Fat and Malnutritioned: Honey Boo and My Diet When Young

Deep fried Oreos? Those sound gross to me. I feel sorry for this girl, because I think what chance does she have with the average American diet?   Why are they eating cheap macaroni and cheese on a reality show salary? Of course they lost the show when the mother decided to date a child molester. 

There's many thin Americans eating the processed foods too and not getting as fat as Honey-Boo and Boo and her mother. Honey Boo-Boo is basically eating the diet of mal-nutrition that is creating more obesity. Potatoes, and eggs and macaroni and cheese and way too much sugar.  The typical American diet especially for the working class and poorer.

They eat processed foods to the hilt. I get unhappy with my food choices when we are lower on money. Food pantries give you the worse foods too. Some of the worse weeks, I have more intense feelings of hunger. I've seen rich people eat, they have side dishes, salads, pickles, and good breads on the side. Those things are wiped away when you are broke.

Eating frustrates me. I joked the other day, I wish I could go back to college just to have the pantheon of available food in your average dorm cafeteria. I lost 80lbs one year of college without even trying just because I had plenty of good food to eat like an open salad bar at every lunch and dinner. It's hard to describe the type of hunger I get when poor. It's like the body is hunting for food, it doesn't have. There's been times, where I have said "Screw it!", and gone and bought a SALAD with my last five dollars on earth because I have felt so desperately hungry for nutritious food.

I am actually DIAGNOSED with mal-nutrition. It's on my medical records. The doctors think I have some kind of mal-absorption problem but never having had weight loss surgery, my body is anemic--severely low on B-12, and severely low on Vit D and others. I eat vegetables and fruits. I reintroduced eggs back to my diet slowly--still on fence with that, and yesterday vegetables and fruits in the mix included an apple, a soup that had zucchini, pablano peppers, tomatoes and tomatillos in it. Dinner had more of the peppers and tomatoes in it too. So I try to include what fruits and vegetables I can.

Many are not educated on nutrition. I am and constantly frustrated. The good foods always DISAPPEAR FIRST because they are what I want to eat. I hoarded zucchini all week to put in tonight's dinner and a package of frozen spinach. I'm making  ground turkey lasagna with it and putting grated carrot and cottage cheese in the concoction. I casserole things to death to spread the food out.

 My poor diet as a child and later impacted me. It set me up for a lifetime of obesity. My mother controlled the refrigerator with an iron fist, even putting locks on the freezer because my brother loved to steal ice cream. She counted every slice of lunch meat and cheese and crouton in the kitchen. While my mother could cook she was not educated in nutrition.

Ironically as a fat child, I had severe hunger pangs all the time. Examining what I ate for breakfast and lunch for years, so wonder I was not doing well and grew fat.  It was the worse diet ever for a future woman with PCOS and severe insulin resistance. 

Here is what I had to eat everyday literally for YEARS:

Breakfast was two slices of toast with margarine, and a bowl of sugary cereal like Life cereal or Honey Nut Cheerios. I was not allowed to cook an egg, or make a sandwich for breakfast and trust me I tried to ask over and over. This breakfast was worthless for a pre-diabetic teen and actually brought severe hunger pains, by 10:30 in the morning.

Lunch was always a bologna sandwich with mayo and a leaf of lettuce on Italian white bread, the kind with the sesame seeds on the outside. With this came potato chips and three Oreo or Chips Ahoy cookies in small plastic baggies. My GC sister would get gold fish crackers with her lunch but those were "hers" and the rest of us were not allowed to touch them.

During Lent, remember my family was Catholic, the sandwich would be a tuna or egg salad sandwich.

When my mother decided I was too fat, the sandwich would be cut to a half and a few carrot and celery sticks would get thrown in the baggie instead of the three cookies.  Then the hunger really rolled in.

The numbers and amount of the food always stayed exact. I remember being so hungry in high school from the carb rich breakfast, I would eat some of the sandwich on the bus. When I had my own money, I was so tired of the same lunch for years, I would throw it away and buy some hot meal at my high school. Sometimes there would be salad bar. I went to Catholic school with no school cafeteria so outside of an occasional hot dog day, there was no hot lunch or other offerings. In high school, my parents refused to pay for any hot lunches demanding we take food from home, so unless I had my own money I was stuck with the repetitive lunch.

Dinners were better and would be some type of red meat --lots of steaks, roast beef, fried pork chops or chicken and mashed potatoes. There would be glass of milk or diet Pop.  My family would eat spaghetti on occasion with meat sauce and shakes of parm cheese out of the green can. Rice a Roni would pop up from time to time. We would have turkey and ham on holidays and home made deep dish pizza with Italian sausage, green peppers, onions and mushrooms every Saturday night.  Sunday morning she would make breakfasts with scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, Bob Evan sausages, bacon and those orange frosted cinnamon rolls out of a can. The vegetables were usually green beans or corn out of a can. In high school my mother's cooking talents expanded so at times I would get these fancy party salads of a taco salad with sour cream and , and a layered salad with bacon and cheese and peas every once in a while. She would make chocolate including almond bark and tons of chocolate sheet cakes during various holidays. Much of the cooking was done for company and not us.  It was a high carb, high meat, high fat, high sugar diet.

As a cook at dinners,  she was very good at it. So a lot of the food would be tasty at dinner time but it definitely was not the best for my body. The daily grind of cereal and bologna sandwiches did me no favors either. When I was away at college I would eat more soup,  salad, and hard boiled eggs. This was my best time of eating in my whole life. Even at the sandwich bar, I would pile on the veggies like an early version of Subway. My time in college was the time of my lowest adult weight. I never went to totally normal was down in the lower 200s for a time at nearly 6 feet of height. I had no inkling of what would happen to me later but knew then, I grew more tired and swollen from walking for miles--I had no car, then my friends did. I loved to walk for years and even as late as 1994-1995, could walk for a few miles and think nothing of it, before the weight took over.

When I got poor in my twenties, and had no money for groceries, my diet hit a rock bottom for years. Ironically during my weight gain of 400lbs I had the least money for food. My diet was ramen noodles, commandeered school lunches while substitute teaching in child portions, often some mystery meat buried under gravy and some limp peas or white meat chicken nuggets. It also included some eggs, and cheap pasta. I bought food at a discount store, and did not know how to cook. One dinner I remember getting is paying 2 dollars for these cheap fried Chicken wings at a Chinese restaurant about a block from my house apartment and paying 50 cents for a little carton of rice to go with it. My diet worsened when I moved to Chicago. My job had long long hours and I remember eating only once a day on many days or twice, and literally having to scrounge. We were allowed to eat some food at the group home, but it was low quality cheap food. There were no salads or vegetables. Just fried chicken, sausages, bacon and rice, turkey ham and fried egg sandwiches and more sugary cereal. I don't know how some of those girls managed to stay thin on that food. Later on the way to disability came dumpster diving. I remember days of eating nothing but a package of cheap ramen noodles and some green onions, I had managed to save. How sad.

 Money was so extremely tight. Sometimes I would get a decent meal out once in a while, a salad or a stir fry like on Payday, but the rest of the time it was grind of cheap carbs. Working stoves were rare in the slums and for two years I had to eat whatever could be made in a microwave or on a hot plate. Let's just say that is not the healthiest food.

I look at Honey-Boo Boo's diet and know that is the mal-nutrition diet many poor people in America are getting fatter on. What chance does she have? You know they pour endless chemicals into the food. My diet now frustrates me. I fear weight gain because of the money being low. Its far better then it was years ago though. My eating has to be so controlled even for the sake of the diabetes. There's too many cheap turkey bologna sandwiches and cottage cheese even now. I would rather have more salad and hot cooked vegetables. There is a lot of soup made in this house. I do what I can.

This is the unspoken reality of obesity in America. Cheap food makes you fat. Lack of nutrition makes you fat. Some act like changing the diet is so easy, but there is a real financial edge to all this, like it or not.