Although rabbit is damn tasty.

I was fortunate enough to grow up with a relatively sane family. But I still remember being a fat kid and being shamed about food. And encouraged to diet. And receiving unquestioning praise when I lost a stone in under a month.

I went through cycles: The Good Girl, who doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch, never eats sweets, only finishes half her dinner and lies to her mother that she is eating 1000 calories, not 650, and works out every day even when she is in pain and can’t understand why she keeps getting headaches and dizzy spells and passes out if she tries to stand up too quickly. The Failure, who sneaks bites of food from the fridge even when she isn’t hungry, and scoffs several mouthfuls of whatever is in the fridge when she is “making coffee”, because she needs to get as much food in as possible without anyone knowing. Even though she just had dinner and is genuinely full.

I became addicted to the sensation of hunger. Now, I have to work at recognising hunger at all. And am fat.

Seriously, learning to smooth the edges of a block of cheese down so no one can tell you’ve bitten a chunk out of it is not part of a healthy lifestyle.

If you’re going to live on ramen, add some kimchi so that it doesn’t happen to you. ^_^

These articles/discussion just make me think of two conversations I’ve had with moms.

One was this formerly-homeless woman I met, who told me her crowning achievement in her life was that she & her girlfriend got custody of all their kids & made them a home where nobody hit them and they could have seconds at dinner if they wanted.

The other is my boyfriend’s sister, the nurse, who said to me quite seriously, that it was OK for my (underweight) 3-year-old to have whole milk because “it’s not like you’re going to still give it to him when he’s *nine* or something.” Because nine would be *way* outside the pale, apparently.

OT, probably, although it is about kids and ‘bad foods’, but is anyone in the UK as outraged as me about Change4Life’s latest attempt to scare parents?

Eat cake, die young…
http://www.bhf.org.uk/news_and_campaigning/press_office/latest_news__views/childrens_health.aspx

(…and there’s a whole other can of worms about exactly what, now people are living so much longer anyway, constitutes a ‘premature’ death, but I won’t open it here…)

…and can I just say that if one more person calls my just-turned-one year old last Sunday a ‘big boy’ I’m going to freak the fuck out? I swear it’s all I can do to mutter ‘We like him healthy’. Seriously, he’s a freakin’ baby – they’re supposed to be fat!

Meh.

I fear for his future, what with the current hysteria.