What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

chaoticbooklesbian asked:

A story re: the post about restricting Halloween candy. My mom had this rule when I was a kid that I could only have one sweet thing a day. I HATED that rule. I would convince her that this extra sweet thing was tomorrow's, not tell her about treats at school, convince her the lollipop I got after a doctor visit didn't count. As soon as I had my own money to spend, I would flout that rule as flagrantly as I could without her finding out. She never even knew I hated it until I was an adult.

bigfatscience:

I grew up in a home that was similarly restrictive about candy and sweets. I hated it, and I would sneak candy whenever I could! My mom would “joke” that I was a sugar addict (no. this is not a thing). ugh.

Once I started recovery from restrictive eating and began stocking sweets in my house – I have a candy drawer now – the obsession waned. Now I probably eat about 1/10th the candy I used to eat. And my kids are growing up in a home where sweets are just another part of a normal varied diet. They are not candy obsessed at all! They can take it or leave it as their mood strikes. Eating competence and intuitive eating is a blessing.

When I was growing up, my mother would refer to certain foods as “bad” or “wicked” - she’d mostly say it in a joking way, but she still said it, along with calling us “bad” or “wicked” when we ate them. Even though she didn’t mean for it to affect me, I still internalised it: specifically, I got it into my head that, on the rare occasion when I had access to lots of chocolate or whatever, like after Easter or a birthday, it was better to be “bad” only once and binge the lot, rather than being “bad” every day by eating it slowly. And because we didn’t often have those sort of foods at home, whenever I *did* get access to them, I’d eat way too much, because I wasn’t sure when I’d next get the opportunity.

In combination, those two things led me to develop compulsive behaviours around certain foods. Even when I was really full, if there were chips or chocolate etc available, I’d keep eating, and I was never capable of saying no. It’s taken me literally until the past two years - until my early to mid thirties - to unlearn those habits. I can now keep sweets or chocolate in the house and not be obsessively, constantly aware of them. I don’t have to eat them all at once. I can not eat them at all, even! But it has taken *so much time and work* to get to that point, and one of the main things I had to do was train my brain out of the scarcity mindset around them: that eating a little treat each day was fine, and that they wouldn’t go away forever if I didn’t eat them all at once.

Meanwhile, my 7yo is growing up in a house where chocolate etc are freely available, and he’s already better at self-regulation around treat foods than I’ve ever been. He won’t force himself to finish a dessert just because it’s a dessert if he’s full; he doesn’t even ask for one if he’s too full to begin with. He can set aside birthday and Halloween candy when he’s had enough without being prompted to do so. He’s just a happy, healthy kid. 

  1. weed-and-ladies-please reblogged this from marshmallooooooow
  2. theinfamousdoctorf reblogged this from francesweyr
  3. marshmallooooooow reblogged this from worth-beyond-a-number-scale
  4. floorsirens reblogged this from hideyseek
  5. lostchips reblogged this from snoozingcat
  6. xrozario-sanguinemx reblogged this from worth-beyond-a-number-scale
  7. theworksofshanyu reblogged this from worth-beyond-a-number-scale and added:
    Yeah I never had the right to eat candy or chocolate or chips. Now I have some just chilling in my house. I don't hide...
  8. niamhuncensored reblogged this from worth-beyond-a-number-scale
  9. worth-beyond-a-number-scale reblogged this from bigfatscience
  10. bigfatscience posted this
    A story re: the post about restricting Halloween candy. My mom had this rule when I was a kid that I could only have one...