A Mommy Story

Whenever I whine about not losing weight fast enough, there’s always someone nearby to remind me, “Well, you didn’t get fat overnight, so you’re not going to lose it overnight.” I kinda hate it when people say that, even if they are right.

I’m well aware that I didn’t get fat because I ate one cream puff and *poof*…instant fat. It took a lot of effort and a lot of yummy food that found its way to my mouth over the years.

I’m not an indiscriminate eater. My mother would tell you I was incredibly picky about food as a child…it just so happens that most of the foods I liked were high-calorie and filled with sugar and fat. Basically, I loved a few foods a little too much, to the point of abusing them.

If I tried to think of the top foods that I overate when I was younger (which I clearly am trying to do according to the title of this post), I can think of five in particular that were my worst. These were foods that I was simply addicted to – I overate them regularly, sometimes to the point of feeling ill. Yet I kept coming back for more.

And now, presenting the top five foods (in no particular order) that paved the way to obesity for me:

McDonald’s french fries – “McDonald’s cheeseburger” may have been one of my first phrases as a toddler(it’s true), but it’s the fries that keep me coming back. As a teen, I was too lazy to walk one block home from school, but if my mom had the car I’d gladly walk the half mile to McDonald’s for my fry fix.

Even now I steal them from my children’s Happy Meals, rationalizing my theft with the comfort that they’re eating fewer calories if I take some away from them. I refuse to give them up, but I now limit myself to a small on most occasions. If ever there was a support group needed for a food addiction, it would be for these fries.

Cookie dough – Long before anyone thought of adding chocolate chip cookie dough to ice cream, I was shoving spoonfuls of it in my mouth when my mom had her back turned putting another cookie sheet into the oven. I’d take my finger and scrape every last possible trace of the dough out of the bowl, too, savoring each sweet bite.

When they recently came out with the tubs of pre-made dough, I had to force myself to stop buying them after eating 1/4 of the tub before it even had a chance to make it to the oven. Salmonella be damned – the dough is so much better than the cookies!

Doritos – Many a night would end with my fingers stained orange from the nacho-cheesy-goodness of Doritos. My mom always bought the value sized bag, which usually equalled 2-3 servings for me. I could easily go through half a bag in one sitting, generally followed by a stomach ache.

It’s probably the post-feeding-frenzy stomachache that saved my life. While I will occasionally snack on Doritos now, it’s only in small amounts and the artificial cheese flavor quickly brings back those bad feelings. I refuse to end my days on this planet face down in a cloud of nacho cheese dust.

Fla-vor-Ice – Any child of the 80’s remembers these artificially colored and flavored treats. Freeze and eat popsicles, right? Or if you’re impatient like me, puncture and drink proto-popsicles. Yes, I shot them one tube at a time. We’d buy these in 100-packs and I’d sneak into the kitchen and drink 8-12 of them in under 30 minutes. Nothing like a concentrated sugar rush to keep a kid bouncing off the walls!

Sure, they claimed to have real fruit juice, but I have yet to find the fruit that tasted like any of these brightly-colored ice pops. I confess that I still have a fondness for Flavorice, but I generally avoid them since I’m sure I’ve reached my lifetime limit on artificial coloring.

SDS Subs – In my small college town, there is a pizza and sub shop that has some of the best subs around, delivers to your door, and runs a sub special every Tuesday night. When I was in college, Tuesday night was sub night. OK, sub and a single order of garlic bread night. And maybe Saturday night, too, if I didn’t have any plans. You get the point. I ate A LOT of those greasy, mayo and Italian dressing covered subs.

It became such a bad habit that my roommate and I started saving all of our sub boxes (cleaned out, of course), until we had a tower of floor-to-ceiling boxes in the kitchen. I’m not being figurative here – it was a tower, with boxes stacked from the floor all the way to the last inch of the space of the 8 foot ceiling. We even started a second tower on the other side of the trash can, too. I look back at the photos now and feel queasy at seeing the outrageous number of calories I consumed in such a short time, yet I know if there was an SDS box sitting in front of me, I’d open it and eat every bite of that sub.

So those are my worst offenders. What about you? Which foods did you lovingly walk hand-in-hand down the road to weight gain with, or which ones do you feel could knock you off track if given the chance?