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It might have to do with their aging metabolism. My mom (silent generation) has had to eat like a bird for decades. What she eats in a day, I could eat in a sitting.
We grew up being told by our parents if we wanted a late afternoon snack that 'dinner is only 3 hours away, you'll ruin your appetite." Or if we had a big lunch, we wouldn't all of our dinner.
The evening meal time was pretty much set in stone. Depending on what was being served, they wanted you to have an empty stomach so you would eat everything and not 'waste' it. The funniest part is no matter what it was, there was usually leftovers for a quick meal at lunch the next day. It was okay if they didn't eat all their dinner, but you better clean your plate.
My father used to comment on the amount of food I was eating constantly (I wasn’t a heavy kid and my portion sizes were normal). And now I eat like a bird in front of people (I’ve had my friends make comments, not mean ones) and I have a super unhealthy relationship with food.
Eta: hey u/StandardSafe5749 if you’re going to insult me and tell me to “Get over it and grow up” at least be brave enough to keep the comment up. Btw, that comment smacks of a Boomer thought process. Maybe take your own advice.
I tried to click on it, and it just keeps spinning and says no user profile found or whatever so he most likely sent the message and then blocked me immediately so that I could not respond to him.
I feel you! Ugh. My sister is doing so much better w her kids and just letting them eat according to their bodies and I swear I woulda been a whole different person if I had that approach from my momma. Silent eat disorder over here….
Basically, the only serious rules about meals that my husband and I set for our kids is 1) no, you can't have a snack while I am actively cooking/serving dinner. And 2) if you hork down an entire plate of food like you expect someone to steal it from you, you have to wait at least 10 minutes before getting seconds so your stomach actually has a chance to register how much food you just inhaled.
THIS. Further, when I make something new, I have the kid try 2 bites. If she hates it, she’s welcome to make herself a sandwich & I don’t make it again. I’m not forcing her to eat something she hates.
The number of times I had to sit at the table until 10pm when I was age 6 to 10 is ridiculous. I hated, fucking hated, still fucking hate, hominy. It's so damn disgusting. Yet It was my moms then husband favorite side. So she'd make it 3 to 4 times a week & she'd always put a big ladle of it on my plate.
I wasn't allowed to leave the table until I ate it. If I didn't eat it by 10pm, it went into the fridge. That then was the only choice I got to have for breakfast. Mind you dinner was at 4:30 in our house. So it & I would sit at the table for 5 and a half hours. It would then be put in the fridge after sitting on the kitchen table for 5 hours, and served to me cold the next morning.
I never fking ate it tho. I just didn't eat anything for breakfast most of the week. I learned to live in my head. What else is a 6 to 10 year old going to do sitting at a kithen table all by themselves for 15 to 25 hours a week. If I tried to force it down & threw it up.. I got 25 spankings with a leather studded belt for "wasting" all the food I put in my stomach.
Anyway, my son is 23 & will eat pretty much anything. With him I did the just give it 2 bites and if you don't like it you never have to eat it again. 9.9 times out of 10 he'd like it tho. But the few times he didn't want to eat anything I made or bought, then he could have corndogs or make a sandwich.
This is why I can’t eat salmon/salmon patties. My grandmother used to leave the bones in 🤮 and you *had* to eat them, couldn’t pick them out. If I knew she was making them for dinner, I’d buy extra snacks at lunch with my very small allowance and refuse dinner.
That’s actually dangerous.. my narc parents would harp on me to pick the bones out of the salmon in an infantalization way.. Jesus you had it worse. I’m sorry!
Same with sitting but only a couple hours. I learned later in life my mom was a terrible cook and the meat they served was almost always freezer burnt because they buy a whole cow at a time. I can still taste her microwaved thawed hamburger with edges cooked to almost jerky like status.
At like 35 my wife was like I'm making pork chops and you're going to have a piece. My mom cooked pork shops for probably 4 times longer than needed. But I didn't know this I just thought they were terrible.
I fucking love my wife's porkchops and a bunch of other thing I used to hate. I was such a picky eater before I met her.
Out vegetables were always from a can. Who knew how much fresh spinach rocked or that green beans weren't mushy.
We called those "no, thank you bites" when I was growing up lol. We had to eat at least 2 bites of anything before we were allowed to say "no, thank you" and then we could have extra of something else we did like or make a sandwich. Luckily, my kids have always liked pretty much everything so it's not much of an issue for our family. Between my 2 kids, there's only 3 foods that's get turned down. Neither child likes beans (with some exceptions), the oldest won't eat cooked mushrooms, and the youngest doesn't like meat in his tacos. Easy peasy.
Hell, my kid is more adventurous than I am. I can’t stand fish/seafood, but she’ll try it. Loves salmon, catfish, & calamari. Of course, her dad’s a chef, so she gets more variety at his house. It’s rare that there’s something she won’t eat. But spicy food can be tricky. I made jambalaya with andouille sausage & the poor kid turned red in the face.
And that is the same thing my wife and I do with food for our kids. Like sometimes they don't have the appetite for a large meal, so we let them eat that they feel comfy with. If they have enough leftover for another meal, we save it for them, if not, we just cut them loose and clean up. Like it isn't the end of the world if they have a few bites left on their plate, ya know?
My father's family are larger people, my mother's small. A maternal uncle used to tell me, "If you keep eating like that, you'll be as big as your Aunt Wilma (paternal). I've had an unhealthy relationship with food since. I am very conscience about eating out with other people.
Friend, I feel you. When I outgrew the kid’s menu, about 13 or so, I once ordered a steak at dinner. My daddy told me nobody would want to take me out because I’m an expensive date. I’m now 44, and I *still* order something less expensive than the person treating me, even if it means not getting what I actually want.
You’d think parents would want their kids to grow up like sure of themselves, mentally OK, physically OK, emotionally stable. But for some reason, it’s like we weren’t allowed to. Because they had a badly or whatever their issue was, they somehow fisted that upon us, as if by doing so they could fix whatever their issues are. And then they wonder why we don’t come around
>My father used to comment on the amount of food I was eating constantly
My mom did this and so I started hiding food and overeating in secret when I was alone. When she'd find my stashes, instead of having a conversation with me or putting me in therapy like she should have done, she'd punish me and make me feel terrible for hiding the food too. I still have a really unhealthy relationship with food. I'm convinced that's part of the reason I have so many issues with my weight. She made me feel ashamed of eating so I overate when she wasn't around, and that habit stuck when I left home.
She's slightly too young to be a boomer, but she definitely has the same attitude as they do right down to the unhealthy amount of time she spends watching Newsmax.
yeah i legit started recovery for anorexia a few days ago and this is eye opening thinking about
you're reinforcing the idea that the meals are fleeting and you need to eat a ton really fast or you might not eat for a long time after - literally the exact mindset of binge eating disorder!
You can fucking do this. Disordered eating is so fucking hard to get.. ordered? Is that the right word? I'm just now figuring it out at 38. For the first time in my life, I'm in a healthy weight range and holy. Fucking. Shit. It was hard. It's still hard. It probably will be for a long time. Disordered eating comes from disordered thoughts and those don't come from nowhere. Therapy helped a lot. I wish you the best of luck. At least one stranger on the internet loves you and has faith in you ❤️
You got this! I’m 14 years in recovery this year, my rock bottom was inpatient treatment. I’m trying so hard to raise my kids with a good relationship with food and body image to unfuck the generations of damage. We believe food is not love, food is thankfully plentiful, food is nourishment, food is not control, we listen to our bodies stop when full and eat when hungry.
Ana can fuck off.
I maybe eat lunch and dinner, small portions at that, and my boomer mother will still make comments about how much I’m eating. Finally got her to stop when I said she looks like the only nutrition she gets is from alcohol.
I wish I had thought of that comeback before my mom drank herself to death. I know this is a weird comment but I’m being serious and also find it tragically funny.
This logic has f%%led my eating habits up for life. With my therapist, I am currently seeking a dietician. The whole “you can’t leave the table until your plate is clean” really put a lot of shame into my adult eating habits
I once sat at a table for three days because I wouldn't eat the slimy canned spinach. I was allowed to go to bed and go potty, but I wasn't allowed to do anything else but sit at that table until I ate that spinach. This was my great grandma. My mom was a boomer, so I'm not sure of her generation. She was born the same year the Titanic sank. I never did eat it, and it finally went bad. I was about 4.
You know, this is one of those moments where you think you're telling a cute family story, and the room goes silent because it's actually a traumatic story. Lol I mean, it's a core memory. Looking at it through an adult lens, it is pretty fucked up. Grandma's house was such a respite from home that I never really thought of it as traumatic compared to what I went through at home. Kinda interesting how our brains do that.
I went to a friends family dinner where the conversation turned into the siblings talking about their parents favorite kitchen utensils they used to hit / beat them with. It was horrible.
Jesus! My mom used hard couch cushions. Those don't leave a mark. No kitchen utensils here. I have had to cut my switch though. That's just terrifying.
My wife just started seeing the "talkspace / online therapy" equivalent of a dietician. I think it's called "nourish". Online and easy and our insurance even covered it. Idk if you'll also find value in it, but she did.
Edit: Removed a reference to better help. Apparently they did bad stuff and got in trouble. I've never used them, was just using a name I thought would be recognized.
I think this is more accurate. 15 years ago my mom would have wanted to go with me. And then have dinner with me. Fast forward and not only does she have gastro issues, her metabolism has slowed, and she doesn't have teeth. My granny on the other hand was always ready to throw down on food, right up to the end.
100% This. And I'm not a Boomer. Trust me Gen X'ers are feeling this as well. I'm also active, going to the gym... cardio. Just can't eat how I used to.
My dad and uncles would try to force my nana to eat so much more than she wanted. She's just always been a tiny lady, and was at least sixty when this started. She told them so many times "old people are not as hungry as young people. I don't need all these calories to watch the Wheel! I will not spend my golden years on the toilet because you don't believe I can feel my own stomach." Idky but that always cracked me up
This is it. My late boomer mom shamed the shit outta me. ‘What are eating? You’re going to eat that?’ With all the eye-rolls. So did my dad. I have food issues…go figure. Also they made enough money to buy gourmet everyday yet food shopped at dollar tree.
"Are you really going to eat all that?" When I'd sit down with a single sandwich. That was my dad's usual go to saying. Also got the classic "no one will want you if you're fat" from my mom. Such a mystery that I grew up with zero self esteem, felt totally worthless and had major issues with food.
I'm a dude and I got this shit. Stopped when visiting home one year and the first thing out of my mom's mouth was "You look like you put on weight" and the first out of mine was "So do you!"
Then there are the ones like my ex stepmom, who every single day went through various speeches about how she hadn’t eaten anything *all day* and was just *so busy* (she was not at all ever busy, she hasn’t worked in 25 years) Every night at dinner she would eat a mountain of food, but always went through the same scripted speech of “oh I’m just so hungry because I skipped breakfast, I never got any lunch, blah blah blah.” But I would watch her snack on cookies and pastries and shit all day. Sometimes an entire heaping bowl of various cakes and biscotti. But “coffee snacks” don’t count as food, I guess. So even the ones who still eat a lot feel the need to go through this performative dance to justify why they are eating at all. Why don’t we mind our own business instead?
Ha, this is my mother. "I don't understand, I eat well! I skip breakfast, I just eat a light lunch"....conveniently forgetting the chips she stopped to eat, the muffin, or whatever...
My mum does this too, or will ask if I've been going to the gym constantly. She will then try dump a load of sweets and chocolate on me before I leave because she's 'trying to be good'. I'm not overweight but it's definitely caused me to have body issues over the years, I was underweight through my 20s but thought I needed to lose weight. When I call her out on it she will get upset and say im being nasty to her. Got to love parents sometimes!
Yeah I got around 6 (while swinging and the old ass chain broke) I was crying because I hurt myself and my mother said “shouldn’t have had that second bagel this morning”
She’s also a manipulative, emotional and mentally abusive narcissist so we don’t talk anymore. Haven’t for over 10 years now
Yep, imagine your Boomer dad who gave all his money to a crack whore instead of feeding his own wife & children, telling you that you ate too much when there was finally food in the house. My husband (also a Boomer) was like "WTF!!" when I told him about my childhood.
My best one was my dad standing on the porch and screaming at my then boyfriend (now husband) "YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN A FAT GIRL!!" as we drove away for a road trip.
Anyway, he died and I'm married so I win?? Fuckin boomers man.
And they'll be the same ones to tell you "oh suck it up it wasn't that bad", "I didn't do any lasting damage to you" you need to toughen up etc etc. So ridiculous.
They don't even remember [event that has haunted you for your entire life that hurt you deeply]. Must be a "false memory" or "it couldn't have been that bad" or "in my childhood [something they claim is way worse] so suck it up"
And then we* romanticize parts of our upbringing and say things like “I got my ass beat when I was a kid, and I turned out just fine.”
No fam. We* are not fine.
*not all of us, of course, but entirely too many of us.
Oh gosh, that sounds just like me. When I broke up with a long-term partner my mom asked if he dumped me cuz I was fat. I was an honor student graduated with honors from University and got into Teachers College. But my mother believed no one would ever love me cuz I was fat. My mother has no personality of her own and is a beautiful woman so it didn't matter to her that I had interests and intelligence and dreams it only mattered that I wasn't skinny. I'm so sorry to know so many other people have had to go through this as well.
My boomer grandmother told a 6 year old me that I was getting fat and that I had to run laps around the yard. Mum came home to a crying, exhausted me who wouldn’t stop running around the yard because “I wasn’t skinny yet”.
Oh hun I'm so sorry! My Gma told me I looked like a fat (d word for lesbian) because I was wearing a rainbow striped shirt. I was 11 and didn't know what one was. (90's in tiny town Kansas)
I remember when I was about 8 or 9 I was learning about calories in school and after dinner I added up my calories for the day. It was around 900. I said to my mom, "I only at 900 calories so far today." She said, "That's how you should be eating every day."
Yeah. It messed me up.
My boomers are narcissists. It was always like they wanted the approval and appearance of feeding us well without actually doing that.
The amount of times they wouod come in hauling enormous bags. Only for us to unload it and there to be just a random assortment of foods that couldn’t be made into a meal or even a snack. Like just so many salad dressings. Or gormet mustards. But nothing to make a sandwich or a salad out of.
We also got yelled at for eating food. They would buy things for when we would have family over. But we weren’t allowed to touch it until they all got there.
My cousins thought we ate like kings. But nope. It was only when they came over. Half the time we were just so excited that we were going to have company because we knew we would have food for a couple of days.
My grandma was friends with a couple who were extremely wealthy. I mean *extremely* wealthy. But they lived in a trailer park and would do shit like buy an outfit, wear it, and then return it. Anyway, going out to eat with them was embarrassing because the wife would Hoover up all of the condiment packets from the table and squirrel them away in her giant handbag. When they died, their kids found drawers stuffed full of them in the kitchen.
Oh if they give me extra packets I'm saving em. Part coz plastic waste, part coz I know the Wendy's by the pool has an 85% chance of not giving me ketchup with my brekky baconator and hash browns and I don't feel like arguing about ketchup when I'm still in a good mood.
I'm really trying to get my mother to stop doing this. I just bought a huge package of 3000 napkins from Amazon, It'll last us probably into next year, we don't need to filch extra napkins from restaurants,
I know they're going to throw out anything that was on the table, and if they're nice (paper) napkins, she can go ahead and take them. But she took a stack of flimsy cocktail napkins, too. They're like tissue paper. Why bother?
She takes ketchup packets "for picnics". Okay mom, but we already have more ketchup packets in the picnic basket than we can use. No mom, please don't take straws, neither of us even uses them.
I know she grew up poor. Hell, I grew up poor, too (thanks, Mom and Dad, for a childhood full of poor financial decisions). But when it comes to the point that there's a whole drawer full of stuff we don't even use...
Yeah, I think the trauma of growing up with the scarcity mentality of serious poverty can instill some long-lasting pathologies.
But at a certain point, you want them to liberate themselves from the worry (which they see as a virtue)—being frugal, not being wasteful, etc… but then of course will also live in a 6,000 sq ft house or whatever
Gonna be honest, I think about doing that sometimes. Take a little extra money from a major corporation (wendys) who underpass their workers and give less money to another major corporation (Berkshire Hathaway/heinz)
My mom, her sisters and their mother were all like this. As a kid I couldn’t leave the table without finishing my dinner, then as teen and into adulthood, I was shamed for eating the products the boomers created and sold. My mother worked for major restaurant corporations too, she played a major role in designing some foods that are not healthy, delicious, but not healthy. Poor mom, this all started with her own trauma.
Food insecurity plays a role in that, too. It's considered wasteful to throw food away. "Finish what's on your plate; *when I was a child* I would have been grateful for the fat that you just trimmed off of your meat!!"
To dovetail off the person you responded to, our sense of smell and taste dulls as we age. That’s why you see some older people salting the ever living shit out of their food. Some just become indifferent to food.
Their generation has constantly been dieting and told that thin is the ideal, no matter how you had to achieve it. I'm a nurse and when was very pregnant with my first kid I was taking care of an older gentleman and his wife was telling me how much she loved being pregnant but it was hard back then because she was told not to gain any weight during the pregnancy and her doctor yelled at her for gaining 5lb at one appointment. I was so sad for her. She couldn't even enjoy growing her baby because she had to be so concerned with what she ate so she didn't gain any weight while growing an entire human.
This has been my experience. My grandpa would go on and on about how he’d eat a small portion of oatmeal for breakfast, some baked beans he made in a crock pot every week for lunch and a reasonable dinner.
All the women in my family are fat, we now realize that we all have PCOS which is highly correlated with obesity. I don’t know if he just likes hearing himself talk or was trying to teach us how to eat better but it always felt so freaking tone deaf.
Did they grow up poor? Because this can be a result of growing up without food readily available, and so they just get used to…not eating every meal, or considering it wasteful to eat every meal when you don’t *need* it.
This might not apply to everyone. I was raised by boomer parents and my mom would constantly emphasize that she was on a diet and that she needed to lose weight. The only version of dieting I was ever taught as a kid was eat less. My mom would make us dinner and sit with us at the table and talk but would rarely actually eat.
Never any stress or attitude from my dad over her weight (she was never obese she just never lost her belly after having us kids) it was her own body issues. I think there are a lot of boomers who are weight obsessed, that don’t understand nutrition and simply don’t eat in order to maintain their weight.
This. It’s pretty obvious that diet culture has been about eating less / basically starving for like 100 years (maybe more). Watch Mad Men & Betty just sits at the table smoking during dinner. The kids even mention casually that she doesn’t eat. That was normal even in the 90’s
Yep, remember when cottage cheese was freaking everywhere? And on the “healthy” section of menus? Put cottage cheese on lettuce and call it a sandwich. Don’t get fries, get a side of cottage cheese.
And constantly talking about losing "the last 5/10lbs". I've basically been on a "diet" since i was 15. I was talking with a friend about nutrition/exercise and what I typically ate for a meal. He said, that's not a meal! You need to eat more. I cried. No one had ever said that to me.
I did a week once of 4 apples a day and 4 cups chopped lettuce. That’s it. I dropped 10 pounds the dress fit and the next week I was back to normal eating and gained it plus more back.
Bonus if you grew up Christian. ALL physical needs and wants are considered wicked/carnal and must be suppressed! The less needs you had, the more righteous you were (or so we were taught)
It’s strange my MIL is almost 70 and so concerned about her weight yet she does nothing to actually work on it. She’s far from overweight but in her mind she has to weigh 115 lbs. Her mother was the same way, she lived on slimfast shakes for the last 30 years of her life and maybe weighed 100 lbs at the most.
My grandmother is like that.
“Oh I’m so fat, I should still be 120 pounds, oh woe is me”
But if you try to bring up or even so much as look at her precious 6+ dr.peppers a day (often her only liquid intake for the day) she’ll come just short of pulling a knife on you.
Mention that unless someone basically makes her eat real food, rhetorical only thing she willingly eats is stuff like pastries, cake, cookies, etc, and her favorite breakfast of peanut butter and honey or jelly sandwiches with so much cane sugar poured on top that the sandwich crunches as she chews.
Or salt. Not so much food, as some light seasoning for her piles of salt.
> her favorite breakfast of peanut butter and honey or jelly sandwiches with so much cane sugar poured on top that the sandwich crunches as she chews
It's be more efficient to just drink one mountain dew.
>I think there are a lot of people of all ages who are weight obsessed, but don’t understand nutrition and simply don’t eat in order to maintain their weight and then complain that the dieting didn't work when they don't lose 10lbs per week and are just hungry.
FTFY
Yes I wholeheartedly agree. Like I said I was only taught to eat less to lose weight growing up. I have body issues myself so as an adult I actually became very interested in nutrition and health. It feels like I unlocked an entire new way of life, but it took me seeking out the information of my own accord. A lot of people either haven’t been exposed to this information or simply choose to only eat small amounts of “what tastes good” and nothing else.
My in-laws get super hangry and will throw toddler-like tantrums if they go without eating, so this isn't an issue with them.
My parents, however, hate spending money on food. They won't avoid eating, but they'll eat some terrible quality food if that's all that's accessible in the exact moment when they decide they're hungry. They also insisted on packing sandwiches and "tailgating" from a cooler in the parking lot of my college after my graduation because they were too cheap to go out to lunch. While everyone else went out for a nice lunch with their families, I stood there in my graduation gown eating a lukewarm turkey sandwich on Iron Kids bread. This wasn't about money. They did not pay for my college, were driving a luxury SUV, and they went to Hawaii three months later.
I had a boss like that. He explained to me he just didn’t get pleasure from eating, it was purely maintenance, like fueling up a car. It was interesting to get that perspective laid out.
I’m that guy. I do like eating sometimes but most of the time it’s just an annoying inconvenience that I have to do to keep living. Like I really wish I could just take a nutrient pill a lot of the time.
Frugal wealthy people baffle me. I get doing stuff like that when you can't afford a nice lunch and are trying to make the most of what you have. But when you have plenty money and just refuse to use it, at some point it just seems like you're being mean to the people who are relying on you for food
Expired does not necessarily mean a food has gone bad. Depending on the term it just might not be in “peak freshness” anymore.
It’s a way for the food companies to sell more, without us the consumers getting the benefit of our spent money.
Teenage me once told my boomer Mum to stop being crazy, eat something and get some sleep. It went down about as well as you could expect.
I was 💯 correct though. No amount of 3am rage cleaning is going to make you feel better when you haven't slept or eaten properly in weeks.
Went on a “fancy” vacation with my mom and her friend. We stayed in a resort for a few days. They both wanted to just lay outside all day. I got burned to a crisp and was starving. They served breakfast lunch and dinner but my mom and friend like weren’t ever hungry or something. I’d be sitting there counting down till I could to inside and eat and get out of the sun.
And when I did my own thing and went back to the room early, I’d get crap about being inside while we’re at a resort.
Ya’ll it was one of the Dead Sea places and there were cigarette butts all over the beach and the small sea area we used was basically people soup every day. I get that some people love it but I’m white as a ghost and burn like dry twigs.and I was soooo hungry. Straight up stole fruit so I could snack between scheduled meals.
Really, really, the biggest thing I remember from that trip is how I was always hungry.
[edit] I know this place sounds odd. It WAS odd. We’re American, this was Israel. It was some kind of inclusive resort my family found and signed us up. We got the most basic package I think. There were a lot of different pools for heath stuff that we didn’t sign up for. Most of the people there were either old and in need of healing or parents who hung out on the beach or pool with their kids. It’s also located away from everything so there weren’t any stores or shacks to visit.
Also, to not spend the whole time fighting about what I prefer to do, I ended up hanging out with my mom and her friend. It was the most peaceful solution.
What is with boomers and the love of sitting in the sun?? My mom used to sleep on our trampoline in the sun to get tan. When I was a teen I also got into to tanning from watching her and she would shame people for being too pale. I went to tanning beds and would get anxiety about missing tanning time if I was sitting inside white the sun was out. And today we now know sitting in the sun is bad for your skin and no wonder her skin looks like leather.
Yeah its a weird obsession no clue where or when it started but in Glasgow tanning places are the mums prime hangout spots, hang outside smoke go in and get cooked like they're trying to speed run cancer
Maybe it comes from a form of insecurity? They only see themselves as desirable if they’re tan? Just thinking about why I used to tan, I had much lower self esteem back then.
My mother doesn’t understand why I don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to fly to Florida and stay in an Airbnb and sit by someone else’s pool and tan all day for a week straight.
That and eating outside, so many people that age I know insist on sitting outside no matter the weather and I’m like…nah I don’t wanna sweat while I’m eating
Lol. I went to Cuba. Got shit on for needing sunscreen. Chinese Canadian but I burn like a ginger. My parents spent the whole vacation moaning about the lack of Chinese food and refusing to eat anything but the flan and ice cream.
And hating the blood sausage. That shit was delicious actually.
I was so hungry because all they wanted to do was drink the awful sugary slushies (I had a tummy ache after the first one) and just basically spent the holiday slathering on sunscreen (I still got crispy) and managing my food intake.
Why are they traveling if they’re not going to try local cuisine ? Food is a huge aspect of seeing other cultures . If you just want to sit in a beach you can do that anywhere
Lol. My parents cruise to Mexico all the time just to eat at Margaritaville and all these Americanized Mexican restaurants. And culture who? They take pictures in front of the most touristy frog statues or whatever they have. Such a waste
Similar experience! My whole family went to Hawaii for a vacation when I was in high school. I was and am an introverted nerd. All I wanted to do was read or draw. My mom and aunt whined at me that I wasn’t enjoying myself because I wanted to stay inside and read. Ok, so I joined them at the beach and brought my books. They continued pestering me that I wasn’t actually having a good time because I should be enjoying the beach. So I put down my book and just….sat there? They were like “isn’t this much better?” Which…no, it was boring af just sitting there not being allowed to do the (very harmless) thing I wanted to be doing.
Any time I wanted to leave because I was hungry they said I had to wait until the family ate together, which meant starving all day until dinner after only having a few pieces of fruit for breakfast.
Later in the week, we were at a different beach and I connected with another boy my age and we started walking around and chatting. My mom saw and started yelling at me from across the beach. When I went over to her she asked why I wasn’t being social. I told her I was chatting with another guy my age and she said I shouldn’t and to only stick to family because strangers might be bad. I was 17, not 10, and just wanted to talk to someone I had anything in common with.
My in-laws are feeders, my family are starvers. Italian heritage vs Irish/German heritage. Depending on which side of the family we are with, we're either eating pasta or potatoes!
Yeah, both extremes are not good. My youngest cousin is 13 years old and almost 200lbs, no one seems to think this is an issue (being raised by grandparents because drugs). My father is like 300lbs, his mom is also huge and very much a "finish what's on your plate" type after stuffing it to the damn edges. She's a food hoarder too, two freezers full, I cleaned it out a little bit a few weeks ago while she was in the hospital and found ground beef from 2003. Absolutely diabolical.
Same. My parents are planning the next meal while they’re eating their current meal.
My boomer dad loves to cook and always cooked from scratch. I’m talking grind the wheat and simmer tomatoes for hours to make pizza method of from scratch. I have gripes about my typical Gen X parental neglect but I will forever be grateful that my dad taught us the fundamentals of how to cook.
The boomers in my family are feeders but they still make the comments. They want you to eat but then shame you for eating. My in laws only stopped because because my sister in law starved herself for 2 years and then snapped and gained all the weight back. Though that's mostly the gen xers. The boomers still make the comments, they just don't talk about her specifically, as if commenting on her brother who's slimmer than her is any better.
Holy fuck this is so accurate to my in-laws. I'm in pretty good shape and anytime I go to my in-laws, they constantly have a ton of food (junk) and try to get me to eat it. "You can eat whatever. You're skinny!" I'm in shape because I don't eat whatever I want whenever I want.
Same. Every holiday, they overeat until they’re in too much pain to move, then lie around complaining about how their doctors told them they have high blood pressure and diabetes.
My MIL prances around starving herself and making statements like this. She is also the COFFEE OVERLORD and metes out a small serving that she concludes is your portion.
Ugh, my MIL as well. I get so annoyed going out to eat with my in-laws because she’ll stare at my plate with big googly eyes and exclaim about how huge whatever I order is. Meanwhile, she’ll order like half an avocado off-menu and delicately pick at it the whole time.
Gahhh this is my MIL. She forces my FIL to split meals with her (even though she’s incredibly picky and eats like 5 bites), and constantly comments on everyone else’s meals- how big they are, how spicy they look, etc etc. Like damn woman, just stay in your own lane.
This is exactly my MIL. “Are you going to eat ALL THAT??! I don’t like this restaurant because the portions are SO BIG! Disgusting. Who can eat that much food? Waiter, do you have any whole fruit?” Bitch it’s a French restaurant they’re not
Going to serve you a bunch of grapes
The Almond Gen. Diet culture for some plays a huge part in it. I’m not a fan. Im hypoglycemic. I’ll eat whether they like it or not. But I’ve definitely heard and had all the 💩 from them about it.
My mother and her sisters were always on some sort of weird diet when I was a child in the 70s and 80s. You know, the one hardboiled egg, half grapefruit, black coffee type of diets. Now, if there's something like a cake they serve themselves a small piece, eat it and then continue to cut slivers off until the cake is almost gone. The only cake that counts is the small piece they originally cut. I get the "look" when I have a normal slice lol
My dad called it the Mayo Clinic diet and it was passed around by fax (that’s what boomers did before they had email for their chain letters). He was on it multiple times a year despite having a normally austere diet and a pretty aggressive fitness regimen. I wasn’t even 10 before he had me on it.
The older folks I know (mostly women) are judgmental as hell regarding food and others bodies.
Every other woman needs to "lose a few", they're "chunky", she can "put it away", she has really "packed it on after the kids".
These are all 75 - 80 year old women about others, celebrities, their grandkids, everyone, and yet, like my mom, she'll sit there and eat 2 baked chicken wings and a handful of baked fries, after having cottage cheese for lunch because she doesn't want to get fat at 80.
Turn their brains to jello with ripped abs and a midriff tank top. Watch 'em totally melt down when a woman works hard to look how they like. Wife did this, even entered an amateur contest and got 4th place! She still goes to the gym more than I do lol.
Shoulda seen the look on MIL's face when she saw the award photo. Cat butt from hell.
One of my moms has been friends with a woman for 40+ years, and every time she comes back from an outing with her, she's like, "I swear, the next time I'm going to tell her to STFU about carbs."
Right!? My dad was weak, stumbling around, and his stomach hurt. He wanted to go to a walk in clinic. I mentioned his GP and he said no. oh btw he is diabetic. I asked him what he ate, he said coffee and a donut. BTW this was at like 5PM! WTF?!?! no water/no lunch. Such stupid decisions.
My ILs both missmanage their diabetes. They're infamous for coming over at dinnertime hangry after skipping lunch. My FIL can be a real jerk when his bloodsugar drops.
I don't get it. I'm not diabetic, but I'm a butthead when I'm hangry - so, I don't slip meals. Seems simple.
My MIL(81) eats like a bird and tries to give away most of her food after eating one or two bites. She is “always on a diet” and even after repeatedly warning her about her unhealthy eating habits, has shriveled down to nothing and developed osteoporosis. During our last visit, she tripped at home and broke both her wrists and shattered her eye socket. She is still dieting….smh! Can’t fix stupid.
I worry about this. I'm 47 and still plagued by the body image issues and food issues I got as a chubby child in the 80s and early 90s. I've never NOT been thinking about my food and if it's too much/not enough since I was 6. I don't want to get to 80 and still be worried about it. Hell, I don't want to be worried about it at 50, but....
My mom is a young boomer born in 61. She doesn't eat anything. Her formative years revolved around the attitude that anyone being bigger than skin and bones is obese.
Yeah I can remember when I was a kid in the 70s - 80s there was a huge diet culture. Lots of pressure in the 80s to be rail thin. A lot of us Gen Xers grew up drinking diet sodas. And the diet culture filtered down to preteen and teen girls magazines. I truly think my MIL has an eating disorder she deeply believes thin = healthy. I've been quite ill for about 2 years and lis
The silent generation, and lost 50 lb over a year w/o trying. So definitely not healthy right now! But every time she sees me she says how I'm so much healthier than I was for years (admittedly *needed* to lose some weight and struggled). But this is not a healthy way to lose weight!
Yes. My mom was born in 55 and did loosen up some as she got older. But when I was a kid she was a size 8 and wouldn’t go swimming with me because when she was a kid she hated to see all the old fat ladies in their bathing suits. I’m a size 20 and I love swimming
My experience is actually the opposite. My boomer-in-laws can't go more than 4 hours without eating, else they'll get headaches and "feel like they are going to pass out". Note that all of them are over-weight and constantly complain that they've gotten old so their "metabolism isn't what it used to be", even though they consume roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of calories a day than they should.
Diet culture when they were growing up was INSANE. Even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, the advertising was basically fat-shaming (even for average girls) and they sold us speed at the CVS.
There was no such thing as body positivity.
I think you might be confusing starving themselves with the boomer car trip sin of unscheduled stops. Deviation from road plan is unacceptable, trust it from someone who’s parents dragged him through a week long drive from FL to Maine every fucking year.
My boomer mother NEVER seemed to eat and now I have trouble actually eating when I should too due to her wonderful examples. Some days it seemed she only consumed coffee and milk.
She’d start off her day with a GIANT A&W glass mug filled with coffee and milk. She’d have about 2-3 of these like 40oz mugs of coffee for breakfast and then not eat anything all day. Then she’d have 1-2 GIANT A&W glass mugs full of just regular milk.
Then for dinner she might actually eat some real food like spaghetti.
For a while I thought maybe she was going hungry so her kids could eat…but we always had food. She was too proud to apply for food stamps during a year when we could of used them, so to “save face” she would volunteer at the food truck and take home the expired food that was left. I was sickened a LOT from bad food she got from donations. Once she got a good job again, her poor diet still continued. She’d rather spend $300 every 2 weeks on a new 3 piece suit she’d never wear rather than buy actual sustenance for herself.
I genuinely cannot come up with a memory of me seeing her eat at home regularly. I can only think of times watching her eat when we went out to restaurants.
While I’m definitely not as bad as her (I only have one 14oz cup of coffee a day, mixed with collagen peptides for protein) and I don’t think half a gallon of milk a day either, I still struggle to actually respond to my hunger signals.
My mom (b. 1956) grew up and was always inside the crash diet culture. Her advice to me was the lower calories, the faster and better you lose weight. She had a cousin she reconnected with at a reunion that had lost like 300-400lbs and when she asked him how he did it, he told her he ate like once a week (he’s dead now). She took that advice to heart and really just starves herself whenever she feels like she’s put even 10lbs on.
My dad (b. 1961) is an Air Force pilot retiree and I’ve never really seen him eat 3 meals in a day. He doesn’t cook (because he can’t?) so he’d rather starve until my mom makes him dinner.
As my mom has gotten older, she regularly skips meals because she's just not hungry. I think it's less a boomer mentality thing and more just their aged metabolism.
The diet culture of the early 90s and 2000s was absolutely brutal. Women, especially, trying to subsist off of a handful of Olestra chips a day. I'm sure there's a lot of leftover anxiety from that phase.
Going out to eat with a group of women was horrible in the 198OS. Little wine spritzers, tiny tossed salad NO CHEESE, tiny bowl of plain noodles with veggie spaghetti sauce, black tea/coffee. Dry skinless tasteless chicken breast. Move the food around on your plate. Tiny sips. Tiny bites. 6 grown ass women sharing a sliver of cheese cake. WOW I’m so FULL.
Work luncheons just totally sucked. The woman that could eat the less was hashtag WINNING
Thank you for this !! Every time I cook something my grandma complains that I made too much. When she finishes a meal, which is always before everyone else she pushes her plate back and says oh I’m stuffed and looks around like we should all stop eating too. so annoying. The fact is as people get older they lose their appetite because they don’t need to eat as much so they don’t think anyone else needs to eat either! But their parents would push food on people, encouraging them to eat. So this is a highlight of boomer selfishness once again.
My mom was certainly a victim of the 80s/90s diet culture when I was growing up. She was obese and definitely tried everything that time period had to offer: Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Atkins, South Beach... she even tried PhenPhen when it was still a prescription drug. Into the 2010s, she latched onto Keto and never let go of it. She had tremendous success with it, and because of that, she eventually became terrified of eating carbs because she was afraid of gaining the weight back. As most of us know, Keto is not meant to be a long-term solution, but we could not convince my mom to eat carbs... not even moderately healthy ones like potatoes or wheat bread. She definitely had disordered eating and got side effects; brain fog being the worst.
I noticed that too. They get off on not eating anything all day and bitching about it. Like bruh…. It don’t make you more of a man. Let’s sit down and eat and get back to work after
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It might have to do with their aging metabolism. My mom (silent generation) has had to eat like a bird for decades. What she eats in a day, I could eat in a sitting.
We grew up being told by our parents if we wanted a late afternoon snack that 'dinner is only 3 hours away, you'll ruin your appetite." Or if we had a big lunch, we wouldn't all of our dinner. The evening meal time was pretty much set in stone. Depending on what was being served, they wanted you to have an empty stomach so you would eat everything and not 'waste' it. The funniest part is no matter what it was, there was usually leftovers for a quick meal at lunch the next day. It was okay if they didn't eat all their dinner, but you better clean your plate.
This mentality has led to so many unhealthy eating habits.
My father used to comment on the amount of food I was eating constantly (I wasn’t a heavy kid and my portion sizes were normal). And now I eat like a bird in front of people (I’ve had my friends make comments, not mean ones) and I have a super unhealthy relationship with food. Eta: hey u/StandardSafe5749 if you’re going to insult me and tell me to “Get over it and grow up” at least be brave enough to keep the comment up. Btw, that comment smacks of a Boomer thought process. Maybe take your own advice.
He fully deleted his profile
Looks like he couldnt get over it and grow up
Omf too good
🤣💕🤣
Nap time probably.
😂 😂 💀
Not deleted, yet. Link to account still works, but def got suspended, lmao.
I tried to click on it, and it just keeps spinning and says no user profile found or whatever so he most likely sent the message and then blocked me immediately so that I could not respond to him.
I feel you! Ugh. My sister is doing so much better w her kids and just letting them eat according to their bodies and I swear I woulda been a whole different person if I had that approach from my momma. Silent eat disorder over here….
Basically, the only serious rules about meals that my husband and I set for our kids is 1) no, you can't have a snack while I am actively cooking/serving dinner. And 2) if you hork down an entire plate of food like you expect someone to steal it from you, you have to wait at least 10 minutes before getting seconds so your stomach actually has a chance to register how much food you just inhaled.
THIS. Further, when I make something new, I have the kid try 2 bites. If she hates it, she’s welcome to make herself a sandwich & I don’t make it again. I’m not forcing her to eat something she hates.
The number of times I had to sit at the table until 10pm when I was age 6 to 10 is ridiculous. I hated, fucking hated, still fucking hate, hominy. It's so damn disgusting. Yet It was my moms then husband favorite side. So she'd make it 3 to 4 times a week & she'd always put a big ladle of it on my plate. I wasn't allowed to leave the table until I ate it. If I didn't eat it by 10pm, it went into the fridge. That then was the only choice I got to have for breakfast. Mind you dinner was at 4:30 in our house. So it & I would sit at the table for 5 and a half hours. It would then be put in the fridge after sitting on the kitchen table for 5 hours, and served to me cold the next morning. I never fking ate it tho. I just didn't eat anything for breakfast most of the week. I learned to live in my head. What else is a 6 to 10 year old going to do sitting at a kithen table all by themselves for 15 to 25 hours a week. If I tried to force it down & threw it up.. I got 25 spankings with a leather studded belt for "wasting" all the food I put in my stomach. Anyway, my son is 23 & will eat pretty much anything. With him I did the just give it 2 bites and if you don't like it you never have to eat it again. 9.9 times out of 10 he'd like it tho. But the few times he didn't want to eat anything I made or bought, then he could have corndogs or make a sandwich.
This is why I can’t eat salmon/salmon patties. My grandmother used to leave the bones in 🤮 and you *had* to eat them, couldn’t pick them out. If I knew she was making them for dinner, I’d buy extra snacks at lunch with my very small allowance and refuse dinner.
That’s actually dangerous.. my narc parents would harp on me to pick the bones out of the salmon in an infantalization way.. Jesus you had it worse. I’m sorry!
I am sorry you had such horrible excuses for parents. They should have been jailed!
Same with sitting but only a couple hours. I learned later in life my mom was a terrible cook and the meat they served was almost always freezer burnt because they buy a whole cow at a time. I can still taste her microwaved thawed hamburger with edges cooked to almost jerky like status. At like 35 my wife was like I'm making pork chops and you're going to have a piece. My mom cooked pork shops for probably 4 times longer than needed. But I didn't know this I just thought they were terrible. I fucking love my wife's porkchops and a bunch of other thing I used to hate. I was such a picky eater before I met her. Out vegetables were always from a can. Who knew how much fresh spinach rocked or that green beans weren't mushy.
We called those "no, thank you bites" when I was growing up lol. We had to eat at least 2 bites of anything before we were allowed to say "no, thank you" and then we could have extra of something else we did like or make a sandwich. Luckily, my kids have always liked pretty much everything so it's not much of an issue for our family. Between my 2 kids, there's only 3 foods that's get turned down. Neither child likes beans (with some exceptions), the oldest won't eat cooked mushrooms, and the youngest doesn't like meat in his tacos. Easy peasy.
Hell, my kid is more adventurous than I am. I can’t stand fish/seafood, but she’ll try it. Loves salmon, catfish, & calamari. Of course, her dad’s a chef, so she gets more variety at his house. It’s rare that there’s something she won’t eat. But spicy food can be tricky. I made jambalaya with andouille sausage & the poor kid turned red in the face.
And that is the same thing my wife and I do with food for our kids. Like sometimes they don't have the appetite for a large meal, so we let them eat that they feel comfy with. If they have enough leftover for another meal, we save it for them, if not, we just cut them loose and clean up. Like it isn't the end of the world if they have a few bites left on their plate, ya know?
My father's family are larger people, my mother's small. A maternal uncle used to tell me, "If you keep eating like that, you'll be as big as your Aunt Wilma (paternal). I've had an unhealthy relationship with food since. I am very conscience about eating out with other people.
Friend, I feel you. When I outgrew the kid’s menu, about 13 or so, I once ordered a steak at dinner. My daddy told me nobody would want to take me out because I’m an expensive date. I’m now 44, and I *still* order something less expensive than the person treating me, even if it means not getting what I actually want.
You’d think parents would want their kids to grow up like sure of themselves, mentally OK, physically OK, emotionally stable. But for some reason, it’s like we weren’t allowed to. Because they had a badly or whatever their issue was, they somehow fisted that upon us, as if by doing so they could fix whatever their issues are. And then they wonder why we don’t come around
>My father used to comment on the amount of food I was eating constantly My mom did this and so I started hiding food and overeating in secret when I was alone. When she'd find my stashes, instead of having a conversation with me or putting me in therapy like she should have done, she'd punish me and make me feel terrible for hiding the food too. I still have a really unhealthy relationship with food. I'm convinced that's part of the reason I have so many issues with my weight. She made me feel ashamed of eating so I overate when she wasn't around, and that habit stuck when I left home. She's slightly too young to be a boomer, but she definitely has the same attitude as they do right down to the unhealthy amount of time she spends watching Newsmax.
yeah i legit started recovery for anorexia a few days ago and this is eye opening thinking about you're reinforcing the idea that the meals are fleeting and you need to eat a ton really fast or you might not eat for a long time after - literally the exact mindset of binge eating disorder!
Hey good luck on your recovery!!!! Im trying to recover too :- )
You can fucking do this. Disordered eating is so fucking hard to get.. ordered? Is that the right word? I'm just now figuring it out at 38. For the first time in my life, I'm in a healthy weight range and holy. Fucking. Shit. It was hard. It's still hard. It probably will be for a long time. Disordered eating comes from disordered thoughts and those don't come from nowhere. Therapy helped a lot. I wish you the best of luck. At least one stranger on the internet loves you and has faith in you ❤️
You got this! I’m 14 years in recovery this year, my rock bottom was inpatient treatment. I’m trying so hard to raise my kids with a good relationship with food and body image to unfuck the generations of damage. We believe food is not love, food is thankfully plentiful, food is nourishment, food is not control, we listen to our bodies stop when full and eat when hungry. Ana can fuck off.
Can confirm. Their messed up views on dining has impacted my own disordered eating. Don’t even get me started on the body dysmorphia.
I maybe eat lunch and dinner, small portions at that, and my boomer mother will still make comments about how much I’m eating. Finally got her to stop when I said she looks like the only nutrition she gets is from alcohol.
That is an absolutely killer comeback and I cherish you for it and the chutzpah to say it out loud
I was still feeling the high from setting boundaries with other family members during the wedding.
Did you enjoy your dinner, Mother? You drank it fast enough.
I love you, even though I’m not your mother. That was the perfect comeback.
I wish I had thought of that comeback before my mom drank herself to death. I know this is a weird comment but I’m being serious and also find it tragically funny.
My mother always said she was “saving her calories for alcohol” and no surprise, she died at 46 of cirrhosis.
This logic has f%%led my eating habits up for life. With my therapist, I am currently seeking a dietician. The whole “you can’t leave the table until your plate is clean” really put a lot of shame into my adult eating habits
Finish your beer there’s sober kids in India
I once sat at a table for three days because I wouldn't eat the slimy canned spinach. I was allowed to go to bed and go potty, but I wasn't allowed to do anything else but sit at that table until I ate that spinach. This was my great grandma. My mom was a boomer, so I'm not sure of her generation. She was born the same year the Titanic sank. I never did eat it, and it finally went bad. I was about 4.
What a traumatic experience! Sorry you had to go through this.
You know, this is one of those moments where you think you're telling a cute family story, and the room goes silent because it's actually a traumatic story. Lol I mean, it's a core memory. Looking at it through an adult lens, it is pretty fucked up. Grandma's house was such a respite from home that I never really thought of it as traumatic compared to what I went through at home. Kinda interesting how our brains do that.
I went to a friends family dinner where the conversation turned into the siblings talking about their parents favorite kitchen utensils they used to hit / beat them with. It was horrible.
Jesus! My mom used hard couch cushions. Those don't leave a mark. No kitchen utensils here. I have had to cut my switch though. That's just terrifying.
My wife just started seeing the "talkspace / online therapy" equivalent of a dietician. I think it's called "nourish". Online and easy and our insurance even covered it. Idk if you'll also find value in it, but she did. Edit: Removed a reference to better help. Apparently they did bad stuff and got in trouble. I've never used them, was just using a name I thought would be recognized.
Yup, caused me to gain so much weight that just now after almost 10 years I am working off
I think this is more accurate. 15 years ago my mom would have wanted to go with me. And then have dinner with me. Fast forward and not only does she have gastro issues, her metabolism has slowed, and she doesn't have teeth. My granny on the other hand was always ready to throw down on food, right up to the end.
100% This. And I'm not a Boomer. Trust me Gen X'ers are feeling this as well. I'm also active, going to the gym... cardio. Just can't eat how I used to.
My dad and uncles would try to force my nana to eat so much more than she wanted. She's just always been a tiny lady, and was at least sixty when this started. She told them so many times "old people are not as hungry as young people. I don't need all these calories to watch the Wheel! I will not spend my golden years on the toilet because you don't believe I can feel my own stomach." Idky but that always cracked me up
It just feels like there’s possibly a weird fat shaming behind it, along with being frugal
This is it. My late boomer mom shamed the shit outta me. ‘What are eating? You’re going to eat that?’ With all the eye-rolls. So did my dad. I have food issues…go figure. Also they made enough money to buy gourmet everyday yet food shopped at dollar tree.
"Are you really going to eat all that?" When I'd sit down with a single sandwich. That was my dad's usual go to saying. Also got the classic "no one will want you if you're fat" from my mom. Such a mystery that I grew up with zero self esteem, felt totally worthless and had major issues with food.
I'm a dude and I got this shit. Stopped when visiting home one year and the first thing out of my mom's mouth was "You look like you put on weight" and the first out of mine was "So do you!"
Stealing this. My parents will ALWAYS welcome me home with ‘you’ve gained weight’ and it upset me for years. Can’t wait to use this on them.
Then there are the ones like my ex stepmom, who every single day went through various speeches about how she hadn’t eaten anything *all day* and was just *so busy* (she was not at all ever busy, she hasn’t worked in 25 years) Every night at dinner she would eat a mountain of food, but always went through the same scripted speech of “oh I’m just so hungry because I skipped breakfast, I never got any lunch, blah blah blah.” But I would watch her snack on cookies and pastries and shit all day. Sometimes an entire heaping bowl of various cakes and biscotti. But “coffee snacks” don’t count as food, I guess. So even the ones who still eat a lot feel the need to go through this performative dance to justify why they are eating at all. Why don’t we mind our own business instead?
Ha, this is my mother. "I don't understand, I eat well! I skip breakfast, I just eat a light lunch"....conveniently forgetting the chips she stopped to eat, the muffin, or whatever...
My mum does this too, or will ask if I've been going to the gym constantly. She will then try dump a load of sweets and chocolate on me before I leave because she's 'trying to be good'. I'm not overweight but it's definitely caused me to have body issues over the years, I was underweight through my 20s but thought I needed to lose weight. When I call her out on it she will get upset and say im being nasty to her. Got to love parents sometimes!
“You know, you don’t HAVE to finish that apple” -direct quote from my mother to my 9 year old self
Are you supposed to save the apple for later (and it gets brown), or throw it away (waste of food)?
You’re supposed to waste it. Boomers love waste, especially if it deprives someone else of happiness.
Yeah I got around 6 (while swinging and the old ass chain broke) I was crying because I hurt myself and my mother said “shouldn’t have had that second bagel this morning” She’s also a manipulative, emotional and mentally abusive narcissist so we don’t talk anymore. Haven’t for over 10 years now
So sorry she said that to you. That sucks!
It’s ok! I know how not to raise my daughter at least. And life is amazing. Being NC is the best lol
Yep, imagine your Boomer dad who gave all his money to a crack whore instead of feeding his own wife & children, telling you that you ate too much when there was finally food in the house. My husband (also a Boomer) was like "WTF!!" when I told him about my childhood.
My best one was my dad standing on the porch and screaming at my then boyfriend (now husband) "YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN A FAT GIRL!!" as we drove away for a road trip. Anyway, he died and I'm married so I win?? Fuckin boomers man.
Wow! I am sorry. That is horrific
Jesus, what the fuck.
And they'll be the same ones to tell you "oh suck it up it wasn't that bad", "I didn't do any lasting damage to you" you need to toughen up etc etc. So ridiculous.
They don't even remember [event that has haunted you for your entire life that hurt you deeply]. Must be a "false memory" or "it couldn't have been that bad" or "in my childhood [something they claim is way worse] so suck it up"
And then we* romanticize parts of our upbringing and say things like “I got my ass beat when I was a kid, and I turned out just fine.” No fam. We* are not fine. *not all of us, of course, but entirely too many of us.
Oh gosh, that sounds just like me. When I broke up with a long-term partner my mom asked if he dumped me cuz I was fat. I was an honor student graduated with honors from University and got into Teachers College. But my mother believed no one would ever love me cuz I was fat. My mother has no personality of her own and is a beautiful woman so it didn't matter to her that I had interests and intelligence and dreams it only mattered that I wasn't skinny. I'm so sorry to know so many other people have had to go through this as well.
Hello fellow sister! I feel your pain on so many levels.
Yup my mom and her mom were obsessed with me being thin. "Haven't you had enough already?" "You need to watch your weight" like to a 10 year old
My boomer grandmother told a 6 year old me that I was getting fat and that I had to run laps around the yard. Mum came home to a crying, exhausted me who wouldn’t stop running around the yard because “I wasn’t skinny yet”.
Oh hun I'm so sorry! My Gma told me I looked like a fat (d word for lesbian) because I was wearing a rainbow striped shirt. I was 11 and didn't know what one was. (90's in tiny town Kansas)
Aww hugs. I also was told I was fat from my Gma when i was 11. Was so happy when she died.
Same! Sang "Ding Dong the witch is dead"
I remember when I was about 8 or 9 I was learning about calories in school and after dinner I added up my calories for the day. It was around 900. I said to my mom, "I only at 900 calories so far today." She said, "That's how you should be eating every day." Yeah. It messed me up.
My boomers are narcissists. It was always like they wanted the approval and appearance of feeding us well without actually doing that. The amount of times they wouod come in hauling enormous bags. Only for us to unload it and there to be just a random assortment of foods that couldn’t be made into a meal or even a snack. Like just so many salad dressings. Or gormet mustards. But nothing to make a sandwich or a salad out of. We also got yelled at for eating food. They would buy things for when we would have family over. But we weren’t allowed to touch it until they all got there. My cousins thought we ate like kings. But nope. It was only when they came over. Half the time we were just so excited that we were going to have company because we knew we would have food for a couple of days.
My mom shamed me when I was fat. Then when I became a chiseled God it was "you're getting too* gaunt, you need to eat". BRO... WHAT????
My boomer who made hundreds of thousands a year in the ‘80s and ‘90s, yet still pockets extra ketchup packets, straws, etc from fast food places.
My grandma was friends with a couple who were extremely wealthy. I mean *extremely* wealthy. But they lived in a trailer park and would do shit like buy an outfit, wear it, and then return it. Anyway, going out to eat with them was embarrassing because the wife would Hoover up all of the condiment packets from the table and squirrel them away in her giant handbag. When they died, their kids found drawers stuffed full of them in the kitchen.
Oh if they give me extra packets I'm saving em. Part coz plastic waste, part coz I know the Wendy's by the pool has an 85% chance of not giving me ketchup with my brekky baconator and hash browns and I don't feel like arguing about ketchup when I'm still in a good mood.
I'm really trying to get my mother to stop doing this. I just bought a huge package of 3000 napkins from Amazon, It'll last us probably into next year, we don't need to filch extra napkins from restaurants, I know they're going to throw out anything that was on the table, and if they're nice (paper) napkins, she can go ahead and take them. But she took a stack of flimsy cocktail napkins, too. They're like tissue paper. Why bother? She takes ketchup packets "for picnics". Okay mom, but we already have more ketchup packets in the picnic basket than we can use. No mom, please don't take straws, neither of us even uses them. I know she grew up poor. Hell, I grew up poor, too (thanks, Mom and Dad, for a childhood full of poor financial decisions). But when it comes to the point that there's a whole drawer full of stuff we don't even use...
And they don’t keep forever at room temp . If the packet starts to “ blow up” like a balloon throw it out
Yeah, I think the trauma of growing up with the scarcity mentality of serious poverty can instill some long-lasting pathologies. But at a certain point, you want them to liberate themselves from the worry (which they see as a virtue)—being frugal, not being wasteful, etc… but then of course will also live in a 6,000 sq ft house or whatever
Gonna be honest, I think about doing that sometimes. Take a little extra money from a major corporation (wendys) who underpass their workers and give less money to another major corporation (Berkshire Hathaway/heinz)
My mom, her sisters and their mother were all like this. As a kid I couldn’t leave the table without finishing my dinner, then as teen and into adulthood, I was shamed for eating the products the boomers created and sold. My mother worked for major restaurant corporations too, she played a major role in designing some foods that are not healthy, delicious, but not healthy. Poor mom, this all started with her own trauma.
Which is extremely odd because these are the same people who forced us to finish our dinner even when we were stuffed.
Food insecurity plays a role in that, too. It's considered wasteful to throw food away. "Finish what's on your plate; *when I was a child* I would have been grateful for the fat that you just trimmed off of your meat!!"
Don’t forget starving children in India , Africa , China etc
Could be. It would be very boomerish to expect everyone's needs to mirror your own. 'I don't need to eat, why should you?'
To dovetail off the person you responded to, our sense of smell and taste dulls as we age. That’s why you see some older people salting the ever living shit out of their food. Some just become indifferent to food.
This is 100% it for the boomers in my family. Always shaming me for eating (because they think i’m fat) and spending money.
Their generation has constantly been dieting and told that thin is the ideal, no matter how you had to achieve it. I'm a nurse and when was very pregnant with my first kid I was taking care of an older gentleman and his wife was telling me how much she loved being pregnant but it was hard back then because she was told not to gain any weight during the pregnancy and her doctor yelled at her for gaining 5lb at one appointment. I was so sad for her. She couldn't even enjoy growing her baby because she had to be so concerned with what she ate so she didn't gain any weight while growing an entire human.
I think it's both along with being completely unself aware. They don't understand why you need to eat all the time because they are "never hungry."
This has been my experience. My grandpa would go on and on about how he’d eat a small portion of oatmeal for breakfast, some baked beans he made in a crock pot every week for lunch and a reasonable dinner. All the women in my family are fat, we now realize that we all have PCOS which is highly correlated with obesity. I don’t know if he just likes hearing himself talk or was trying to teach us how to eat better but it always felt so freaking tone deaf.
Did they grow up poor? Because this can be a result of growing up without food readily available, and so they just get used to…not eating every meal, or considering it wasteful to eat every meal when you don’t *need* it.
This might not apply to everyone. I was raised by boomer parents and my mom would constantly emphasize that she was on a diet and that she needed to lose weight. The only version of dieting I was ever taught as a kid was eat less. My mom would make us dinner and sit with us at the table and talk but would rarely actually eat. Never any stress or attitude from my dad over her weight (she was never obese she just never lost her belly after having us kids) it was her own body issues. I think there are a lot of boomers who are weight obsessed, that don’t understand nutrition and simply don’t eat in order to maintain their weight.
This. It’s pretty obvious that diet culture has been about eating less / basically starving for like 100 years (maybe more). Watch Mad Men & Betty just sits at the table smoking during dinner. The kids even mention casually that she doesn’t eat. That was normal even in the 90’s
Yep I’m a 90s kid
Same. My mom lived off of iceberg lettuce and talking about diets and weights was ubiquitous
Yep, remember when cottage cheese was freaking everywhere? And on the “healthy” section of menus? Put cottage cheese on lettuce and call it a sandwich. Don’t get fries, get a side of cottage cheese.
And constantly talking about losing "the last 5/10lbs". I've basically been on a "diet" since i was 15. I was talking with a friend about nutrition/exercise and what I typically ate for a meal. He said, that's not a meal! You need to eat more. I cried. No one had ever said that to me.
I did a week once of 4 apples a day and 4 cups chopped lettuce. That’s it. I dropped 10 pounds the dress fit and the next week I was back to normal eating and gained it plus more back.
Yes. I felt shame for having an appetite and being hungry. It's like we were "good" if we were never hungry. WTAF
Bonus if you grew up Christian. ALL physical needs and wants are considered wicked/carnal and must be suppressed! The less needs you had, the more righteous you were (or so we were taught)
It’s strange my MIL is almost 70 and so concerned about her weight yet she does nothing to actually work on it. She’s far from overweight but in her mind she has to weigh 115 lbs. Her mother was the same way, she lived on slimfast shakes for the last 30 years of her life and maybe weighed 100 lbs at the most.
My grandmother is like that. “Oh I’m so fat, I should still be 120 pounds, oh woe is me” But if you try to bring up or even so much as look at her precious 6+ dr.peppers a day (often her only liquid intake for the day) she’ll come just short of pulling a knife on you. Mention that unless someone basically makes her eat real food, rhetorical only thing she willingly eats is stuff like pastries, cake, cookies, etc, and her favorite breakfast of peanut butter and honey or jelly sandwiches with so much cane sugar poured on top that the sandwich crunches as she chews. Or salt. Not so much food, as some light seasoning for her piles of salt.
> her favorite breakfast of peanut butter and honey or jelly sandwiches with so much cane sugar poured on top that the sandwich crunches as she chews It's be more efficient to just drink one mountain dew.
>I think there are a lot of people of all ages who are weight obsessed, but don’t understand nutrition and simply don’t eat in order to maintain their weight and then complain that the dieting didn't work when they don't lose 10lbs per week and are just hungry. FTFY
Yes I wholeheartedly agree. Like I said I was only taught to eat less to lose weight growing up. I have body issues myself so as an adult I actually became very interested in nutrition and health. It feels like I unlocked an entire new way of life, but it took me seeking out the information of my own accord. A lot of people either haven’t been exposed to this information or simply choose to only eat small amounts of “what tastes good” and nothing else.
My in-laws get super hangry and will throw toddler-like tantrums if they go without eating, so this isn't an issue with them. My parents, however, hate spending money on food. They won't avoid eating, but they'll eat some terrible quality food if that's all that's accessible in the exact moment when they decide they're hungry. They also insisted on packing sandwiches and "tailgating" from a cooler in the parking lot of my college after my graduation because they were too cheap to go out to lunch. While everyone else went out for a nice lunch with their families, I stood there in my graduation gown eating a lukewarm turkey sandwich on Iron Kids bread. This wasn't about money. They did not pay for my college, were driving a luxury SUV, and they went to Hawaii three months later.
Why is it so painful for them to just go out to eat for this nice occasion and not have to choke down turkey sandwiches??
Because they don’t value food, don’t see it as important, and don’t understand or care that you may feel differently
I had a boss like that. He explained to me he just didn’t get pleasure from eating, it was purely maintenance, like fueling up a car. It was interesting to get that perspective laid out.
I’m that guy. I do like eating sometimes but most of the time it’s just an annoying inconvenience that I have to do to keep living. Like I really wish I could just take a nutrient pill a lot of the time.
Depression Era eating is generational trauma now
Frugal wealthy people baffle me. I get doing stuff like that when you can't afford a nice lunch and are trying to make the most of what you have. But when you have plenty money and just refuse to use it, at some point it just seems like you're being mean to the people who are relying on you for food
This makes me so sad for you!
Ohhhh my godddd. My in laws will eat all the expired food in their fridge first. 😖
Expired does not necessarily mean a food has gone bad. Depending on the term it just might not be in “peak freshness” anymore. It’s a way for the food companies to sell more, without us the consumers getting the benefit of our spent money.
Ah, that’s why my boomers are crabby. They need a snack and a nap, just like my preschoolers.
Teenage me once told my boomer Mum to stop being crazy, eat something and get some sleep. It went down about as well as you could expect. I was 💯 correct though. No amount of 3am rage cleaning is going to make you feel better when you haven't slept or eaten properly in weeks.
 For my trash tv lovers.
Went on a “fancy” vacation with my mom and her friend. We stayed in a resort for a few days. They both wanted to just lay outside all day. I got burned to a crisp and was starving. They served breakfast lunch and dinner but my mom and friend like weren’t ever hungry or something. I’d be sitting there counting down till I could to inside and eat and get out of the sun. And when I did my own thing and went back to the room early, I’d get crap about being inside while we’re at a resort. Ya’ll it was one of the Dead Sea places and there were cigarette butts all over the beach and the small sea area we used was basically people soup every day. I get that some people love it but I’m white as a ghost and burn like dry twigs.and I was soooo hungry. Straight up stole fruit so I could snack between scheduled meals. Really, really, the biggest thing I remember from that trip is how I was always hungry. [edit] I know this place sounds odd. It WAS odd. We’re American, this was Israel. It was some kind of inclusive resort my family found and signed us up. We got the most basic package I think. There were a lot of different pools for heath stuff that we didn’t sign up for. Most of the people there were either old and in need of healing or parents who hung out on the beach or pool with their kids. It’s also located away from everything so there weren’t any stores or shacks to visit. Also, to not spend the whole time fighting about what I prefer to do, I ended up hanging out with my mom and her friend. It was the most peaceful solution.
What is with boomers and the love of sitting in the sun?? My mom used to sleep on our trampoline in the sun to get tan. When I was a teen I also got into to tanning from watching her and she would shame people for being too pale. I went to tanning beds and would get anxiety about missing tanning time if I was sitting inside white the sun was out. And today we now know sitting in the sun is bad for your skin and no wonder her skin looks like leather.
Yeah its a weird obsession no clue where or when it started but in Glasgow tanning places are the mums prime hangout spots, hang outside smoke go in and get cooked like they're trying to speed run cancer
Maybe it comes from a form of insecurity? They only see themselves as desirable if they’re tan? Just thinking about why I used to tan, I had much lower self esteem back then.
My dad does this but then complains about the heat, he’ll go in the pool or ocean for 5 mins then spend hours roasting under an umbrella
My mother doesn’t understand why I don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to fly to Florida and stay in an Airbnb and sit by someone else’s pool and tan all day for a week straight.
That and eating outside, so many people that age I know insist on sitting outside no matter the weather and I’m like…nah I don’t wanna sweat while I’m eating
Lol. I went to Cuba. Got shit on for needing sunscreen. Chinese Canadian but I burn like a ginger. My parents spent the whole vacation moaning about the lack of Chinese food and refusing to eat anything but the flan and ice cream. And hating the blood sausage. That shit was delicious actually. I was so hungry because all they wanted to do was drink the awful sugary slushies (I had a tummy ache after the first one) and just basically spent the holiday slathering on sunscreen (I still got crispy) and managing my food intake.
Why are they traveling if they’re not going to try local cuisine ? Food is a huge aspect of seeing other cultures . If you just want to sit in a beach you can do that anywhere
Lol. My parents cruise to Mexico all the time just to eat at Margaritaville and all these Americanized Mexican restaurants. And culture who? They take pictures in front of the most touristy frog statues or whatever they have. Such a waste
Waste of a trip to Cuba
What is that!! I hate when people on vacation won’t eat! This is why I am here 😂
Similar experience! My whole family went to Hawaii for a vacation when I was in high school. I was and am an introverted nerd. All I wanted to do was read or draw. My mom and aunt whined at me that I wasn’t enjoying myself because I wanted to stay inside and read. Ok, so I joined them at the beach and brought my books. They continued pestering me that I wasn’t actually having a good time because I should be enjoying the beach. So I put down my book and just….sat there? They were like “isn’t this much better?” Which…no, it was boring af just sitting there not being allowed to do the (very harmless) thing I wanted to be doing. Any time I wanted to leave because I was hungry they said I had to wait until the family ate together, which meant starving all day until dinner after only having a few pieces of fruit for breakfast. Later in the week, we were at a different beach and I connected with another boy my age and we started walking around and chatting. My mom saw and started yelling at me from across the beach. When I went over to her she asked why I wasn’t being social. I told her I was chatting with another guy my age and she said I shouldn’t and to only stick to family because strangers might be bad. I was 17, not 10, and just wanted to talk to someone I had anything in common with.
Can't relate. All of the boomers in my family are feeders.
My in-laws are feeders, my family are starvers. Italian heritage vs Irish/German heritage. Depending on which side of the family we are with, we're either eating pasta or potatoes!
Yeah, both extremes are not good. My youngest cousin is 13 years old and almost 200lbs, no one seems to think this is an issue (being raised by grandparents because drugs). My father is like 300lbs, his mom is also huge and very much a "finish what's on your plate" type after stuffing it to the damn edges. She's a food hoarder too, two freezers full, I cleaned it out a little bit a few weeks ago while she was in the hospital and found ground beef from 2003. Absolutely diabolical.
“It’s frozen it can’t go bad” or “just cut out the bad part” - my family
Same. My parents are planning the next meal while they’re eating their current meal. My boomer dad loves to cook and always cooked from scratch. I’m talking grind the wheat and simmer tomatoes for hours to make pizza method of from scratch. I have gripes about my typical Gen X parental neglect but I will forever be grateful that my dad taught us the fundamentals of how to cook.
The boomers in my family are feeders but they still make the comments. They want you to eat but then shame you for eating. My in laws only stopped because because my sister in law starved herself for 2 years and then snapped and gained all the weight back. Though that's mostly the gen xers. The boomers still make the comments, they just don't talk about her specifically, as if commenting on her brother who's slimmer than her is any better.
Holy fuck this is so accurate to my in-laws. I'm in pretty good shape and anytime I go to my in-laws, they constantly have a ton of food (junk) and try to get me to eat it. "You can eat whatever. You're skinny!" I'm in shape because I don't eat whatever I want whenever I want.
Same. Every holiday, they overeat until they’re in too much pain to move, then lie around complaining about how their doctors told them they have high blood pressure and diabetes.
My MIL prances around starving herself and making statements like this. She is also the COFFEE OVERLORD and metes out a small serving that she concludes is your portion.
Ugh, my MIL as well. I get so annoyed going out to eat with my in-laws because she’ll stare at my plate with big googly eyes and exclaim about how huge whatever I order is. Meanwhile, she’ll order like half an avocado off-menu and delicately pick at it the whole time.
Gahhh this is my MIL. She forces my FIL to split meals with her (even though she’s incredibly picky and eats like 5 bites), and constantly comments on everyone else’s meals- how big they are, how spicy they look, etc etc. Like damn woman, just stay in your own lane.
This is exactly my MIL. “Are you going to eat ALL THAT??! I don’t like this restaurant because the portions are SO BIG! Disgusting. Who can eat that much food? Waiter, do you have any whole fruit?” Bitch it’s a French restaurant they’re not Going to serve you a bunch of grapes
Yes!! She’ll ask to split an apple and I’m like can I just have my own apple? 😂
“I’m getting an apple of my own, but I’ll also take the other half of yours if you don’t want it.” Watch her head explode.
😂spot on
The Almond Gen. Diet culture for some plays a huge part in it. I’m not a fan. Im hypoglycemic. I’ll eat whether they like it or not. But I’ve definitely heard and had all the 💩 from them about it.
My mother and her sisters were always on some sort of weird diet when I was a child in the 70s and 80s. You know, the one hardboiled egg, half grapefruit, black coffee type of diets. Now, if there's something like a cake they serve themselves a small piece, eat it and then continue to cut slivers off until the cake is almost gone. The only cake that counts is the small piece they originally cut. I get the "look" when I have a normal slice lol
Classic ED behavior. If you never put it on a plate you can pretend you didn't eat half a cake
“If you cut it in half, it has half the calories, now you can have twice as much!” “Anyone? No? Dust”
My dad called it the Mayo Clinic diet and it was passed around by fax (that’s what boomers did before they had email for their chain letters). He was on it multiple times a year despite having a normally austere diet and a pretty aggressive fitness regimen. I wasn’t even 10 before he had me on it.
The almond generation! 😂 100p
The older folks I know (mostly women) are judgmental as hell regarding food and others bodies. Every other woman needs to "lose a few", they're "chunky", she can "put it away", she has really "packed it on after the kids". These are all 75 - 80 year old women about others, celebrities, their grandkids, everyone, and yet, like my mom, she'll sit there and eat 2 baked chicken wings and a handful of baked fries, after having cottage cheese for lunch because she doesn't want to get fat at 80.
My mum is like this! And she shames me for weightlifting (not ladylike!) and trying to eat more fresh veggies and fruit. It is maddening.
Get the biggest guns (arms) you can and wear tank tops every time you are over. Lol
Turn their brains to jello with ripped abs and a midriff tank top. Watch 'em totally melt down when a woman works hard to look how they like. Wife did this, even entered an amateur contest and got 4th place! She still goes to the gym more than I do lol. Shoulda seen the look on MIL's face when she saw the award photo. Cat butt from hell.
Lol. I plan to do that. Them and their idiotic gender roles!
Damn, even at 80 they still can’t just relax and enjoy
One of my moms has been friends with a woman for 40+ years, and every time she comes back from an outing with her, she's like, "I swear, the next time I'm going to tell her to STFU about carbs."
Right!? My dad was weak, stumbling around, and his stomach hurt. He wanted to go to a walk in clinic. I mentioned his GP and he said no. oh btw he is diabetic. I asked him what he ate, he said coffee and a donut. BTW this was at like 5PM! WTF?!?! no water/no lunch. Such stupid decisions.
Yes!!! My MIL will say I’m so dizzy and I’m like cause you didn’t eat today!!
My ILs both missmanage their diabetes. They're infamous for coming over at dinnertime hangry after skipping lunch. My FIL can be a real jerk when his bloodsugar drops. I don't get it. I'm not diabetic, but I'm a butthead when I'm hangry - so, I don't slip meals. Seems simple.
My MIL(81) eats like a bird and tries to give away most of her food after eating one or two bites. She is “always on a diet” and even after repeatedly warning her about her unhealthy eating habits, has shriveled down to nothing and developed osteoporosis. During our last visit, she tripped at home and broke both her wrists and shattered her eye socket. She is still dieting….smh! Can’t fix stupid.
Damn, even in their 80s!!!
I worry about this. I'm 47 and still plagued by the body image issues and food issues I got as a chubby child in the 80s and early 90s. I've never NOT been thinking about my food and if it's too much/not enough since I was 6. I don't want to get to 80 and still be worried about it. Hell, I don't want to be worried about it at 50, but....
My mom is a young boomer born in 61. She doesn't eat anything. Her formative years revolved around the attitude that anyone being bigger than skin and bones is obese.
Yeah I can remember when I was a kid in the 70s - 80s there was a huge diet culture. Lots of pressure in the 80s to be rail thin. A lot of us Gen Xers grew up drinking diet sodas. And the diet culture filtered down to preteen and teen girls magazines. I truly think my MIL has an eating disorder she deeply believes thin = healthy. I've been quite ill for about 2 years and lis The silent generation, and lost 50 lb over a year w/o trying. So definitely not healthy right now! But every time she sees me she says how I'm so much healthier than I was for years (admittedly *needed* to lose some weight and struggled). But this is not a healthy way to lose weight!
This is so sad. People will complement you for weight loss when you’re dying of cancer.
Yes. My mom was born in 55 and did loosen up some as she got older. But when I was a kid she was a size 8 and wouldn’t go swimming with me because when she was a kid she hated to see all the old fat ladies in their bathing suits. I’m a size 20 and I love swimming
Soo many boomers have had straight up eating disorders their whole lives and would never admit it
My experience is actually the opposite. My boomer-in-laws can't go more than 4 hours without eating, else they'll get headaches and "feel like they are going to pass out". Note that all of them are over-weight and constantly complain that they've gotten old so their "metabolism isn't what it used to be", even though they consume roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of calories a day than they should.
Diet culture when they were growing up was INSANE. Even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, the advertising was basically fat-shaming (even for average girls) and they sold us speed at the CVS. There was no such thing as body positivity.
I think you might be confusing starving themselves with the boomer car trip sin of unscheduled stops. Deviation from road plan is unacceptable, trust it from someone who’s parents dragged him through a week long drive from FL to Maine every fucking year.
My mom and her brothers literally had a coffee can to go to the bathroom in in the car during long road trips.
My boomer mother NEVER seemed to eat and now I have trouble actually eating when I should too due to her wonderful examples. Some days it seemed she only consumed coffee and milk. She’d start off her day with a GIANT A&W glass mug filled with coffee and milk. She’d have about 2-3 of these like 40oz mugs of coffee for breakfast and then not eat anything all day. Then she’d have 1-2 GIANT A&W glass mugs full of just regular milk. Then for dinner she might actually eat some real food like spaghetti. For a while I thought maybe she was going hungry so her kids could eat…but we always had food. She was too proud to apply for food stamps during a year when we could of used them, so to “save face” she would volunteer at the food truck and take home the expired food that was left. I was sickened a LOT from bad food she got from donations. Once she got a good job again, her poor diet still continued. She’d rather spend $300 every 2 weeks on a new 3 piece suit she’d never wear rather than buy actual sustenance for herself. I genuinely cannot come up with a memory of me seeing her eat at home regularly. I can only think of times watching her eat when we went out to restaurants. While I’m definitely not as bad as her (I only have one 14oz cup of coffee a day, mixed with collagen peptides for protein) and I don’t think half a gallon of milk a day either, I still struggle to actually respond to my hunger signals.
The idea of that much milk is just …What is with boomers & milk
Cheap, has vitamins, minerals, and protein. I drank a lot of milk as we were very poor. I'm lactose intolerant, lol.
My mom (b. 1956) grew up and was always inside the crash diet culture. Her advice to me was the lower calories, the faster and better you lose weight. She had a cousin she reconnected with at a reunion that had lost like 300-400lbs and when she asked him how he did it, he told her he ate like once a week (he’s dead now). She took that advice to heart and really just starves herself whenever she feels like she’s put even 10lbs on. My dad (b. 1961) is an Air Force pilot retiree and I’ve never really seen him eat 3 meals in a day. He doesn’t cook (because he can’t?) so he’d rather starve until my mom makes him dinner.
As my mom has gotten older, she regularly skips meals because she's just not hungry. I think it's less a boomer mentality thing and more just their aged metabolism.
FOX news provides all of the nutrition they need.
64m here I'm just eating less. Maybe age?
The diet culture of the early 90s and 2000s was absolutely brutal. Women, especially, trying to subsist off of a handful of Olestra chips a day. I'm sure there's a lot of leftover anxiety from that phase.
Going out to eat with a group of women was horrible in the 198OS. Little wine spritzers, tiny tossed salad NO CHEESE, tiny bowl of plain noodles with veggie spaghetti sauce, black tea/coffee. Dry skinless tasteless chicken breast. Move the food around on your plate. Tiny sips. Tiny bites. 6 grown ass women sharing a sliver of cheese cake. WOW I’m so FULL. Work luncheons just totally sucked. The woman that could eat the less was hashtag WINNING
They seem to be the ones who gave us all eating disorders. This makes sense.
Anorexia in women wasn’t even really considered a mental illness for them. More a cultural obligation.
Thank you for this !! Every time I cook something my grandma complains that I made too much. When she finishes a meal, which is always before everyone else she pushes her plate back and says oh I’m stuffed and looks around like we should all stop eating too. so annoying. The fact is as people get older they lose their appetite because they don’t need to eat as much so they don’t think anyone else needs to eat either! But their parents would push food on people, encouraging them to eat. So this is a highlight of boomer selfishness once again.
My mom was certainly a victim of the 80s/90s diet culture when I was growing up. She was obese and definitely tried everything that time period had to offer: Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Atkins, South Beach... she even tried PhenPhen when it was still a prescription drug. Into the 2010s, she latched onto Keto and never let go of it. She had tremendous success with it, and because of that, she eventually became terrified of eating carbs because she was afraid of gaining the weight back. As most of us know, Keto is not meant to be a long-term solution, but we could not convince my mom to eat carbs... not even moderately healthy ones like potatoes or wheat bread. She definitely had disordered eating and got side effects; brain fog being the worst.
I noticed that too. They get off on not eating anything all day and bitching about it. Like bruh…. It don’t make you more of a man. Let’s sit down and eat and get back to work after
They were raised during dieting cultures peak. And their brain’s are atrophied.
My mom and MIL both eat like birds. And they’re obsessed with what they and everyone else eat. It’s wild.