That's awesome!

This reminded me of a moment from my childhood that still makes me sad; a friend and I were bored and wanted more than anything to be taken to the roller rink (and this was at a time where my parents insisted that I get more exercise). When I asked my mom, she said maybe another time, and when I pointed out that we didn't do enough as a family, my dad snapped at me for arguing. I remember crying, not because I was told no the one time, but for being snapped at when I knew I was told no 99% of the time.

We seriously didn't do enough together as a family besides eating dinner and watching TV. No going to the park, no museums, no theme parks, no vacations, no biking, no walking, and certainly no roller rink unless a friend invited me. I don't think I ever asked to go again after that.

My parents are divorced and when I was little I spent every other weekend at my biological fathers' house. It was not a good place for a child to be and often there was not enough food available to me. My mother would hide snacks in my bags and I remember not only always having this gnawing hunger but also having to sneak around when I went to eat.

When I was 11 I ended up in the hospital for a month on an IV unable to eat due to surgery for peritonitis. I remember then, too, being hungry in a way I can't describe and fantasizing about food almost constantly.

When I came home from the hospital I was fed and I just ate and ate.

I felt then, and still feel that I am always one word away from the ability to eat being taken from me.

In my twenties I thought a lot about what I thought my parents "did wrong" when it came to food/weight issues. And yet of my parents' four children, only I ever had a weight problem in childhood and young adulthood. And none of my siblings' children have a weight problem either.

I'm not sure there's anything my parents could have done to have prevented my obesity. I think they may have been able to help me more effectively, but they had no experience with childhood obesity, so they couldn't really do what they didn't know - especially since they consulted the "experts" who should have known the best way to deal with childhood obesity (though I'm not very confident that's true even today).

What I remember most vividly from childhood is being constantly hungry and being very jealous of my younger brother, because while I was being constantly admonished for eating, my parents were constantly pushing food on my brother (the only person in our family to be underweight as a child).

My brother and I were both adopted (our sisters are our parents' bio-kids, who came along when my brother and I were in junior high).

Because of the pattern, I suspect a strong genetic component. I'm sure that having one overweight child and one underweight child was extremely stressful for my parents, but as a child it felt a lot like my parents loved my brother more than me. Of course, he thought the reverse not only because he was always being nagged to eat when he wasn't hungry, but because I was the "good girl who got all A's" and he got in trouble a lot and didn't do that well in school - today he probably would have been diagnosed ADHD and dyslexic (because his daughter was).

I remember once at a grocery store when I was about 5 and my brother was about 3, a stranger came up to my mother and started screaming at her. Because I was very fat and my brother was underweight, the woman assumed that my mother was overfeeding me and starving my brother. The woman said something to the effect that my mother should stop feeding me and start feeding my brother. I burst into tears because I really thought my mother was going to stop feeding me. I was already was hungry all the time because of the "diets" I was being put on, and the prospect of getting fed even less really scared me.

My mother didn't defend herself, she just walked away - and I could tell she was deeply hurt and ashamed, and it felt like it was all my fault, especially since my mother didn't comfort me and just let me cry, which made me really think she really was going to stop feeding me. To this day, I regret that my mother didn't tell us that that lady was crazy and didn't know what she was talking about.

In terms of the food in the house, it was all reasonably healthy (not always low-calorie, but pretty typical for the times). I remember going to my cousins house and being astonished at the amount of junk food sitting on their fridge top). In our house if there were chips at most two bags would be open (and usually only one), ande there was never more than two or three choices. On my aunt's fridge there were so many bags you couldn't count them and most of them would be open.

In our house, at dinner there was probably too much food (both parents had come from farm families were portions were large because they needed to be), but the food was relatively healthy (probably too much butter sometimes), but there was always a large salad with a vinegar and oil dressing (rarely creamy dressings) and two vegetables (often more because Mom always made so many veggies that we would have leftovers. So we'd get two new veggies and there'd be small dishes of veggies leftover from other meals).

Mom and I were usually "dieting" so we didn't always eat exactly what everyone else was eating. I learned to count food "exchanges" by the time I was 8 years old (and joined Weight Watchers for the first time with my mother).

There were a lot of "horror stories" to reflect my parents mixed emotions about food and weight loss (when my mother went "off" the diet I was her binge buddy. Then she'd feel guilt and regret and she'd say 'we shouldn't have done that,' and so I absorbed the food=guilt message though if I ever tried to not participate in the off-plan foods I'd sometimes feel like my mother was mad at me). I was hungry a lot, so I'd sneak food and then get in trouble.

My brother learned he could "frame" me by stealing food and blaming me. My parents would say "he has no reason to steal food, because we would gladly give it to him, because he needs to gain weight." They didn't get that his goal wasn't the food, it was getting me into trouble for something I hadn't done.

I remember two incidents vividly. One was oreos that had been returned to the cookie jars with the fillings licked off. I pointed out that I would have eaten the whole cookies (my dad was so quick to agree "she's got a point there," that I was rather hurt). My brother didn't get in trouble, but I didn't either, my parents deciding that they couldn't know for certain who was responsible.

The second time, my mother found soda cans under my bed. It was before diet soda became popular. My brother and I were only allowed soda if we asked first, and never more than one can a day. I was able to prove that the cans weren't mine because they were all rootbeer and cream soda cans. Thank God for the cream soda cans, because I detested cream soda (and while I'd drink rootbeer if there was nothing else left, orange soda was my favorite). I pointed out that if the cans had been mine they would have been flavors I liked, not my brother's two favorites.

For the first time, my parents realized that my brother really would do things just to get me in trouble. And it started a bit of a war between my brother and I, where we would each hatch complicated schemes to get the other in trouble.

If I could have my parents do one thing differently, well I guess it would be two things. It would be to have been more consistent with their food messages (because they still "pushed" food on my on special occasions - so I often felt unable to win where food was concerned) and to be more understanding about how difficult it was for me to control my own eating.

I remember even as a child asking that some foods be locked away or kept out of my reach and my parents saying that I had to learn to control myself around food (even though my mother wasn't always able to do so well, herself). I was also sometimes punished for whining about being hungry. I would have liked a more sympathetic response.

I think the "dieting" mindset worked against me, because I learned that I had two choices. Eating absolutely eveything in sight, or being so hungry that I couldn't think of anything but food.

My parents divorced when I was a baby and I grew up with my mum, for a large part of my childhood we were poor and we simply didn't have the money to always have much food in the house. I would go to school and envy all my friends amazing lunches, and be quietly upset that I had hardly anything to eat.

This continued into high school but it was worse as my mum had become very unwell at this point, I no longer took any packed lunch and rarely had money to buy anything-If I did it was only enough for a chocolate bar.

This lasted all through my school years even though by my final year our situation had changed and my mum was well and we had more money. I just took it as normal to go to school hungry.

It made me really loathe school for yet another reason, and it always seemed so unfair and difficult. I love being an adult now, since I know I'll never be in that kinda position again-I take care of myself now. The worst part of it all really was wondering why my dad never did anything to stop this-He never had any money issues and I know now he should have provided for me.

Great Idea for a thread!

I dont know if this has anything to do with my issues now.. But when I was first born I got sick and was not able to eat.. Like they had to force me to eat because I would of died.

When I was around 4 I stuck both my hands on a kerosene heater and had to be fed all my food because I couldn't do it myself. I couldn't eat like a normal person.

Around 12 or so my brother got into drugs real bad and my parents would spend most of their time trying to get him the help he needed. I think this is where most of my issues come from. I wasn't neglected my parents loved me but I feel that since they had to spend most of their time on him I used food to make up for it. I started gaining weight like crazy at this age. I took food up to my room. My room was upstairs and the stairs led down to the kitchen. My parents room was on the other side of the house. My parents never said anything because they didn't want to hurt my feelings. (What they admitted to me later) I wish they would of because I was only a child I didn't know what I was doing was wrong.

My brother terrorized me. Not in a way that a brother normally fights with a sister.. I mean really terrorized me. He would come home late and jump on my bed yelling and screaming waking me up. (Just one example).

My mom's partents did to my mom what she did to me. "you clear your plate or you'll eat that at your next meal." "you grandmother made that pie because you were coming and you're going to eat that tiny little slice" things like that. My mother told me about 4 months ago that she was sorry for making me clear my plate when I was little because she sees now what it did. she is in therapy working through some stuff.
I think I turned to food emotionally because of little things bothering me and then as I got older I held on to that. When I met my husband I was a size 16. We got engaged and then i found out I was pregnant about 2 months later. After that I found out it was twins. My twins were born very early and one of them has numerous health problems, including kidney failure and cancer. So the eating got out of control. I feel like maybe if i hadnt learned my eating habbits for my mom I would have handled all of the stress better. Now i'm a size 22. I have 105lbs to lose to be at the upper end of my healthy weight.
I hope I set better examples for my kids... eesh