing with them. I don't know why you quoted just those words but they were taken out of context and I didn't write them as a solution, I was just sharing an experience.
And why shouldn't I be angry? Maybe you don't have the same experience but it is infuriating to see somebody hurting themselves by over eating, doing drugs, drinking, or any other kind of self affliction.
I want to throw something out there. Everyone is coming to this thread with different parental experiences. Some people are suggesting love and compasion while others don't feel as forgiving of thier parents actions. I'll speak for myself when I say that my mother's daily couch sitting, unemployed, complaining, wallowing in self pity, always playing the victom, eating junk all day habits disgusted me, but so did everything else about her. It doesn't come from me being judgmental of people that are depressed (as she likely was) or binge eating (because I binge eat!) but my disgust for a woman that mentally and physicially abused me. She could have built Rome and I would have still hated her.
I agree with you, Glamour. It's not that this random person is/does x,y, or z. It's that this woman is your mom and has done x,y, and z TO YOU as a child or even now as an adult. Very personal and emotionally-charged subject matter. Bringing up a lot of emotions I have about my mom. They run the gamut.
To be honest, it's also bringing up crap about myself b/c I fit the unemployed, do nothing, binge-eating names you guys are hurling at your moms. But believe me, I will press on with my journey.
The fact that your mom has tried and failed commercial dieting plans means she is aware of her problem and has tried to deal with it. I do believe that compulsive overeating, especially processed foods, can be an addiction in the same way that drugs and alcohol are, and that it is just as dangerous of an addiction. Addictions can be immobilizing. Your mom sitting around eating ice cream all day is like an alcoholic sitting around drinking whiskey all day. If she was an alcoholic your dad probably would not be bringing gallons of booze in the house so he could have one drink. That seems almost like a passive-aggressive act to me, on his part. If she could stop the binge eating, she would get out of the fog and probably do more things. But the point is try not to be angry at her as she has a real illness and needs professional help, not in the form of commercial diets but therapy or OA.
You remind me of myself as a daughter of an alcoholic. You feel pity but also anger....this is normal! You also have to learn how to be supportive but not enabling of the addiction. You might want to check out the Alanon or Co-Dependent sites -- no matter what the addiction, people living with a self-destructive family member have the same feelings and challenges. These support groups really helped me as a teenager living in an alcoholic environment and today my dad has been recovered 20 years, he has been a HUGE help to me in my adult life, happy endings are not uncommon once the family gets a true picture of what they are dealing with and how to deal with it.
Well, worst part is... dad never does that, he did it once in about a year... otherwise? its mom that brings it home... she can't go into a store with out buying garbage.
*So really he is the good guy, im not going to go into detail about it, but yes he is passive agressive, i would be too putting up with what he does.. *
Thanks guys for all of your input, its a real touchy subject for alot of people, not just myself! thats for sure.
Luciddepths, I just wanted to say that I totally get what you mean about having the junk food in the house and teaching your children self control.
It wouldn’t be doing your future children any favors by raising them in a completely junk food free home…they wouldn’t have any opportunities to LEARN the self control, to learn to treat themselves in moderation. The real world of food (with it’s McDonalds and Ben&Jerrys and Oreos and 24 hour supermarkets every 10 miles) would be overwhelming and full of temptation they would not be prepared to handle. This is my honest opinion, so please, no flogging lol.
I remember going to friends houses in high school and marveling at the fact that there was a brand new package of Chips Ahoy sitting in the pantry and no one was begging for a cookie or sneaking a cookie or eating a cookie…really, that the package sat unopened for five minutes was a wonder to me. I was envious. My friends seemed more concerned with painting their toenails than stuffing their faces. Me? The exact opposite. I definitely think that the way I was raised, the relationship I witnessed my mother and grandmother having with food, affected me. Yes, I made my own choices, but who was it that let my five year old self overeat to the point of sickness? Who was it that stood in the kitchen moaning and groaning over how amaaaazzzzing the banana pudding was and then after eating half the dish, moaning and groaning about how disgusting they were? My mother, my grandmother, sometimes even my uncles and other relatives. I did not come into this world ready to eat a family size bag of cheetos…sure, there are genetics at play…but I don’t believe for a second that’s all.
I am actively teaching my own son self control. He doesn’t have a weakness for sugar like I do, but a deep fondness for salty, carby snacks…pretzels, chips, crackers, etc. He could easily overeat these items…but that doesn’t mean I keep them away from him or out of the house.
It may seem strange for someone with two psych degrees (bachelor's and masters degrees) to say, but I think there's a much stronger genetic component than people are willing to acknowledge.
I tried for almost 40 years to "learn self control," and to understand "why" I had such a problem with overeating and portion control. I was looking for psychological explanations, overlooking physiological ones because I didn't think they could possibly be nearly as important.
I believed more than anyone that my binge and overeating problems were mental. I thought I overate because of the bad habits I learned from my family, and in response to emotional abuse from my mother - but that doesn't really explain why only I had childhood overeating and obesity issues. Why I stole and snuck food and my other siblings did not (one 18 months younger than I, one 14 years younger, and one 16 years younger).
I hated my mother for her lack of control, and I hated myself for my lack of control, and I blamed her for my lack of control (though my siblings raised in the same household, under the same conditions didn't have that lack of control. My sisters, if anything were raised in a worse environment, as my mother's depression has worsened through the years. Every year she is more and more negative).
As I said, I spent the better part of four decades trying to learn self-control. I thought I needed to be able to have the trigger foods in the house. I never considered the physiological issues, and only started losing weight permanently when I finally started believing that physiology could be a significant factor.
I learned that I was not eating out of emotions - what I was eating was causing the emotions (when I first read that this was possible, I thought it was the craziest theory I'd ever heard). Then I learned it was true for me. When I eat very few high-carbohydrate foods I don't have the moodswings or the tendency to be emotional and irrational. The lower carb I eat, the more sane I am.
I've come to believe that humans were never meant to eat high-carb foods as a regular part of the diet. No one needs to have high-sugar or high-starch foods around the house just to practice self-control. You don't need cocaine, alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, or lottery tickets around the house to practice self-control either.
Keeping junk food in the house, is no more or less a model of self-control than is keeping the stuff out of the house (even if you do occasionally "go out" for such treats).
Self-control around some foods may be as much, or even more a genetic response than a learned one. Adoption studies show that children of alcoholics are more likely to become alcoholic even if they are raised in an alcohol-free or a low-alcohol environment. The adoptive parents "modeling self-control," doesn't seem to be very effective in decreasing the the likelihood of the adoptive child becoming an alcoholic. The predisposition towards alcoholism may be mostly genetic.
The obesity research suggests that same is probably true of obesity. Adoptions studies have shown that children's weights correlate much more strongly with their bio-parents as their adoptive parents. It would suggest that biology seems to play a large role, perhapes even more so than environment. At the very least, it appears to be a much stronger influence than ever thought.
Learned helplessness can be an overwhelming factor. Having dieted for decades without success, I often struggled with feeling helpless and hopeless. People in my life I'm sure where frustrated and angry that I wasn't helping myself. In my experience though, dieting only made me fatter, so I was terrified of starting another diet only to end up larger.
If I hadn't discovered that my problems with carbs was physiological, I have no doubt that my weight would have only gotten higher and higher. Even once I understood the problem, it's still extremely difficult to manage it. Though I wonder how well a heroine addict would do if they were encouraged to keep it in the house to learn self-control... if every restaurant and grocery store sold it... if friends and family pushed it "just on special occasions", and if every other television commercial advertised it.
Sadly, there's a whole lot more empathy for drug-addiction in our culture than food addiction. Food addiction is dismissed as a moral character flaw more so than a physical addiction (even though the clinical research has found that the same areas of the brain are affected. Even some of the drug-addiction and even obesity genes have been identified).
just a general thought after reading the posts here...
Being 56...a father...a son....I know that when you are young you want to believe your parents are in control...can take care of you...responsible citizens...
But that is not always the case...people come form many-many situations....some they can control and some they can't....
people...parents...make wrong decisions all the time....
always have and always will...but one thing is for sure....
and always will be.....
For every second you spend being negative or having negative thoughts about your parents....your situation.....your life....
you lose the opportunity to do something good for you...your parents...your situation....your future.
Hey thats ok, i take it as no stab you said it just like a dad would I appreciate that.
I understand what you mean I agree with the last part for sure
I just have to make it clear though, i know my parents make mistakes, i do too everyone does. I've never thought my parents were in control and if i did i was under the age of 15 when i thought it. i watch them lose control all the time.
I appreciate that. 
