The Food Choices of an Unhealthy Teenager

That looks like a perfectly normal day for me……..when I weight 245lbs. Can you believe we ate like that? That many calorie sucking foods? No wonder we were always hungry because barely and of the food we were eating had any sort of nutritional value so our body was screaming out for food…real food. Yet we kept filling it with crapola.

Doesn’t your stomach just turn when you looked back? Reflection is key though

Oh man, let me reminisce with you. This will be fun!

I’d get up, pound a huge diet energy drink and have a yoplait yogurt (about 120 calories). We’d hit Chilis at least once a week (used to be a big favorite of mine) and we’d split some chips and salsa (about 250 calories for half the plate of chips – that is if we stuck to one refill) and I’d get the turkey combo (half a turkey sandwich, fries w/ side of ranch, and broccoli cheese soup) clocking in at a modest 1200. Then for dinner, we might pick up a NY style pizza (1200 calories for half) and breadsticks (probably about 500 calories for 3) and eat the whole thing in a night. THEN… we’d probably top it off with a few stiff whiskey drinks (depending on the night, probably 300 – 700 calories).

I wish I was exaggerating. I don’t want to think about the Fridays where the relatively low cal breakfast was replaced by a donut or bagel the company brought us and we generally split a bottle of something between us that night.

Now dealing with the same choices – I don’t drink caffeine (that energy drink would probably send me into ORBIT right now), and regular yogurt is so nutritionally void, I’d go for a cup of tea and greek yogurt. I really can’t stand chilis anymore, but if I was going to eat that meal, I’d get broccoli instead of fries (but keep the broccoli cheese soup, yum) and order the sandwich with no mayo and it would be more like 550 calories (and no appetizer, of course). For dinner, I’d skip the breadsticks and make a salad instead, and the pizza would probably last us 2 meals. As for the drinks, I’d probably pick another night to imbibe, as I’d be pretty full up on calories already. Or I would have skipped the pizza for something healthier if I did want to throw back a few.

So I guess I’m not that much different in what I can eat, just how I balance it. That was always my goal!

Thanks so much for the giveaway shout out! I love this post I’m a chicken fingers lover too… they are just so good lol. I used to eat about 4 bowls of cereal a day .. now I’ve limited myself to about one hahaha. ah progress Have a great day!

I can TOTALLY relate to eating like that. But as a kid I could eat like that and not gain anything. It wasn’t until college that weight started creeping on and I had to reassess how much crap I was consuming. Now the thought of eating like that just grosses me out!

That’s a scary exercise! I think I’ll skip it, but I do appreciate that I’ve come a long, long way!

I did a post one time that detailed some of the bad food I ate when I was morbidly obese. And I didn’t even include fast food meals. The total calories was close to 4000. I’m still amazed that I ate that much!

Switch the Reese’s sticks to movie theater size Mike & Ikes and the hot cheetos to a big bite hot dog and add a 40 oz slurpee with a sour warhead lollipop and that sums up a typical weekday for me. Some days I would switch it up and go to weinerschnitzel’s rather then 7-eleven for chili cheese fries, a bacon western dog and mini corn dogs. At least I roller bladed the 2 blocks…hahahaha. Ahhh, second lunches were my downfall.

Oh, gosh, I am almost scared to say: coffee for breakfast, followed by some cake or cheese biscuits for breakfast at work, coffee and cookies mid morning, lunch would be a very large bagette, stuffed to the gills with butter and filling, followed by chips and chocolate. I would probably have some sweets of some kind to get me through the afternoon and then I would have a reasonably high carb, high fat evening meal, which I would follow with a high fat pudding and some chocolate. Eeek, I feel so ashamed…

In my defense, I did suffer from depression at that time and I knew I was doing terrible things to my body!

Wow what an interesting post. I too had bad bad habits – you inspired me to blog about them today! Isn’t it funny to think we thought that was ‘normal’ eating!

Although I haven’t been that much of a fast food fan in the past, my portions were totally out of control. My (white) carbs far outweighed any protein or veggies and I was bloated, sluggish, constantly tired, and constantly wanting to eat. I also drank way too much wine on way too many days.

Thank goodness for that lightbulb moment!

Wow! Yes, I think many of us could relate horror stories about what we ate!!! I was a kid at my heaviest & that included LOTS AND LOTS of sweets. But, maybe breakfast would be 3 pieces of bread smothered with butter & cinnamon sugar, some sandwich with mayo or other fatty substance on it for lunch with any kind of chips (lots) and treats galore along with that, more treats in the afternoon (chips, cheetos, any of those mini snack items from Hostess or 3-4 homemade brownies or 10-12 cookies and it goes on!!!), dinner would be meat, casserole or whatever was made by mom, veggie with loads of BUTTER & more treats. Soda too. It was bad! I continued into high school this way until I lost the weight. Yes, amazing we survived!

Ahahaha, I do this all the time too. There’s something fun about reminiscing about these things.

My biggest vice was eating seasoned sunflower seeds. The ones with tons of (partially hydrogenated) oil and salt etc. I’d eat a gigantic bag in a day, easy. And that would be just snacking!

OMG! My sisters and I do this all the time and always at the end of it we say “How on earth did we eat that crap?”

Oh man, I still think about this every once in awhile too. I look back and really do wonder what I was thinking.

Let’s see here (I think I’m going to do a post about this, because I can probably think of more)

Breakfast was a huge bowl of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch, probably about 3 cups with milk. That or I went to BK for a sausage crossaint thing with hash browns and OJ, or a personal-sized breakfast pizza. Sometimes I would have cereal and then still go to BK.

Lunch: I usually went out to either Taco Bell, Taco John’s or Culvers. At TB, I had a steak quesadilla with a soft taco on the side, and the HUGEST cup of Mountain Dew ever (I drank the whole thing) then. At Taco Johns (Don’t know if you have one of these near you) I had a meat and potato burrito (Taco meat, fried potatoes, nacho cheese, sour cream and lettuce) with a side of MORE fried potatoes and a HUGE Mountain Dew. At Culvers, I would get a cheeseburger with bacon, a side of french fries and a little cup of ranch for dipping, and can’t forget to wash it all down with Mountain Dew. Sometimes I would go to McDonalds and get a double cheeseburger, large fries and a Orange Hi-C then add a Cinnamon Melt/ice cream cone onto that. That was lunch.

Dinner usually involved huge bowls of pasta: like mac and cheese or tuna helper. Or going out to a restaurant to order something more horrific.

This definately deserves a post. But, there you have it. That would be a normal day for me. No fruits or veggies, no whole grains, no healthy fats whatsoever.

Even on bad days, at least I know that I will never be THIS bad ever again. Thanks for the great post, and the trip down memory lane.

Well I can’t say I ever ate like that. There were days like that, maybe. But my problem was week time starvation and weekend binge(ation).
My weekdays often looked like this:
bowl all-bran with milk
kiwi

apple

three rice cakes, maybe some pb or a piece of veggie ham

then maybe a fruit if I was abosolutely starving

dinner:
1 serv of carbs (rice or pasta)
1 cup or so of veggies
1 serv tofu

and then nothing if I could. It’s not a lot of food, especially on nights when I had 1.5hrs of speed skating practice, or a 3-5k run…
Then on weekends I just wouldn’t be able to stop eating. I’d binge on whatever foods we’d have.

Then I went to university and the binging just didn’t stop. I never was able to make myself starve during the week, I’d pig out before bed on cookies, or chocolate chip banana bread, and chocolate milk, telling myself I was eating “healthy foods”. But I’d still be in a guilt cycle.

Haha. That looks quite similiar to my college eating. That plus regular Dr. Pepper and who knows how much alcohol.

My usual standby at Arby’s was the Roast Chicken Club Combo with Cheese Fries and about a gallon of Arby’s Sauce. Mmmmmmmmmm. I think with out the Large Dr. Pepper it comes in well over 1200 calories.

My question is…how in the world did I constantly eat all that bad stuff and not gain a ton of weight!?!?!?!?!? In college I was just about the same as I am now. Weird.

ahhhh those were the days when my body could handle everything and anything (literally). totally makes me sick to my stomach now, but ya gotta be thankful for that young metabolism…even though it exists no more

I used to love those muffins until I saw the ingredients and not to mention the nutritionals!

Okay…my dad owned a deli and we ALWAYS had food in the house. If I wasn’t calling him to bring me home some yodels or Tastycakes (for those of you not from back east…they are the BEST damn chocolate cupcakes…three in a pack and all three of which I consumed). My best friend and I used to order a large, extra cheese pizza at 12 p.m. for sleepovers and eat the entire pie. Then I’d have my dad bring home the large bags of M&Ms, would put them on the couch in between my friend and I and eat the entire bag! I think the only thing that saved me was that I was always active. Thank goodness I wised up early enough to make a change to healthy eating (although on occasion what I wouldn’t give for a good East Coast greasy Angelo’s Pizza or a Mozarella Sub!)

One thing that still makes me laugh (and cringe) to this very day is the belief that I once had that fat-free meant I wouldn’t get fat. Sour Patch Kids, gummy bears, you name it and I ate it because the label read Fat: 0g. Yikes!!!!! I am sure glad I know better now!

I know this is an old post, but I gotta comment. I was just talking about this with my sister last week.

Breakfast : Breakfast Roll (6in French Baguette with 3 slices of blood sausage, 2 fried eggs, 3 sausages, 2 slices of bacon)
Mid morning snack : Coffee & Chocolate muffin
Lunch : Sausage & Chip from the canteen at college
Dinner : Large Dominos pizza with a portion of wedges
Dessert : Assorted chocolate / icecream