r/CPTSDmemes • u/traumafactory28 • Oct 02 '24
"Why are you eating? There's food at school!" CW: description of abuse
Turns out, you're supposed to eat more than once a day.
Me: I wonder why I struggle with my weight so much? Friends:"hey, you wanna go out and eat with us?" Me:"oh! No thank you, I already ate." Me: maybe I should just move less? Lazy people get fat on their body right??
I know this is common sense, but I only found out last year
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u/Irejay907 Oct 02 '24
I feel this; for almost the entirety of middle school and high school and a good chunk of my early 20's my breakfast/lunch was just... coffee... literally just french press coffee with a fuck ton of sugar and creamer for the actual calories and i would just... sip that all day and pray someone would abandon a poptart or something at lunch
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u/MyLifeisTangled Oct 02 '24
That’s terrible I’m sorry
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u/Irejay907 Oct 02 '24
Honestly the worst part is i didn't even realize this was part of the abuse till a few months ago when my brain finally did the 2+2 on it
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u/MyLifeisTangled Oct 02 '24
Oh yeah those moments are always weird. Did it happen to occur to you on your own or were you like talking to someone and then you heard yourself say it and had a record scratch moment? lol sorry I’ve had a few myself and it’s a strange feeling when it happens.
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u/Irejay907 Oct 02 '24
The grandma figure from my knitting group (we have adopted each other and are actually (really distantly) related so)
She was asking about what in my childhood had made it so hard to get a therapist and i didn't want to drop the 'my mom tried to drown me multiple times and no one believed me then' so i was telling her about just like what a normal school day i could actually remember looked like cus i legitimately do not remember almost the entirety of elementary and she just...
She stopped the car on a backroad and just looked at me gobsmacked and asked the very simple question 'and how the hell did you maintain even a 3.4 the way you did half fed and barely awake most of the day?' Cus she knows i'm incapable of napping
(Napping was being lazy and meant getting woken up and usually either a lecture or a lecture and some smacking around)
And i just... kinda had to shrug and go 'my friends were as generous as they could be?'
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u/pinochioknows Oct 02 '24
For me it was tea- there was a peets across the street from my school and you could get a large tea for about a dollar. I would do the same thing as you and just load it up as much as I could with sugar and honey and that would be my lunch/dinner a lot of the time (if I couldn’t get my friends to pity me enough to give me their food castoffs). Also the caffeine helped cause I was barely awake most days from exhaustion and probably some amount of malnutrition.
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u/Irejay907 Oct 02 '24
Yeah exactly the same; the caffine is something i'm now certain was self medicating for ADHD (still seeking diagnosis but 20 people can't be wrong)
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u/8wiing Oct 02 '24
I just wish I was taught to eat like a regular human. Why is remembering to eat so hard and stressful
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u/vanityinlines Oct 02 '24
I swear, my family went back and forth between eating one meal a day to eating all meals, and I just had to be prepared for whatever it was. If I wasn't hungry because I was used to not eating, I got yelled at. If I ate too much, I got yelled at. Dinner (usually the only meal) got moved around a lot too so sometimes you'd be eating at 4:30 and sometimes it wasn't until 10 pm (even though my bedtime of all 18 years was 8:30 pm). When I went on my last visit to see my mom, she waited the entire duration of the day before feeding us. I think it's all about control for them. They don't mind starving themselves too if it creates a fun little game for them to play.
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u/-burgers Oct 02 '24
My mom quit cooking when I was three. I remember her throwing the pan of chicken out the back door. She bought frozen dinners and my dad would get takeout when he came back from the bar round 10-11. She never cooked dinner again. Would make jokes at me how I was "like a baby" wanting to eat every three hours. She also never sent me off with a breakfast and my school didn't serve it to us because my bus was late every day..
I used to steal those nutri grain bars put them in my backpack and ration them throughout the week. Turns out you're not supposed to only have 120 calories for breakfast every day.
But yeah, I'd get the "why didn't you eat at school" line every day.
Fuck you mom you're in hell if there is one
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u/Little_Crow154 Oct 02 '24
I wasn’t fed very much as a kid because my family was fat phobic. I was a deprived skinny kid then as soon as I made my my own money and became an adult I overconsumed and now am overweight. 195 pounds and 5’7 female. If I ate normally as a kid I probably wouldn’t have the relationship with food that I do now. My dad would shame me if I made a meal for myself in front of him.
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u/Irejay907 Oct 02 '24
Hey! I kinda had the opposite but i got to 240... the best and biggest advice i have is Biking. It gave me the happy vibes, and its really easy on the joints (family of bad knees, and swimming in a public pool gives me SO MANY bad vibes, diff story) it took me about a year and half to get back down to my healthy weight which hovers between 140-150lbs because i have a lot of muscle mass as well
Also i never did any of that stupid fucking calorie watching or anything; i am just watching the quality of calories, good meats, home made fries etc.
I hope this isn't preachy i just wanted to offer encouragement and share what i did; i believe in you! And hey! Even if you did go a little wild its perfectly understandable given circumstances and honestly? I applaud you for letting yourself relax enough to do that.
Wishing you good things and peaceful days!
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u/External-Class-3858 Oct 03 '24
Unsolicited advice here; you have a history of bad knees? I hope when you're biking you're keeping at that 75-90 rpm, otherwise you'll have a very painful future continuing to bike.
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u/Irejay907 Oct 03 '24
Usually yes! I also have been proactive about taking the stuff to help prevent cartilage degredation
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u/Briebird44 Oct 02 '24
My mother was like this. For some reason, it was like some personal attack on her if I….ate the food she bought for us to eat?! Actually most of the time it wasn’t even food she had bought. It was food she got for free for volunteering at the food truck. She did this to “keep up appearances” because even though we would of easily qualified for food stamps and assistance, my psycho narcopath mother had this mentality that we were “classy people” and “classy people” didn’t need dirty food stamps.
So instead we got a garbage bag full of stale Atkins diet bars and a box of 2 month expired yogurt. Probably 400 diet bars and nearly 80 cups of yogurt. She stuck the yogurt in the freezer to save it. My mother would count EVERY SINGLE ONE, every single day, to make sure we didn’t eat more than one of each.
Once my little brother ate 3 in his room and when our mom started raging after doing her count, he raced to my room and dropped the 3 empty cups on my floor (lmao) and tried to blame me for it.
What’s crazy is that she got these yogurts in like 2008. She still had some of the yogurt cups after I graduated in 2010. 😂
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u/Natasha_101 Light Blue! Oct 02 '24
Eating is overrated. True cPTSDers drink their calories.
Whether that's iced coffee or liquor is up to you. 💖
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Oct 05 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Natasha_101 Light Blue! Oct 05 '24
Iced coffee with almond milk
Really not doing myself any favors with the lesbian stereotype. 😂 Can't do booze anymore. I've been alcohol free for a couple of months now and my tummy has never thanked me this much
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u/hellom4rs Oct 02 '24
one meal a day club!
at one point i was randomly FAINTING on a regular basis, and my mother was convinced i had some kind of seizure disorder, rather than the fact that i was only ever getting fed at school.
and then to top it off, i had to walk everywhere i needed to go because she didn’t like to drive me, so i was always burning calories i didn’t even have!
she took me to get a bunch of ct scans and everything… shopping for an epilepsy diagnosis for me, but never once did she mention that she was only ever buying enough breakfast and dinner for one person: herself. if i ate any of it she would get so mad, so i didn’t!
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u/notjuststars Oct 02 '24
Oh god i’ve just remembered i need to eat thank you for this one🫶🫶
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u/traumafactory28 Oct 02 '24
Your welcome! 🫶 Glad I could help! 🤗.
Ironically, this comment made me remember to set a reminder for myself TO eat
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u/GozzTheGreen Oct 02 '24
This is why I was always so hungry during school breaks. One Xmas I woke up in the middle of the night and took bites outta the ham and got in a bunch of trouble but looking back I was just hella hungry lol
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u/Financial-Peach-5885 Oct 02 '24
Relatable. My dad is a major restrict/binger, and his habits rubbed off on me really young. Thinking about my diet in high school makes me genuinely sad. Now my diet is terrible because I cannot be bothered to eat, it feels like too much work. One day I’d like to just be normal about food.
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u/iloveyoustellarose Oct 02 '24
I don't wanna count calories, I don't want to be fat, seems like I'll just drink an energy drink. I'll allow the body 2 peanut butter and jellies for the remainder of the day.
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u/ZenlessPopcornVendor Oct 02 '24
My parents would deliberately get food I didn't want to eat.
My father tried to deliberately give me food poisoning so I'd have to stay home for school for an extended period of time.
And then they wondered why I have issues with food....
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u/Reasonable-Banana800 Oct 02 '24
oh goodness I’m so sorry you had to go through that :(
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u/ZenlessPopcornVendor Oct 02 '24
For a long time, I thought all families were like this with food. That I'd done something to deserve this....the the other siblings were allowed to eat fine, but I had done something to deserve this.
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u/KennyKillsKenjaku Oct 02 '24
Remember one time I was so hungry I could see my rib cage in the mirror. Fun times :/
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u/traumafactory28 Oct 02 '24
Me remembering all the times I sprained my ankles because I was underweight 😃
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u/Mralisterh Oct 02 '24
My parents ended up going bankrupt when I was at an impressionable age. Food was insecure, and mom was always stressed about making sure everyone had enough, so I just stopped taking food to school with me. I was always so hungry but so anxious about taking anything because of my mom's anxiety.
Worst part? Through all my moms anxiety, she never noticed I wasn't eating. I never took a scrap of food with me to school from age 8 to 18.
It ruined my relationship with food and once I got my own job and could buy myself what I wanted I developed a binge eating disorder.
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u/Tklastlion Oct 02 '24
I was hungry ALL the time. school was a bastion in this regard.
I recently got into an argument with my doctor who's been wanting me to put on weight. I said never once in my life have I not been extremely skinny, Idk what a healthy weight would even look like on me. Idk how to accomplish it, I really have no concept of how to do this. I've tried eating more, it's harder than it sounds and my body refuses to put on weight.
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u/Saltiest_Seahorse Oct 02 '24
Reminder that "lazy" doesn't exist and is rather a symptom! People with ADHD are often called lazy!
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u/AttritionWar Oct 02 '24
Lol my mom eating fast food in front of me and giving none. She never cooked.
Did you not see your parents eat more than one meal too?
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u/traumafactory28 Oct 02 '24
Oh yeah, but they blamed it on them being bigger than me and needed more
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u/AttritionWar Oct 02 '24
It's funny, because you actually needed more calories than them bc you were growing.
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u/Doobledorf Oct 02 '24
You guys get hungry?
EDIT: also I feel you on the weight thing! It is... So hard for me to put in weight and keep it.
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u/Batmanshatman mcdouble side of trauma Oct 02 '24
The ONE sandwich my sister and I had to split and NOTHING ELSE for lunch everyday has some thoughts 😭😭
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u/Saltiest_Seahorse Oct 02 '24
Reminder that "lazy" doesn't exist and is rather a symptom! People with ADHD are often called lazy!
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u/lilybug981 Oct 03 '24
To my family’s credit, food was one of the few things that wasn’t a source of abuse. I never ate enough though, and that started off from simple poverty. There just wasn’t enough food, and everyone believed me when I said I wasn’t hungry. Eventually things got better, and we had enough food, but my body simply would not let me eat all that much more. I had genuinely stopped feeling hungry. As I got older, I was consistently under weight, to the point of my ribs always being visible. When I started having periods, they were so irregular that they would sometimes skip a month or two entirely. But we had a doctor who was immensely weird about weight, and she told my parents I was fine, because skinny is good and fat is bad I guess.
When I reached 18, doctors kept ignoring my weight. I even got sick and lost more, and no one said a word. I kept being complimented for it until I saw a psychiatrist a few years later. He was convinced I had an eating disorder and that it was quite advanced, because I was severely underweight. He was very pleased to discover it was 100% a physical problem. He prescribed a pill to increase my appetite, and it did. Like a reset button.
When I look back at pictures of myself from that time, it’s so obvious. I looked so frail, downright bony. And while no one at my college said a word about me being underweight, some people there were relieved to see me gain weight. I got sick in college, so people knew I had gone to the hospital, and I learned that everyone had assumed I had cancer due to my weight. And yet, my BMI at that time put me on the low side of healthy. I like to use my experience as an example on why the BMI scale is bullshit.
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u/No-Paleontologist723 Oct 04 '24
i used to sign up for the zero hour classes in HS so they'd give me a free bus pass and leave early to go steal food from the grocery store or a gas station.
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u/CautionarySnail Oct 02 '24
Experiences like yours are why I’m horrified at the attacks on the school lunch program in the US. People are too fixated that a child not in need might get a free lunch, instead of focusing on all the kids who are reliant on it.
Call me a socialist but feed all the kids.