When my brothers and I were still kids, my parents would buy junk food in limited quantities and would apportion everything equally. The junk food wasn't hidden or anything, but we could only eat our share.

Obviously they should limit it, but it wasn't done that way in my household. It arrived in shopping bags, then disappeared and came out again only when I had been "good." Hard to tell which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I think his method of hiding it aggravated stuff for me.

sounds like being a good parent to me. First off, we'd go broke if we let our kids decide what they ate, and also, they are KIDS! We are grown and don't have a handle on well rounded nutritious eating, but they are supposed to?

i am sorry if you feel that what your parents did lead to your problem today, but it sounds like perfectly normal parental behavior to me.

-fm

Um, this thread wasn't made to complain about the way I was raised..just curious if anyone else on 3FC had the same thing happen to them growing up and if they felt like there's a correlation between the two.

Thanks.

I have a lot of issues around food that started within the family. I am not blaming anyone 'cos I do not think it was intentional, but my grandmother and my father used to love rewarding me with chocs and biscuits, whilst my mother was obsessed with me being overweight - and made me so self conscious about it -that I began to have no self worth that probably explains in a nutshell why I now have a binge eating disorder

Odd. My parents never hid anything. Chips, puddings, and ice cream and things like that were treats, but not hidden. Sodas were rare and always "white soda" and not "color soda." We grew up with the expectation that that sort of food was for parties and not for normal.

Fast food was in summer -- usually because of vacation and the need for fast eats on the road.

What I remember more is dinner at table all through my life. Breakfast and lunch through most of my life, and then it got a bit weak when I was in late MS and HS. (People's schedules were getting crazier).

There was also always water in pitches and cut up fruit in the fridge. That was a staple.

And sundays were always dim sum.

A.

Both my mother and my grandmother were the supreme being in control of the kitchen and the food. No one was allowed to help themselves. They had the control, even to the point of deciding how much each person in the family could eat. If I wanted an apple, I had to ask for it and it was given to me, I did not help myself to it. This was simply the way it was, and no one thought twice about it. I never felt restricted at the time and I am sure it had more to do with controlling the food budget than it did about control over family members eating.

But I have to say, when I finally was on my own and had my first apartment, I felt defiance about eating. I let myself eat as much as I wanted without restriction. It began my lifelong battle with bingeing and dieting. To this day, I still struggle with sneak eating...eating whatever I want when I am alone. Funny, when I go for dinner at my mother's, she still portions out my food on my plate for me as though she knows what and how much.

Yes, my mother frequently baked homemade cookies
and then hid them to keep me from eating any.
Although I wasn't really fat, just a bit overweight,
she had me on a diet from age 9 on.

However, when I came home from school, I could smell them,
and I would total search everywhere till I found them,
then I snitched as many as I could before I got caught.

Hmm, not really. My parents were divorced, and my mother was a full time worker plus an alcoholic. So she was out of the house most of the time, and I was completely in charge of feeding myself (all meals and snacks) at an early age (starting around 8). We didn't have too much junk in the house, honestly. Not good food, I ate Kraft mac n' cheese practically every night, but she just didn't buy treat snacks like cookies or candy. When she did, I gobbled it up in a few days, but it was never hidden from me.

My stepmom kept most of the Christmas candy and the occasional batch of cookies she bakes in her car to keep it from my dad (and me when I'm home). She'll bring it out after dinner and let us take a couple pieces. It's not really hidden, we could go get it out of the car, it's just made inconvenient so we don't eat it all day. Quite frankly, I never developed a complex from it, I actually thought it was kind of funny. We would always laugh about our treat rations.

All that aside, I still binge, and still hide/sneak/hoard food and eat in private when I am in binge mode. I remember when I was at boarding school there was always a plate of some kind of dessert (brownies, cookies, etc) out after each meal. I would look around to see if anybody was looking, take *handfuls* of the dessert and shove it in my backpack. Then maybe an hour later, I'd sneak back down to the dining hall and do the same thing. Then I'd have a stockpile of treats in my room that I could eat alone with nobody watching, lol.

I'm not sure why I developed that desire to stockpile as much food as I could.

Funny this topic came up..i was just telling my mother the other day how i've been eating so many cookies and i think i overdo it because my dad hides them from me so when he slips up and i find them i just don't know how to stop.
I guess it's cuz i never know when i'm going to get them again so i try and gobble up as many as i can.

I hate it and it makes me feel bad that i let myself eat so many of them, but it just puts me in a frenzy when i KNOW treats are in the house but are being hidden from me.

ETA:Whenever i would visit my mom..i had all kinds of junk i could want..but i ate it at a reasonable pace because she just had it out so i wasn't concerned about "hoarding."

Growing up my Dad would go grocery shopping and I would eat almost everything within a couple days, sometimes the first day. I am so ashamed of that, especially because my father was a single parent and struggles to put food on the table. He saw my problems and began to hide food or not buy it. I would throw tantrums if I couldn't have it.
I'm glad I can look back and see that I had a problem and I'm working on it now. One step at a time, but I think I can break my bad habits with food.

I have come to realize that a lot of my food issues relate to this. When I was a teen and not overweight in any way( 130 and 5'8), my mom hid food from me and would only let me eat green beans and frozen meals.
I remember days of nothing but green beans. I started working at Long John Silvers and I would eat my little frozen meal before work and than graze all night at work!
I remember purposely pretending to be sick from school so I could stay home and eat in peace.
I have worked really hard to get over this and it is still a struggle for me.
I have to constantly remind myself I will not go hungry and I can always eat later.

Only when I started stealing from the family business. My father distributed food products (mostly snacks) and sometimes would keep supplies in our garage at home. I'd steal boxes of slim jims, cheese/sausage snacks, chips and peanuts and hoard them in my room. One month my father told me I had eaten (stolen) over $200 worth of food. And that is on top of eating family food and snacks my parents bought for the house. And when the holiday's came around, I was all about the chocolate.

My parents just really didn't buy junkfood. My mom cooked dinner each night. I ate at the school cafeteria at school, and when I hit middle school I bought more junk at school. When I found the cafeteria served TACO BELL that was where it started IMO. I can remember being young at home and though I wasn't fat I was chubby because I ate a lot of food, yes it was healthy but a HUGE plate of rice piled with veggies and meat definitely wasn't what I should have been eating! I probably should have been eating half the amount I was eating.

I feel like most people whose parents hid these foods had worse time than those parents who gave a bit each day. Makes me worry how my parenting skills in the future will affect my kids!

My mom hid snacks from me, my brother was skinny so she would buy them for him and not let me have any. Then she started hiding the food (candy, cupcakes, etc) and I would look all over the house for it. I had hour from when I came from school and she came home, so I did find it and she would move them to another place in the house. She once put a lock on the refrigerator.

I remember talking about this in therapy and my therapist said "you know, she set you up".

Now, years later, she still doesn't think what she did led to my food problems and whenever I do lose control, I go right for the cupcakes and candy that
she hid from me... sad that I know it and I still do it, but I keep on trying...