I don’t “blame” anyone for my issues with weight or food.
However, I do attribute some of my habits and weaknesses to environmental and genetic factors. It is almost impossible for a child who grows up being comforted with food, rewarded with food, punished by having it taken away and taught how to cook everything in grease to turn into a veggie loving yoga freak. It’s just true. I live in the South and not to stereotype or make generalizations; people here tend to be food oriented. We celebrate and grieve with food, we show love with food. I grew up eating chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes with heaps of butter, candied yams with marshmallows, pot roast, pie, macaroni…the list goes on and on.
No one ever talked to me about healthy foods vs. unhealthy foods. No one ever warned me that even though I was a pretty skinny kid, my metabolism would slow down as I got older and I would need to watch what I ate. My weakness is food because it reminds me of home and makes me feel safe and comforted.
However, it is all my choice. I make every single decision when it comes to what goes in my mouth. I know the rules and I choose to follow or break them every day. I have plenty of resources and know how to use them. I’m a grown up now, it’s all me.
The large majority of my immediate family is…well, large. Most have diabetes and are significantly overweight. So there are so genetic factors at play here.
I think unless I was bedridden and was being force fed a bad diet and overfed, I couldn't blame anyone but myself. No one in my immediate family had weight issues, and I didn't until I was middle aged, so my eating habits had been in my own control for years. In fact, I radically changed my diet myself after leaving home. I started eating whole grains and was even vegan for a while.
My sweet tooth was certainly fed well as a child, but again, all of this was given with love. We had sports programs, but fitness and exercise wasn't a priority, but we had lots of outside playtime. Overall, I think they did a great job, and made no more mistakes than any caring parent would make since no one is perfect. I love them dearly to this day.
It sounds from here too that even people whose parents had lots of difficulties with good parenting have made their peace as adults, and have moved on into a better relationship.
I say kuddos to the young woman who joined weight watchers at 17 and learned how to eat better while still young. That was soooo brave and adult at an age when many wouldn't fell they could take that control over their lives.
What an amazing group of women (and men) come to this group, I am in awe and love learning from your experiences. I am inspired, so will go out for a nice cross country ski and hot yoga to celebrate.
While it would be easy to blame my mother for my weight and my issues with food, it's not at all helpful.
She didn't gain the weight for me, and she can't lose it for me either. Blaming her makes it seem like I'm helpless in the situation, which is not at all true. She is not in control of me, I am. I think that blaming my mother would serve as an excuse to not lose weight.
I don't like the idea of giving someone else so much power over my life. It's my problem, I have to deal with it.
i don't think it is productive or healthy to blame parents, but I think it is important to be able to look back into your early years to see where patterns and poor habits may have started in order to break them. parents have such a a huge influence on developing their children's eating habits, but then again i think alot of it is also genetic too.
i blamed my mom for my food issues for a long time and i still do think she was enormously influential in developing them, but i know she meant well, and i also know that i was an eater for as far back as i can remember. my mom did not directly make me eat to numb myself and escape reality, or to sneak food. however, she did put me on diets as early as 7 years old. i remember being sent to school in 2nd grade with a fruit cup and a rice cake in my lunchbox for lunch, and wondering why i was being punished. i remember being the only kid in class who was not given a snack to bring in for snack time, and feeling different and deprived. i remember going out to restaurants and getting upset because i had to pick something healthy to eat or i would be berated the whole meal, despite being forced to eat the healthy option anyway. the way that my mom was verbally abusive to me on pretty much a daily basis, calling me fat, and all sorts of horrible names about my weight, and saying that i was fat just to spite her didn't MAKE me turn to food, but when the whole world seemed to be against me it made it seem like on heck of a nice comfort. I don't blame any of these past experiences for my eating junk today, but I do not discount the fact that they shaped my relationship with food and my body in a very unhealthy way. I'm trying to break these connections and undo these patterns, but it is very hard. My mom is now my #1 weight loss supporter and we have a good relationship, but at times its very hard not to get angry at her and want to point a finger when the topic comes up. I know this is not typical, and is a bit of an extreme example, but regardless, I think the role that parents play in helping their children develop good eating habits and self-esteem are absolutely crucial in setting the stage for later behaviors.
My parents -with the very best of intentions- did what turned out to be some very harmful things in regards to eating and food during very formative years. I absolutely place some of my views on food and overall weightgain as a child squarely on their shoulders. It's not something I "blame" them for today (certainly a loaded word, agree Kaplods!) and I would hope I'm a little more mature than to look at it from that standpoint at 28 years old.
But as others have mentioned, that is neither helpful nor constructive and like Autumn Sky said, it's my responsibility to look for the patterns and act accordingly. Could I help stuff when I was 3 or 4? Of course not. But I can certainly help it now.
My mom put a healthy dinner on the table every night (a meat, a starch a veggie) and didn't buy soda or sugary sodas. We drank milk, iced tea or water and we didn't really snack much (I remember lots of bags of granny smith apples). My folks weren't loaded, so we went out to dinner rarely and fast food was very rare.
Same for me. My mom made us "clean our plates" before we were allowed to leave the dinner table. If we came home from school hungry, we weren't given a snack, but told to wait for dinner. Dinner was on the table and ready to be eaten at 5pm EVERY week night as that was when my father got home from work. Growing up my father was VERY thin (always has been) and my mom was almost 500lbs. They both ate whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Don't get me wrong, they never flaunted it like we couldn't have it or anything.
Through all this, my entire childhood I was only slightly overweight (maybe 10-15lbs at most). It wasn't until about five years ago that I gained so much weight. That was nobody's fault, but only due to my own ignorance. I never was taught about nutrition and at a mostly healthy weight, had no desire to learn about it ... figure I was doing fine by myself. Then the weight came on. Finally after being tired of being fat for so long, I started getting very introspective to determine where all my habits came from. I still "cleaned my plate" when I ate. It didn't matter how full I was, I ate it all. That HABIT came from my mom's teaching. But I don't blame her for that, she thought she was doing something positive, teaching us to eat our veggies and potatoes or what have you. All in all, I guess I agree with most everyone else. I don't blame anyone for my weight gain. Now that I know everything, I have no reason to be heavy again... It's all up to me.
*In regards to obese/overweight children*
After do some research & asking lots of questions I firmly believe that some if not most parents do not teach their children how to eat "right". Either by the foods they are offering or by the poor example they are setting with their own eating habits.
Are there some people with "disorders" that cause them to be heavy - YES! Is that the case for most people - NO!
Last edited by SamanthaJubilee; 02-11-2010 at 01:19 PM.
Reason: correction
i blame my mother for my bad self-image, and my emotional eating.
It was learned behaviors that i should never have been taught.
Growing up i always heard "im stresed" while my mother dug into a bag of chips or rustled through the fridge (i think she was really just bored). But i quickly learned that "stress" aka boredom meant an open pantry. I should have been taught to do constructive things in my boredom or unhappiness, and its not until i figured out this problem for myself (about a year ago) that i really started to get healthy and lose weight.
my mother also gave me very very low self esteem when it came to my body. When i started to get overweight i was constantly asked if i wanted to start a diet with her (always "tomorrow" tho) and there would be times when i would say "im hungry" and my mother would respond with "you arent hungry. get out of the pantry". i remember one time when i was in the pantry looking for a snack after school and i was talking on the phone (this was in middle school, when i started getting heavy) and my mother saw me in the pantry and puffed out her cheeks and held her arms out as tho holding obese sides and walked toward me. her way of telling me to get out of the pantry cuz i was fat.
Im just now an adult, but im living at home, so i still dont buy my own food, and meals are never cooked at my house anyway. my mother's version of cooking is opening the box of lasagna and putting it in the oven for the time that the box says.
sorry for the rant but yes, i blame my mother. she bought bad unhealthy foods, taught me bad eating habits, and totally destroyed any desire to take care of myself. She made me feel like i wasnt worth being taken care of, because if my own mother didnt like my appearance why should anyone else and more importantly, why should i?
it took me most of my high school years to re teach myself how to eat, how to exercise, how to not emotional eat, and most importantly how to see myself as someone worth taking care of.
maybe some of you who are parents find this to be harsh, but parents teach their kids, and my parents taught me poor lessons that ive had to unlearn. Im young, and im glad that i got my self-image figured out while i was still in high school. But its something that ive struggled with, am still struggling with. It should have never started, especially not from my mom :/
I am beginning to realize that nutrition is overwhelming. There is so much info out there that it is hard to understand it and apply it to the way you eat everyday. That is why people go out and get degrees in this stuff.
My point is that it can be hard for parents to know what is healthy, what isn't healthy and WHY or why not something is healthy. My parents raised my sister and I the same. She is thin, I am fat. Like a PP said, my mom also made a meat, a starch and a veggie each night for dinner. She served us, we would eat it, end of story. She would tell us to eat a piece of fruit if we were hungry and we were told to go outside and play.
But when I went away to college, I didn't have mom and dad standing over me saying "eat this, not that". So I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, in whatever portion I wanted. Hence: 100 lbs gained in 5 years.
I kind of feel like I am missing the "shut off valve" that many other people seem to have. I mean, I can't eat a bit of food, feel satisfied and stop. I have to measure out what I can eat and then I eat it all. I was always amazed at people that could eat half a bag of popcorn and say "I have had enough, I am full". What? I eat the whole damn bag. My friend in high school would eat HALF of a HALF of subway for lunch... That boggled my mind... how could that be enough? I could eat all 6" and sometimes even all 12"!!
But she is thin... and I am not. I am slowly experimenting with stopping when I feel the "hungries" go away (not even that I feel full, just that I don't feel HUNGRY) Now it is up to me to provide myself with knowledge on what is healhty and what is not and to do my best to teach my son what I can.
My mother is a very unhappy, negative woman who lashes out when she feels unappreciated (which is often).
I could and have blamed her for a lot of things in my life, including my weight (and I did, until I was probably 30). She said (and still says) a lot of hurtful things when she feels insecure and she feels insecure a lot.
If I selected out bits and pieces of my life, especially my childhood - ways in which my parents could have or should have known or done better, I can make them seem like ogres or idiots. In fact yesterday I did. I had a mini-rant with my husband over a conversation I had with my mother. Eventually we ended up laughing over it, because we do have a choice, we don't have to be sucked into negativity.
I think part of getting out of that black hole is letting go of blame. When I was younger, I blamed a lot of people for my weight, and blamed myself most of all. Even at five and six years old, I knew that sneaking and hoarding food was wrong. I knew that I had a different relationship with food than my other family members, including my mother and grandmother who were both overweight (but not as children, and even in adulthood not as much overweight proportionately). I knew that the messages I was getting about food were mixed (encouraged to eat at some times, and discouraged at others).
For me, taking control of my life (in several aspects) required letting go of blame, even self-blame. Blame and responsibility aren't synonymous. I can take responsibility for my weight - I can even assign some of that responsibility to my parents (when I was a child) without taking or assigning blame.
I worked with a lot of abused kids and abusive parents in my life, and I learned that my "horrible" parents weren't all that horrible in the scheme of things. Disfunctional yes, but pretty mild disfunction compared to the families I worked with.
If I blame my parents for my obesity and other weaknesses, I have to also credit them for my strengths - my intelligence, my compassion, my sense of humor, my achievements.
When I was much younger, I saw the blame, but not the credit. I blamed myself and my parents (and others as well), but I rarely took or gave credit. As I got older I blamed less and credited more (not only others, but myself too).
I'm who I am (for better and worse) because of the influence of a lot of people, including my parents (who I think really did the best that they could, even when their best wasn't very good).
My parents are not at all to blame. My weight gain was entirely the product of uncontrolled emotional problems and alcohol. I was extremely thin until my senior year of college, when I freaked out because I hit 145 lbs after going on birth control. I lost that weight and then some when my father died...but my Mom and I had such a rift driven by our own personal grief that I really did not have a support system. I had an emotionally abusive boyfriend, no siblings, and no extended family for support. I drank heavily, almost every night, and I ate total crap. I just stopped caring about everything, and I eventually gained 70 lbs in 3 years.
Both of my parents worked when I was growing up, and my Mom hated to cook, but she did a good job of getting the veggies and lean protiens in there. We didn't really snack, I spent a lot of time outside and on sports teams and in dance. My Mom, herself, is extremely thin...and that causes some issues now. I can see that she doesn't understand how I could have done this to myself, and I know it disgusted her to a point. But...she is very, very supportive of my weight loss journey and is now my best friend - something that has really helped to get myself back into gear. Being a Mommy and the wife of a wonderful man has boosted me back up into my former self as well.
I, personally, can't blame anyone but myself. Childhood obesity rates are something different, and the blame there lies entirely on the parents. If your parents fed you in such a way that you were obese as a child...it's hard to break that mentality and change your eating habits. Especially if you always led a sedentary lifestyle and were surrounded by role models who did the same. I can't say that anyone who has experienced that can blame their parents 100%, but you have to take it into consideration as a major contributor. As for the food industry and marketing campaigns...that sounds like an inability to take ownership of a lack in self control...but that's just my perspective. Everybody is different, and I respect that.
Wow my sister and I were just discussing this last night!
We don't blame our mom at all. She wasn't perfect but she did the best she could and did give us alot of great healthy stuff when we were young. As we got older eh not so much. I really wish she would have given us better healthier foods but I have no blame on her at all.
Both my sister and I agree that one of the biggest issues with us is that growing up we didn't have alot of money. So usually once a month we would all get a really big super yummy dinner of our favorite foods. And we had a huge amount of people in our family. So you were not going to get alot and you were not going to have it again for quite awhile.
It was a special happy big deal. Just like with fast food. We usually got it on occasion and it was always like this special treat. So we often ate alot more then we should have.
We also would know that there wasn't going to be leftovers.
So we have kept this mind frame even as adults. So now we will "pig out" or just indulge in this yummy stuff as if it was this super special occasion except we are now adults and can have it very day if we wanted to.
It is saying to ourself yes this is really really good but I don't need to stuff myself because I can have leftovers or even go to the store and make it again later.
Or even better having alittle of it and then tomorrow eat alittle of something else I like too.
Though I will admit I do have some issues with my father. When he was around which wasn't often he would have soda and treats that we were not allowed to touch at all. He would pig out on them. And at the same moment put us down for our weight. This is the guy who told us maybe we should do drugs because it helps with weight loss...only slightly joking ugh.
I don't blame myself and I don't blame my family. Blaming anyone for problems, in my opinion, just keeps the negativity out in the open. Instead of blaming, I look back and notice trends in eating habits, activity time, etc when I gained the most weight. I use what I've learned to teach my own young children healthy eating habits and having fun while being active. I'm still learning every day, and I still struggle with wanting to sit on the couch with a plate full of food and watch tv for hours.....but I don't want my children to have the same struggles as I do.
Even blaming parents of obese children is very unproductive in my opinion. I was slender at 4 and obese by age 5. Morbidly obese by puberty (which began in 4th grade).
I suspect a strong genetic component, because my brother and I were adopted and we have very different weight histories than our sisters who are my parents bio-kids. Their weights in childhood and adulthood have been much like our parents' (one following mom and gaining weight in her late 20's early 30's and one following my dad and having no weight problem at least until retirement age which that sister hasn't reached yet). My brother was underweight most of his childhood and early adulthood. He's gained a little weight since leaving the military, but is still far from overweight.
Of course, everone blames the parents. That none of my siblings ever had an obesity problem didn't absolve my parents of that blame. They felt it intensely and I think it made the problem worse, because they were often frantic about getting the weight off me. My brother if anything had the reverse weight problem. He ate like a horse, but never gained weight. His scrawniness was also blamed on them. Strangers would even disapprovingly suggest that my parents were starving my brother and overfeeding me.
As a result, my brother was nagged and pressured to eat more (even though it never seemed to result in weight gain) and nagged and pressured me to eat less (even though it never seemed to result in much weight loss).
Our pediatrician encouraged my parents not to stress about my brother, assuring them that he'd eventually gain weight on his own, but encouraged them to be extremely strict with me, even putting me on strict diets that doctors today probably wouldn't encourage (I remember being on a doctor-approved 800 calorie diet before high school). By age 13, the same doctor (a very caring doctor, who I do not doubt thought he was doing the right thing) had me on prescription amphetemine diet pills.
Our house was a war zone over food, most of my childhood because my parents blamed themselves and knew that others blamed them too. I think it made them more desperate and determined to control my eating by any means possible, including bribes, threats, guilt trips and verbal abuse.
If they hadn't blamed themselves, and if society didn't blame them, ironically I suspect that my weight issues wouldn't have become so extreme. I think the crash-diet cycle contributes to weight gain far more than weight loss, and I suspect that my weight problem would have been less extreme if I hadn't been tossed under that bus at such an early age - largely because of the blame placed on my parents' shoulders.
I don't blame my parents, other than in the sense of the genetic lottery. My dad was very skinny as a child and young man, but has tended to yoyo up and down for most of his adult life. My mom has struggled with weight pretty much her whole life. So not really "blame" but an acknowledgement that the cards are stacked against me, and I will probably have to work harder to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight than someone with a different genetic background. But on the other hand, they did try - my mom cooked nutritious and balanced meals most of the time. A little bit of pizza or other take out but that was still recognized to be a treat and not the ordinary thing. We always had fresh fruit in the house and not tons of junk (I'm always shocked now when I'm at their house because my parents have a lot of junkfood around these days, at least a lot relative to what I was used to as a kid!)
As a mom, I think about all of this a LOT. I was very skinny as a child, until about 7 or 8, and steadily gained weight from there. My son is 5 and is very, very skinny (clinically underweight in terms of his BMI) and I really, really want him to not hit that "suddenly start to gain weight" point that I did. But it's a really tough balance to figure out how to encourage him to eat - not pressure, but encourage - without it becoming too big an issue. I don't know that I've found the balance, but I do try to keep food from being a reward or a punishment. Not 100% - sometimes, a trip to a restaurant can be a treat for him, which doesn't mean he won't get supper if he hasn't behved well, it just won't be at a restaurant.
I'm hoping that my son has a natural affinity to being slimmer, and that the life changes I've made will be a good model for him on having the behaviors in place to lead a fit, active and healthy lifestyle. And hopefully, even if he ever does face a weight problem, he won't blame me for it! lol!
