The turning point for me came when I was pregnant and felt that my condition allowed me to do whatever the hell I wanted. We went for breakfast at a Denny’s or Shari’s type place, and I ordered boysenberry pie and mashed potatoes and gravy. While everyone else, of course, had the regular eggs and bacon fare. I tell you, I was giddy. And here’s the really amazing thing — nothing bad happened. It gave me courage to just keep on doing it. Now I don’t even think twice about it anymore.

It’s a very good thing.

but i do this. so thank you for pointing out that i do it.

Now, as for mothers. Always interesting to observe our interactions with them and food. My mom came to stay with me on vacation a while back, and I was practicing guilt-free eating. In other words, if I felt like something, I got it, and ate it, and tried hard not to be influenced by the fact that my mother was watching my every move. The funny thing is that she said she didn’t feel like certain things (dessert type things), so I believed her and just bought some for myself. And then she became (very mildly) pouty because she wanted some too and I hadn’t gotten her any!

I told her that I was just trying to respect her wishes, so we had a laugh, and she stopped saying she didn’t feel like stuff she did want, and I started buying shares for everyone. But it was pretty funny. These days I make a conscious decision to act on what people tell me, not what I think they are secretly thinking (even if I’m right). I think it’s healthiest all around.

Heh.

I’ve talked about this before (hopefully not here), but I used to have a friend I rarely see anymore, in part because I just can’t deal with her body/food issues. (And she is, of course, tiny.) She would ALWAYS try to get me to eat dessert with her when we went out for dinner, and about 9 times out of 10, I’d say, “No thanks, I’m full, you go ahead.” (The only reason I pass on dessert is that I’m more into savory stuff than sweet stuff, so I usually do fill up on the meal, ’cause I’m not terribly motivated to “save room for dessert.”)

And yes, she would get POUTY every time — to the point where it was as if she blamed me for depriving her of the dessert she really wanted, the dessert she’d saved room for, the dessert that, to her, was the whole point of going out for dinner. Didn’t matter how many times I said, “Order dessert! If you want it, have it! If you can’t finish it yourself, you are allowed to throw away part of it! I am not skipping dessert to be ‘good’! I’m skipping it because I ALREADY FILLED UP ON STUFF I LIKE BETTER.”

But she just couldn’t do it without an accomplice.

And for my money, she also couldn’t bring herself to order it when even the FAT chick wasn’t ordering dessert — despite the fact that the fat chick had eaten twice as much dinner as she had, because the fat chick never wanted dessert in the first place.

Sigh.

I finally decided to stop dieting after my own insanity regarding perceptions of my weight and worthiness, and realizing that watching my mom as a young child had a good amount to do with it. I look at the women in my family, and our body shapes, and finally feel as though I can be comfortable in my own skin. After all, it’s not just my skin – it’s my heritage. To me, that’s something to be proud of.

I’m getting better, but I think where it gets hard is where the line lies between doing what I want for me versus letting my desire to not be controlled by eating leading to yet more control. I think your story absolutely falls into the latter category. But sometimes I’m hungry and the boy is not quite done with work and we were planning on going out, or cooking together. As much as I am trying to eat when hungry and not let anything get me down, sometimes it’s just nicer to suck it up a bit until I can share dinner with someone else. I don’t want to demand sushi when everyone else wants burgers because while that’s going for what I really want, it’s also letting food be more important than friends.

That’s really only tangential to what you said. I definitely agree that this mentality of only being able to eat a certain way (whether it’s “diet” food or “treat” food, the behavior is the same in a lot of ways) is really messed up and has way too much emotion bound up in it.

Good for you for breaking the martyr tradition – I’m fighting like hell these days to do just that! You rock.