Chocolate milk. Holy god, I went through several gallons a week. I also liked dunking cookies in it :).

Then mac and cheese, pasta, those awful taco kits that don't even taste good, and pizza were dinner staples because my mom can't cook. She still can't, I do it all. All this with a side of chocolate milk (lowfat of course) and I was good to go.

The funny thing was, I was super skinny and very athletic. I played tennis on a national level, aau basketball 2 age groups up, and my soccer team was first in the state. I wonder how good I would've been eating healthy...

My sins:

• ate a whole pizza on weekends
• my breakfast consisted of about 4 servings of any cereal with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and chopped bananas and strawberries.
• before bed, I would eat 4 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with 2 large glasses of milk.
• when I was really hungry I would go down to walgreens and buy 3 recess bars and a bag of chips and eat it.
• most of the stuff we ate at home was fried in canola oil at very high heats.
• cookies lots and lots of cookies, peanut butter gauchos
• my parents cooked everything they gave us with those highly processed beef boulion cubes
• I ate a ton of margarine on my pancakes
• would eat whole cheesecakes with milk
• 10-12 glasses of juice a day

I was never able to gain weight on this diet.

Super extra -large Chocolate Milkshakes, they where at a minimum a quart! I really refer to those days like this. In those days my Pancreas would ejaculate insulin!!! Sorry for the graphic term, but when you think about it. Injecting copious amounts of insulin into my bloodstream just doesn't have the intended hard hitting effect.

One good thing about my food history is that my family never ate at fast food joints. However, as a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I did consume:

• sugar cereals
• bagels
• donuts
• frozen waffles with fake syrup
• margarine
• candy bars
• oreos (lots)
• ice cream sundaes
• instant pudding
• sugared juice
• soda

By some miracle, I managed not to become overweight, but I did have a mouth full of cavities. I also suffered from many health issues I've been working toward resolving since going paleo. Many of those health issues emerged, prevailed, or worsened during my vegetarian/vegan years (late teens through 20s).

My perspective on food and what I consume has completely changed now. I've had to learn through time and experience that what I ingest actually has consequences on my body and mind.

I've never really liked bread, surprisingly. Sandwiches were always too soggy for me. After learning about paleo, I'm inclined to believe it was some internal marker telling me my body didn't want it. My mom would pack me sandwiches for lunch and I would refuse to eat them; I also refused the nasty school lunches. I eventually got so skinny she was scared and started packing me things like soups and salads. The soup was from a can and the salad was smothered with ranch dressing, but I like to believe this was a step up from sandwiches.

Growing up, my vices were

• Potato chips
• Candy
• Potato chips
• Anything with sugar

College/early marriage years vices

• Potato chips
• Boxed dinners (hamburger helper, rice-a-roni)
• Potato chips
• Fast food

I've just recently broken the boxed dinners habit. Fast food occasionally gets me in the form of a salad or wrap from Chick-Fil-A or a burger/fries sans bun from Five Guys.

MMMMMMM, potato chips. I currently do not keep chips in my house as I will still eat an entire bag of them in one sitting.

Sorry to jump in so late, but I have to share.

In middle school, I got $1 to buy lunch. Instead of getting pizza from the lunch line, I went to the vending machines. Most days, I bought a package of Twix and a can of Hawaiian Punch. Massive binges after school, on whatever I could find. In the evenings, my mom would always make a 7-11 run for her Diet Dr. Pepper addiction. I got a Slurpee and a package of circus peanuts. In high school, I moved onto MASSIVE amounts of Mountain Dew. College and grad school weren't much better.

I'm just grateful I was active enough to stay fit, and that I found a way to get off the sugar rollercoaster before it destroyed my body.

I used to eat a pizza every weekend, slice of cheese cake/ cookies EVERY day for like 6 months, non-fat milk, and Nutella(chocolate nut spread) with bread pretty often. I was majorly addicted to sugar, and even now I still have a huge sweet tooth! I still love chocolate too!(I eat Trader Joe's sugar-less chocolate at least once a week. I know it's not so good) On this diet I did fine until I was about 13, then I gained weight and my lower abdomen was distended big time. So I started LC, then found paleo.

I grew up with a single mom who worked 2 jobs. She cooked when she could but for the most part we ate mainly Taco Bell, McDonalds, and Pizza. I drank coke by the 2 liter and had fruit pies almost everyday.

While pregnant I worked at 7-11 and ate nachos, hot dogs, and slurpees for most meals.

Those were dark times...

Kool-Aid is the single biggest standout of paleo-disgusting stuff I used to eat as a kid. Keep in mind, I developed metabolic syndrome symptoms and obesity somewhere between ages 5 and 10, and I drank gallons of Kool-Aid all throughout childhood, so I think it was a serious contributing factor. I know I became desensitized to sweetness, too, because at some point I had to bump up the sugar content from 3/4 cup to 1 cup in every 2-quart pitcher. In my teenage years I felt it was my God-given right to drink a can of pop every day if I so desired; usually it was a component of my after-school snack.

I was also on the sugar cereal bandwagon for a while as a child. Fortunately, I rarely ate breakfast after a certain point in life -- I preferred sleeping in and my metabolism wouldn't kick in for a few hours after waking anyway. I ate a lot of toaster waffles before that point, though. Dark Karo syrup is actually pretty awesome as a waffle topping. Later I figured out my egg allergy, still later paleo, so waffles are right out.

I still loved drinking milk, though. When I was young, we would buy only 2% milk. Later on it was 1%. All throughout this time my mother only drank skim milk and only in her coffee. My parents to this day still only get 1% (or less) milk. I was getting whole milk at my last job for tea and refreshment, but I now would only get something less fatty than heavy cream if I needed it for a recipe.

My parents believe to this day that every meal needs a starch component. Worse, they don't really stratify on quality. Though we made heavy use of potatoes and sweet potatoes, also used to eat those Lipton noodle dishes out of bags, or Rice-a-Roni, or Hamburger Helper. Some days dinner would be sandwiches. Some days it would be pizza.

When I had the opening shift at my high school job (6 or 6:30am depending on the time of year), I would vacuum all the floors and then recoup my energy with a pint cup of Coke. We had free fountain soft drinks all day, and so I had as much as I could drink of Coke, cherry soda, plain tonic water (surprisingly refreshing), ginger ale, etc... There was also an employee meal service in the kitchen twice a day, and it was always low-quality food, buttressed with potatoes or rice.

And then, the baked goods. Cookies were a fixture in the house, mostly home made, but still there. Ice cream, the occasional leftover pie or tart, loose chocolate chips, I would eat anything that was sweet, bonus if it was fatty. I used to melt butter into sugar (not even whipping it into frosting), maybe add some vanilla or peanut butter, and eat it with a spoon.

It doesn't stop there, though. I went off to college on a scholarship that covered room and board, but I always kept around ramen noodles, Kraft macaroni and cheese, soba with some brown sauce, Oreo cookies, etc. And I ate tons of what I thought at the time were "safe" foods, i.e. foods least likely to cause food poisoning. That means I ate a lot of mac & cheese from the dining hall, grilled cheese sandwiches, meatball subs, stir fried noodles, Cap'n Crunch, a piece of sheet cake 1-2 times a day... and I could never seem to figure out what caused food comas after lunch (yes, I'm rolling my eyes right now).

The list could be very long ...Now just for kicks I'll read an old label and look in horror at what I used to think was food ...

Lucky Charms and other artificial colored cereals, Frosted Flakes - any version of frosted flakes/shredded wheat

Pasteurized juices/smoothies - Treetop, Minute Maid, Tropicana, Odawalla, etc.

Soda (regular and diet)

Fake Soy (burgers, hot dogs, crumbles etc.)

fake protein powders (whey/soy)

whole and refined grain products, Mac and Cheese, Ramen, low-carb grain products

low-fat/non-fat dairy (milk/cheese/ice cream/yogurt), salad dressings

Egg whites, "Smart" Balance (fake butter)

Snackwells, Little Debbie/Hostess products, Doritos and other chip products, Sara Lee Pound Cake (and other frozen cakes) Fun-Yuns onion rings, Jello, Puddings

Taco Hell, Godfather's/Ci-Ci's Pizza, Pizza Inn/Hut, Del Taco, McDonald's/BK, Long John Silver's, Jack in the Box

Candy - Milk Duds, Twiks, Starburst, M & Ms, Skittles, "Smarties," Snickers, Dove, Kit Kat etc.

Granola Bars - Clif, Larabars, etc.

Canned Soup, Frozen Meals, Chef Boyardee, Hamburger/Tuna Helper

I had a pretty colorful mix of the wonderful and the terrible food-wise growing up. My parents divorced when I was 6 and they had very different opinions on food and nutrition, so it was an interesting bucket of conflict to try and navigate as a child:

THE TERRIBLE (DAD) -With a new wife and four teenage boys in the house, buying food was all about VOLUME. We were all very active in competitive sports and I remember the days when being on a carb rollercoaster and seemingly unable to burn fat for energy, I literally could not get enough food. I felt like I was starving or something. One of my older brothers would come home and make himself a slurry using 3 boxing of KD with that horrible fake orange cheese, a stick of margarine, half a liter of skim milk and half a can of cheese whiz.

-My stepmom worked at DAWN FOODS, and she would get buckets of horrible synthetic test tube food to try, and in the name of thrift my dad would insist that we eat it. I literally mean that there were tubs of neon colored goo in the fridge, in "flavors" like "purple" and "green". This is food I am convinced contained no actual food product. The good thing coming out of this is that since them I have been unable to stand artificially flavored anything.

-My stepmom probably had a few eating issues of her own and was rail skinny. She would make giant pans of brownies, cakes and pies and not eat a single bite. She went running every day and if she missed her run she wouldn't eat anything at all.

-My dad developed weight issues during these years (surprise!) and despite my insistence that I was trying to eat healthy because I was an athlete, he would make extremely rich dinners and desserts that he would watch us eat and not eat himself. It was really weird. I later on developed some messed up food patterns of my own, but it seems like that's par for the course for most teenage girls these days.

THE GOOD (DAD) -For weekday dinners neither parent was home in time to cook anything, so my household chores included cooking for the family from age 8 up. This gave me a lot more control over at least some of the menu (though it would be a long time before I understood what to even do with it, once I had it) and I always had to make sure there was a meat, a starch and a vegetable on the table. Corn and potatoes did not count as vegetables so at least I was doing something right. I also learned how to cook and love cooking to this day, which a lot of people my age are just learning(or failing to) now.

-Because there were so many ravenous kids in the house, we rarely got 'junk' food (different in my mind then just poor quality crap food, junk food is designed to be unhealthy, and it's usually semi-expensive). Shopping day was on monday, and by tuesday morning the frosted flakes were gone because someone had sat down and eaten the whole box the night before.

-Going out to dinner was extremely rare and usually involved “all you can eat meat” somewhere, because these were the kind of kids that would probably eat 3 or 4 hamburgers at a fast food restaurant.

THE TERRIBLE (Mom)

-My mom believed all the press about fat and cholesterol and salt, ect. She really tried hard to make sure that we ate properly, but this involved things like buying the 'whole wheat' croissants instead of regular (to be fair, I begged for them) and screaming at me for putting butter on my eggs. (I ate buttered eggs for breakfast this morning, enjoying them with the kind of vengeful relish that characterizes teen angst.)

-Mom believed the press about eating many small meals throughout the day, which pretty much led to me constantly snacking and never eating proper meals. Being used to chewing on something all the time has set me up with weird issues where I have a super hard time skipping meals, when I get hungry I get HUNGRY NOW DAMMNIT. I am still trying to fix this today.

-Low fat version of everything. Skim milk, fat free cream cheese, fat free cookies, the works. All fat free really means is extra sugar, of course...

THE GOOD (Mom) -No margarine, artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners allowed. Fast food does not count as food (still to this day I have never eaten at McDonald's or anything, it doesn't even seem like food to me) Ever. In soviet Russia, food nourishes YOU.

THE TERRIBLE (ME)

-I used to love nerds (basically colored sugar pebbles) and a drink called all-sport which was basically extra sugary gatorade??? that I was convinced was good for me.

-I have a weakness for the plastic gas station nickle candy that persists TO THIS DAY. Why???? Especially the pink/red marshmallow 'strawberries' when they're just stale enough to be crispy on the outside. It's sick.

-My sister and I were obsessed with cookie dough anything. This culminated in one fateful day when we bought a cylinder of raw pillsbury cookie dough from the refrigerator section on the grocery store and ate it on the way home from school. Five blocks later we threw up on the church lawn.

-When I was in charge as a babysitter at 12 or 13 my sister and I would go get KFC wraps. I hate mayonnaise and always have but I liked whatever the white saucy goop was in the wraps, so I am pretty sure it is some other-substance and not actually mayonnaise.

-I used to mix up graham cracker crust, a spoonful of butter and honey and melt it in the microwave. I still do this with peanut butter and honey.

Maybe a little lengthier than you ever cared to read, but I had fun with this one. Good question.

I am very lucky in the sense that I banished junk food from my life at a very early age - I have been eating only natural, mostly-organic foods since August of 2009, when I was 15.

However, before that I was very much your typical healthy-food-is-for-losers kid who ate very disgusting things, and even after that I was eating a low-fat diet heavy with grains and plant protein because I thought that was what was the best for me. I'm not going to list all of my mistakes, because it's a long list, but here are some that were a common theme:

• I had a diet soda addiction, and I can recall a time where it was normal for me to only drink diet soda for days at a time.
  
• I live within walking distance of a grocery store called Safeway, which sells storebrand cake, which they sell out of the "bakery" (where they receive cakes from the factory and slice it, I assume). Their white cake was the bomb, and they sold it by the slice - which were about 4 servings worth per slice. My sister and I were so obsessed with it; we would beg my parents to get us some as a "special treat" at least once a week, and when they wouldn't we would walk to the store and buy it ourselves. Those walks, along with those for which we would buy cookie dough, soda, margarita mix, cookies, crackers, discounted bulk candy, et cetera, counted as just about our only exercise.
  
• Kraft Easy-Mac with lemon juice and black pepper added to it was my idea of gourmet.
  
• I once ate an entire Mrs. Smith's frozen carrot cake (the one that comes in that rectangular box). I calculated how much I ingested in that half-hour sitting, and it was about 14 tablespoons of sugar, 1800 calories, and 96 grams of very unhealthy fats... it makes me sick thinking about it.
  
• When I lost my hearing (long story) in 2005 at age 11, I was thriving on a lot of pity and you-can-have-anything-you-want-you-poor-deaf-child sentiments, so my grandparents, who were staying at our house to help out, drove to a nearby Wendy's every day for three months to get me a double cheeseburger with jumbo fries and their large Coke.
  
• My sister taught me when I was 3 how to eat Minute Maid pink lemonade mix (they apparently don't make it anymore, but it was akin to Kool Aid mix and you combined pink, flavored sugar with water to make lemonade) by either licking your fingers and sticking it into the container, or just taking a spoon and shoving a pile of it in our mouths to slowly suck on.
  
• For my 14th birthday I received 4 pounds of Skittles and I ate them all. A few months later I bought an 8 or 10 pound bag of Haribo gummy bears, and I promised to share half with my sister but I didn't, opting to hide them under my bed and eat them by the handful whenever I passed by.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but I'm too grossed out right now to continue.

From around age 8 to 16, my typical weekends looked like this:

Friday night: eating 6-10 slices of New Yorker-style Pizza Hut pizza, washed down with a 2-liter of Coke or Sprite. Later that night, I would eat a sleeve or two of Saltine crackers.

Saturday night: Eat an entire bag or two of Cool Ranch Doritos or Combos, with a pound of imitation crab meet, and Sprite. This would usually end in vomiting. I eventually graduated to Sun Chips and Gatorade, so much better, y'know?

Gotta love grandparents enabling fat kids. No wonder I got to 310 lbs by my 18th birthday. (21 now, down to 205)

I also used to love the BLT Chicken Bread Bowl at Perkins: a large bowl made of bread, with iceberg lettuce, bacon, chicken, slathered in 1000 island dressing. When I got down to the lettuce, I would dump it out and eat the bowl.

Also, my grandpa used to fry tortilla shells in vegetable oil. Yummy.

A lot of horrible crap that was probably directly responsible for my acne, and asthma (cured asthma going paleo by the way). Plenty of fast food. In middle school, I'd eat breakfast at school a lot, stuff like coco krispies or a big cinnamon roll. Lunch was pizza or chicken nuggets, fries, and a Snickers ice cream bar. Before sports practices I'd scarf pop and a candy bar. High school was more of the same, Burger King was a favorite lunch spot, as was 7-11. Slurpees, grape Nerds, more pizza and fries. DISGUSTING! I was skinny, so I ate with impunity. I still am thin, although I can't eat quite like that anymore, nor would I want to, but it can be kind of a curse...as in, "I'll have this cheat because my weight is fine." Boy, it's interesting to look back on all the crap we ate, isn't it? Kind of horrifying.

Diet Coke and Wheat Thins were my kryptonite in college. I would go through a 12 pack of DC in 2 days and a box of Wheat Thins whenever I cracked the seal.

Like most people, I ate all the normal SAD junk. (Hamburger Helper, pasta salads, margarine, sugary snacks, etc.) I used to drink 2-3 cans of Mountain Dew a day.

Here's the really unhealthy/weird thing: I would put Crisco in a bowl, add some brown sugar and white sugar, and mash it up until I had little sugar-coated hydrogenated-vegetable-oil balls about the size of grains of rice. Then eat it.

Luckily I've never had a weight problem; I've actually been underweight my whole life. But I feel better now that I eat better!

I was a "health junk" JUNKIE. I probably ate the equivalent of a bowl of Splenda a day. Walden Farms no-calorie products. Bags and bags of Soy Crisps. I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter spray on EVERYTHING. Crystal Light and diet soda. Vanilla Soymilk. Vitatops. South Beach Diet bars. Low carb tortilla wraps. Sugar Free maple syrup. Low carb, artificially sweetened yogurt. Fat free, sugar free cool whip.

On so many levels, YIKES.

soft pretzels dipped in melted cheese

Surge... pretty sure that sugar content goes in the record books.

I would take a full pack of strawberry muffin mix from the cabinet, combine it with milk in a glass and drink it like a smoothie.

What a fun question lol! I had Eggo waffles or Hot Pockets every morning for many years. I could eat a family size bag of potato chips all by myself. Even when I was a vegetarian I would just eat crap. like microwaveable burritos. Oh boy did I love those microwave foods. Last confession, I polished off a box of cookies every week, usually Oreos. It wasn't all bad though. My parents always left a bowl of fresh fruit out for us kids. We rarely ate fast food and my mom cooked dinner which always included lean meats. We stopped buying white bread too.

1) Reese's peanut butter cup 10-pack.

2) 2-liter of mountain dew or Dr. Pepper

3) Sit in front of computer from 7pm-3am playing RPGs.

Diet Coke and M&Ms for breakfast. I was so bad!!

_Lazza

low carb wheat bread with low fa peanut butter and sugar free jelly with a triple grande upside down non fat, sugar free caramel macchiatto from Starbucks, in my early college days. And I wonder why I always struggled losing weight.

I used to eat ice tea mix in powder form (Lipton, Nestea, or sometimes other stuff like Tang). And finish the whole can in a few days (and these were the largest ones available in the supermarket).

I used to drink two liter sodas throughout the day instead of water. I did this for at least a full year.

When I first tried to quit sugar "cold turkey" after watching Dr. Lustig's "Sugar, the Bitter Truth", I found I was a sugar addict and couldn't. And my body immediately rebelled in opposition; I would go on zombie-like hour-long binges of cookies, cakes, meats, various sugar waters, ice cream - I could binge on anything.

From kindergarten through 8th grade, I'd typically eat several chocolate bars in the morning, plus bubble gum and sometimes a load of ice cream sandwiches in the afternoon.

In high school, would eat two or three ice cream bars/sandwiches at lunch plus a soda. This is not counting other stuff in the morning before school and later in afternoon.

My parents thought that it was a sign of a healthy, growing boy who ate heaps of everything. My situation was especially bad because my parents gave us a large allowance, much of which I spent on sugar.

Surprise, surprise...at the age of 16, family doctor told me I tested pre-diabetic. Have tried to clean up since then. Unsuccessful until I found Paleo. Mixed results since...

me and my brother were talking on sunday and i think i can chalk up my early insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome to the fact that my dad used to buy 2-3 gallons of "juice" a week. it basically was hfcs, food coloring and flavor. being that my mom was a stay at home mother, i ate very healthy all the time. but that juice definitely did me no favors.

edit: can't forget about the "now or laters" and starburst.

My mom loved to bake and make sweets when I was a kid. A lot of times for breakfast, I would eat a big bowl of Cap'n Crunch or Fruity Pebbles and then have a big piece of cake in the colored cereal milk. My dad almost always had a can of Coke Classic for breakfast. I started having one myself when I was 12 or 13 - every day. All the fast food, all the candy, all the pizza...... No wonder I always felt tired and lacked energy!

Whole grains. If you are going to eat grains, eat the white stuff. It tastes better and is less irritating.

I never ate toooooo much junk food until i started working and bought my own car at 16. then it was fast food probably 5 times a week. lunch at convenience stores almost every day. and on the weekend i would party with friends. toke up and order 555 from dominos pizza. i'd sit there in the middle of the night and eat a whole medium deep dish pizza, finish it off with some beer or jager, and for dessert i usually had oreos dipped in duncan hines icing haha. those were the days. never gained a pound, but felt like shit.

Because of a financial squeeze one summer, I subsisted for about a month on nothing--literally nothing--but salted white rice and cupcakes. I was pretty proud of myself for learning to "eat" so thriftily.