But on the other hand, my first memories of diets were of unexciting foods being put in the fridge, my grandma has been a member of weight watchers forever and has been making references to my size for about as long… She encourages overeating at parties but then makes comments about what I eat, and once told me to eat less pasta and cheese. I said, “I’m a student, that’s practically all I eat” :)

I guess what I’d ideally like is if my kids, should I have any, don’t think it’s somehow wrong to enjoy food, and if they enjoy most things from runner beans to chocolate fudge cake (though not together, obviously), but most of all, if they think of their bodies just as a part of themselves, not too thin, fat, short, or tall, just them.

I hope that was the right way to handle it.

Growing up – my mom always limited me to 1200 calories a day. ALWAYS. I was a long distance swimmer, and was working out with my swim team 2 – 4 hours a day. on 1200 calories. Now, when I got older, I would eat more at lunch at school or whatever – but at home? Skim milk. Diet soda. From the beignning of time. And weight watchers at age 12.

When I graduated college, I decided to persue trialthons. I must admit, I have a pretty decent body image – no idea WHY. Maybe like someone else mentioned, because I was always on a swim team? And always saw many different body types? Anyway – I was training for an IRONMAN (this is a race with 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 mile bike ride, and then a marathon – all in the same day). You can imagine that training for this was brutal. I weight 220 when I started training, and 220 when I got to race day. I was getting annoyed with all the working out I was doing and the fact that I wasn’t ‘thin’ (note that at 220 I was a size 16 – I don’t feel that is huge – I’m a large boned gal also). The nutrionist first asked me how much I was exercising. I told her. She then asked how much I ate a day – I told her. And she said, even I take into account that most people are at least 10% off when telling me how much they eat…. you are only eating like 1800 calories a day! For the amount of exercise you are doing, I would think you should be eating 2500, at least. I tried that for a while – because she thought I was starving myself. I didn’t GAIN weight – but I also did lose anything. When she started pobing into my childhood eating – she recognized that the way my mom limited my eating made it so my body could pretty must exist on 800 calories a day.

800. Calories. A. Day.

Now, while this has made me an excpetional long distance athlete (most long distance athletes have issue with staying ‘fueled’ for longer races – it’s totally messed up.

I find myself hoping to have a boy. We don’t know the sex of this baby – but I certainly don’t want a girl to grow up with the same body issues that I have. Somehow – I certainly don’t HATE my body – being so athletic has made me appreciate it for what it can do – but wonder if I’ll be tempted to limit my daughters food intake if I see her getting ‘fat’? At the same time – I know that my mom’s limitations caused many of the issues other have pointed out – the fact that we NEVER had ice cream or cookies or potato chips in the house made them seem all the more sweet to me. To this day, I can easily eat a whole pan of brownies. Yum.

Wow – vrey long comment, and I could keep going!

Seriously, though. Thank you.

My mom did some great things for my body image, which has always been healtheir than average. She is very comfortable being naked, accepts her body and doesn’t talk about it in negative terms, eats what she wants and enjoys food, always told us people came in different sizes and that’s normal and fine. She did awful damage to my relationship with food, though – she controlled my eating to the point that I didn’t want to eat anything at all. I had to eat with perfect manners, couldn’t get up from the table, we had to eat as a family always but the children weren’t allowed to talk (and often the dinner table was the place where we got yelled for transgressions during the day), I had to eat everything she put on my plate (no matter if it made me gag, gave me heartburn, or what have you), wasn’t allowed to make any food choices, wasn’t allowed to snack, and unhealthy food was forbidden. When I got an allowance I would blow it all on candy and Doritos because I never got to eat more than a little bit of sugar.. To this day I can’t eat in front of her. Oddly now that I can eat junk food whenever I want, I don’t desire it whatsoever. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.

I haven’t noticed any comments on the economics of feeding families, which is something I remember from childhood. We didn’t have fish-and-chips as often as we would like, because they were too expensive. Likewise, taking too much cream was greedy not in terms of calories, but because there is a finite supply of cream in the jug and everyone wants some. Eating together encourages makes moderation and judgement about food a social as well as a personal thing.

Nicegirlphd – At 31, I eat (salted) butter in small chunks. It’s lovely. It’s also much better for me to eat that small bit of butter that is the taste I want, than to force myself to shovel down an unwanted slice of toast with it. Given my diet (what I eat, I mean), it is unlikely that I need more fat – I simply like dairy products.

I never thought about it, but I bet that’s why I don’t have any Mom Friends. I don’t have the right bonding apparatus! (I do have friends, but they’re just my same old friends from Before Kid plus the moms I work with.)

Last week, I got on my husband’s case for taking little one to preschool so late (I’ve been going to the gym and then straight to work in the morning), and Monday, they arrived on time, but he proceeded to tell me that when he left the preschool, the kid was sitting at the table there eating colored sprinkles with a spoon. At first I was mortified… what would the other parents and the teachers think about these parents who feed their child a plateful of colored sprinkles for breakfast? But then I thought, hey, they were there on time. Hurray! It’s not like it’s bowls of colored sprinkles 3 meals a day around here, so, we will all survive. I don’t fault the kid for wanting the sprinkes, and dad, well, he was focused on a different outcome.

I guess the food stuff is pretty lax around here. Most of the time, there is real food (not much kid food), mostly homemade things, so I don’t make a big deal about food, or perfection, or toilet training, or much of anything, really, other than not hitting and using one’s words and the stuff I consider really important. I think it’s about 10% of the time that I insist on anything.