This must be what it feels like to go to confession. (I'm Jewish; I've missed out.)

Bless me, paleohackers, for I have sinned:

In the late 1970s, whenever I'd visit my grandparents in the Catskills, Grandma would let me eat table sugar with a spoon. And they wondered why I had behavioral problems.

In the 80s, though my mother made a home-cooked meal each night, I was weak in the face of my friends' pantries and secretly dined on Twinkies, 7-Up and those hot dogs with a ribbon of "cheese" running through the center. There was a lot of cereal in my life. One time, in first grade, I went to Johnny K's house up the street and ate Ritz and Cheez Whiz until I threw up.

In the early 90s my high school friends and I lunched at Roy Rogers almost daily. (Soggy fries and mayo, baby.) In college, it was all pasta, all the time. The year I lived in Israel I ate so much falafel and ice cream I should have been deported for depleting the national supply. Once I moved out on my own, I fell in with a Chinese takeout crowd at work and developed a tenacious habit with starchy, sugary sauce. Also, the occasional McChicken extra value meal. I got pretty fat.

And then in the early 'aughts, I went (was sent) to Weight Watchers and learned how to hate my body. (Not their fault, really, but WW + obsessive-compulsive personality = disaster.) I danced on and off with an eating disorder for the next 10 years, and oscillated between eating what tasted good (even if it wasn't good for me) and requiring only that "food" keep me thin - no matter what was in it, how it tasted, or what it did to my insides. Think low-carb "wraps," fat-free "sauces," and artificially-sweetened anything. I ate almost no meat, and would not so much as sniff an avocado or entertain the idea of oil. I was plagued by digestive problems, but dammit, I weighed 102 pounds.

Now I'm a little overweight but not very, struggling not to obsess about shedding fat, enjoying a pain-free gut, and stickin' it to my anorexic self by chowing on all the things she would have deemed vile.

Amen.

Two words: Fun Dip

Eating flavored sugar with a sugar stick, oh my.

As a kid I was lucky and unlucky at the same time. Lucky because both my dad and my stepmom came from farming families and we were not having any of that vegetarian crap. Also lucky because when my dad was home (he was career Navy), we didn't have any of that low-fat milk crap in the house either. He was strictly a whole-milk guy. And nobody made any great fuss about the fat content in our animal foods either. Nobody batted an eyelash at eggs and bacon for breakfast, although food expenses dictated that we not do that every day. My parents also insisted that I eat liver in my early years and always served vegetables with our meals, which probably saved me to some extent later.

But I was unlucky because we still used margarine instead of butter. I'm not even sure it was for health reasons, it might have been because of price and my dad's taste preferences. (No, I don't get it either. Margarine is just gross now.) Also because when I was still in grade school my dad was deployed on the USS Nimitz and my stepmom started working graveyard shift so she could be home if school called during the day. That left me and my four-years-younger brother to our own devices a LOT. I was eleven when that started, so it wasn't the end of the world--I was old enough to fix simple meals. Unfortunately "simple" meant things like Hamburger Helper, mac & cheese, and frozen meals. She didn't have time to show me how to do anything else. Also, because we were not supervised, any time there was a sugary cereal or a bag of chips in the house, we made it go away and we would sometimes invent NASTY stuff like taking a piece of white bread, slathering it with margarine and then dusting it with table sugar. When I was in junior high things got even worse because my school had a student store that sold Pop-Tarts and candy in the mornings before class. It wasn't unusual for me to spend part of my lunch money on garbage like that.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that the entire household went psycho during those years. My brother and I were constantly fighting, and I don't mean normal sibling rivalry--I mean if there had been a gun in the house, one of us wouldn't be here now and the other one might still be in jail. (This was mid to late 80s.) My stepmom went off the deep end too. It was a horrible time. And I was still (I realize now) suffering the aftereffects years later. When my menses started I had a horrible time of it, really heavy and crampy and I frequently had accidents. (I have since learned that this happens when I'm short on vitamin A. Whoops.) I had bad mood swings that only seemed to improve when I was on a multivitamin/multimineral, indicating that my diet was seriously lacking. My poor dad came home on leave to all this stuff going on (though he probably didn't know about my female issues), and I'm sure he had no idea what to think. He was fed lots better on the ship than we were at home because he was a chief petty officer and the chief's mess had awesome food, even king crab legs when they could get them.

Needless to say, my dad's marriage did not survive, and to this day we're all really awkward around one another. I had depression issues that lasted for years and I still struggle with it sometimes. And I mean that colored my whole high school career (my grades started plummeting in middle school) and then my life afterward because with no college on the horizon, my other choice was the Army and I didn't do that so hot either.

And what did we get out of both parents gone so much because the money was "needed"? They're still in debt. There's this credit card that got way racked up while they were together and last I heard it was in the tens of thousands and both of them were refusing to pay it. So they didn't even make good use of the extra money that was earned. We got left alone and malnourished for nothing. I wonder if my stepmom thought she was being this great feminist example to me by having a job outside the home. I'm still a feminist, but I didn't learn the lesson she hoped I would learn.

By some miracle, I wasn't fat as a kid either. I was just mentally unbalanced, though that was worse in some ways.

I've eaten dumb things since that time, most recently my decision to go vegan in 2005 that lasted all of maybe two months because I immediately got fatter and sicker. But I spent that whole year experimenting with things like homemade rice milk and quicker ways to prepare old-fashioned oats, and I occasionally went on peanut-butter sandwich binges. I wish I could say I got over 200 pounds that year on McDonald's but nope, it was all stuff the establishment deems as "healthy." Feh. That's the last time I listen to the establishment unless my experience matches up with what they're trying to sell me.

(edit) Oh and I had a wicked soda addiction that went on for over ten years. I can totally relate to the whole 2 liters a day and losing a tooth thing. Most of my teeth are in great shape (no idea how I managed that, I'm sure divine intervention was involved), but I lost the very last molar on the right side, and I have a filling in the corresponding molar on the left. I eventually kicked the sugar soda. I still occasionally have a diet soda, I know, they're horrible (at least the aspartame-sweetened ones), but I don't need to drink the stuff anymore, which is amazing. I'm terrible at giving up bad habits, but giving up this one gives me a lot of hope that I can fix the other stuff that's wrong with my diet as well.

For the most part, growing up my mom tried to steer us towards healthier, real food, except those questionable deli meats for lunches.

But outside of the house, it was another story. All the different candies one can imagine. Taking advantage of the soda free refills at Taco Bell, every day. 7-11 big gulps when I've worked up a thirst skateboarding around (in between cigarettes). I got into a habit of getting one of those 1 pint Haagen Daaz coffee ice creams almost every night. Later I switched to Ben n Jerry's Cherry Garcia.

College: more big gulps, Del Taco macho combo burritos for years. In between classes my energy snack was a Snapple and a 3 musketeer, almost every day. Then all-you-can-eat pizza at Godfather's for $5 on Wednesday nights, plus soda refills. Paradise!

When I tried to feel healthier in my choices, I'd shop more at Trader Joe's and get their Juice Squeezes instead of those nasty sodas. And Powerbars and Balance bars instead of candy bars. As if.

Oh yeah, can't forget the "Funyuns" addiciton. They went well with clove cigarettes for some reason.

I used to pour powdered sugar on a plate and lick it up like some sort of sugar-crack addict dog.

Another great Simpsons quote:

Homer: Butter that bacon, boy!

Bart: But my heart hurts!

Even the Simpsons succumb to conventional wisdom.

well, I am coming from a very different background (Poland under communism) so we had our own style of poisons ;-)

first - a lot of bread. often bread only with margarine, as a dessert - bread with margarine and table sugar (or salt for savory snack). bread for every meal :D when the bread rolls went stale my Mom would soak them (in pieces) in warm milk mixed with some sugar for breakfast. a lot of "kasha" which is a group name for all "corn looking" food made of grains, like barley, wheat pieces, fine/thickly grounded grains, buckle wheat etc.

caramelized sugar made into drops, hard candies a lot of beans, peas.

then later on, when everything was already available, I was still eating a lot of bread (one year in collage I lived basically on bread with mustard and ramen soups), pasta, potatoes, chips, pitas, muesli etc.

Disclaimer: I honestly believe that my parents were operating on what information / media messages were available at the time. Since we all at one point or another struggled with weight, and my father had hereditary heart issues looming, artificially-sweetened stuff and low-fat versions of items dominated, based on the belief that we'd lose weight and keep my dad's heart healthy that way. I think that in many ways, my parents were truly, honestly trying to do their best. Little did we know... anyway:

• The BIRTHDAY CAKES...oh, the birthday cakes. My mom used Betty Crocker mixes and frostings to make delightful-looking cakes. Not just for us family members; she was paid to make them for families in our neighborhood, so that cake mix and frosting was frequently in our house. Imagine my horror when (as an adult) I realized that they are by and large trans fats, very high on the ingredient list!! "But guess what?" moms in my childhood and teenage years would say (more or less), "If you want to make a baked good mix healthy, you just skip the oils and/or eggs and add applesauce as a substitute!"

• SnackWells, and other low fat desserts. Also lots of Entenmann's.

• Fat free commercial salad dressings - which, it turns out, almost all contain high fructose corn syrup.

• Diet sodas, by the gallon. OK, not the gallon, but we drank a lot of diet soda as a family - even as young kids and teenagers. I'd get into quarrels with my friends over what was better: diet or regular. The basis of the arguments was "Which is better - being fat or having cancer?" (Even in the '90s we knew that there was something fishy about aspartame, but kept drinking it since there wasn't OVERWHELMING {hit ya over the head with a cast iron frying pan} proof that it was worse for us than being fat. Ironically we never considered the possibility of eliminating soda from our diets altogether.)

• Conventionally produced skim milk. Because it was good for us. Ahem.

• Low-fat / fat-free coffee creamers. Blergh. More trans fats and corn syrup solids.

• Pasta salads. (Dressed with fat-free Italian dressing, of course!) I never liked'em, but they were the staple of our community's pot luck events.

• Kool-Aid, and Crystal Light, both which were of the artificially sweetened variety.

I distinctly remember my mom gathering us as a family and informing us that there were going to be some changes to our diets for the healthier, for my dad's sake, so we were going to eat less meat and more pasta-based meals. (facepalm)

I was born in 1982, and though I love my mom -- she fed me Diet Coke in the bottle. I am the oldest child, and have a brother and sister. She tried that with my brother and with my sister, who was the youngest. I do remember chiding my mom when she tried to give my sister (as a baby) both a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of Diet Coke XD

My mom can bake/broil steak, pork chops, and chicken, and make some good homemade mashed potatoes. When I was younger and the parents were still together, she also cooked him chicken caccatoire (sp? and I didn't eat it, neither did she) and this weird beef and egg noodle stuff which I remember HATING.

She also made "Irish Spaghetti" which was basically pasta with a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup + water + paprika seasoning, and usually with browned ground beef as well. ICK. I like real spaghetti sauce now kthnx.

She also made this weird stuff called chipped beef, which as a child, I remember liking, but now I shudder XD It calls for Budding packages of sliced "beef", milk, starch, salt and probably a few other things, and put it all in a pot and warm it up.

Aside from that there were no vegetables and no fruits while growing up save for baked potatoes. For real real. It was all convenience foods from the grocery store -- lots of frozen pizzas, macaroni and cheese, Tomato Soup, Ramen, the above "dishes", and intermittent steak, pork chops, and chicken breasts.

Before I started dating for real real, I was a picky eater -- like my mom. Once I started realizing there is a whole new world of food out there (and had my own money and wheels) I was able to start cooking for myself. I remember once me and a prior boyfriend cooked up some lamb one night, and she came out of her bedroom to complain about the smell.

Yes. THE SMELL. It offended her olfactory senses. And of course she couldn't be coerced into trying it either ;)

I ate Grains, Vegetable Oil and Fructose.

Tons of soda. I was addicted to Coca Cola. I used to drink 2-3 liters each night. Cost me a tooth.

All of the above. But what sticks out most is that in first grade, my mom would only pack me one ho-ho for lunch (all the other kids got a whole 2-pack for lunch). I whined "but Mooo-ooommmmm, Stacie Johnson's mom lets her have FOUR ho-hos for lunch!" And she replied "well, Stacie Johnson's gonna be real fat someday."

I met Stacie Johnson again as a junior in high school. She's morbidly obese. Just about the fattest person I've ever seen in real life. Couldn't get around without a walker. So while my lunch was typically a fluffer-nutter sandwich, low-fat "cheese" and a "juice" box, at least I only got one Little Debbie snack per day, right?

Once I got my first car, I went wild. I'd skip history class and get Burger King, go back to school, and get Taco Bell on the way home. I probably at fast food 6 or 7 times a week. I've always loved cooking, but I loved my fast food too! A couple years ago, before I did Weight Watchers, I would microwave a Totino's Party Pizza, fold it in half and call it a pizza taco. Or I'd roll it up and call it a pizza burrito. When I was doing Weight Watchers, I was snacking on their tiny cakes, and several times a week, my dinner would be a bowl of tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich made with lo-cal bread, low fat "american cheese," and fake butter spray. I may as well have eaten a piece of plastic for dinner. We've come a long way, babies!

I am so suprised that there is no mention of Kool-Aid. I practically lived on the stuff as a kid. That and the neon coloured freezies. Mmmm....nothing better than a rainbow coloured tongue.

Taco Bell gave me lots of crap for my buck.

ive never been one for fast food, and my hippy, food-loving mom was great about refusing to allow any processed food in the house, so aside from the usual (we ate grains, and drank pasteurized milk- nothing too scandalous) things were pretty ok growing up.

in college, it all changed.

i did a lot of drugs (you name it, i did it and a lot of it), smoked a pack a day, drank like a fish, and in an effort to starve myself down to the impossibly thin waif that was so popular in the early 90s, i ate nothing but these horrible grilled cheese sandwiches with my room mate- fat-free bread, fat-free cheese, and fat-free margerine. thats all we ate, and then drank everclear or vodka with soda water. NOTHING ELSE. yeah, i was thin. so what? thats the start of my realization that thin does not necessarily equal healthy.

and i still have no idea whats REALLY in a fat-free grilled cheese. they tasted like crap, but i was so drunk and high that i didnt care!

Preferred kid meal: Faygo soda, Kraft macaroni & cheese (main course!), Jello pudding pops.

I was probably on a five a day Dr. Pepper spree in high school and could eat a 1lb of sour patch kids in a day. My diet was mainly tacos, pizza, cereal, and canned soup.

Edit: I was trying to think of what I ate for lunch as a kid but couldn't recall. And then it came to me: hot pockets, bagel bites and microwavable mac and cheese. If someone says they eat pizza everyday, the immediate assumption is that they're unhealthy. But as long as you vary your carbs + cheese, no one will question you.

The single item that stands out is a large piece of birthday cake made into a sandwich with two pop tarts as the buns. My wife still gives me hell about it 8 years later.

There was a time when I was very proud of myself for making homemade granola bars. I got really fat during that time period. When my children were young I was really into following the RDA of grains and limiting our fat, even using margarine...OMG, horrible thoughts. :(

Oh man. I ate SO MUCH JUNK. Every week I got $1.00 for my allowance when I was a kid. The first thing I would do is ride my bike to the nearest gas station and buy as much candy as I could. That normally meant a $.60 candy bar, and whatever I could get for $.40. My parents were busy people, so that meant that I had a Tombstone pizza a couple times a week. Blech. We also ate a lot of Ramen Noodles.

mmmm I used to dip cheetos in chocolate pudding snack packs. So gross but so good too then. And when I got to junior high and did not have to eat cafeteria food anymore I would eat a bag of BBQ chips with a grape soda every single day of school. The summer afterward I was so chubby, I went on a diet of nothing but saltines and oranges/apples. I did lose the weight, but omg how unhealthy! And I thought I was doing a good job!

One word- Halloween.

Candy necklace with saliva goo sticking in the folds of my neck. I ate that, oh yes. Ding dongs/Ho Hos/Twinkies/Hostess Fruit Pies. Idaho Spud candy bar(WTF was that thing, anyway?), Sugar Daddy at the movies, Sugar Babies, Pay Day candy bar- loved those things, especially with all the rat hair.

Ah, memories...

Instead of being fat, I was always thin and sickly, prone to asthma and recurring colds and flus. As a kid I was rich on a quarter allowance a week (showing my age), and store-bought candy was an occasional treat mostly acquired with my own money. Homemade desserts were relatively infrequent, ranging from homemade Toll House cookies to instant pudding, and the worst offenders like Grandma's fudge were confined to holiday family get-togethers. But the more time I spent in school, the more miserable I became, and the more I turned to abusing drugs of all kinds in a desperate attempt to numb the emotional and psychological pain.

It wasn't until the last few years that I realized in hindsight just what I was doing to myself back then, and why I was doing it, and why it created a self-perpetuating vicious circle that only made things worse. Emily Deans at Evolutionary Psychiatry has been a wonderful source of info, but even closer to home there's my n=1 of anger outbursts coinciding with increasing fruit consumption (since dialed back). That recent experience gave me new insight into all those traumatic adolescent memories. I'd come home from another horrible day at school, or from drinking and smoking myself into a stupor with "friends", then sit down and go through at least half a loaf of toast slathered with butter (at least it was real butter!) and a heavy sprinkling of cinnamon sugar. On top of that, maybe half a box of high-sugar cereal, one bowl at a time, even after the first had already shredded the roof of my mouth. But my favorite, and the reason for this post, was a concoction of my own devising that involved half a glass of instant hot chocolate mix, topped with the same amount of powdered non-dairy creamer, with just enough hot water added to turn it into a half-mixed sludge that I would then shovel down with a spoon.

All this was at its worst in junior high and high school, but after I left that toxic environment and started to enjoy life, I was abusing junk (of all kinds) much less and eating more variety of meat and veggies (thank you Indian cuisine). Still, it wasn’t until I hit 40 and went paleo that my moods have truly stabilized. I get angry less often, when I do it’s far quicker to pass, and I no longer feel as though I’m constantly trying and failing to climb out of a pit of low-grade chronic despair.

Taco Bell. 7-11 hot dogs. What DIDN'T I eat?

I still love clove cigarettes, If my friends are smoking them around me I will just chill and enjoy the smell, but i wont let one touch my lips, I just want to smell them haha. Regular tobacco cigs however, i hate the smell so if someone lights up around me i will get up and walk FAR away.

childhood: Whatchamacallit (candy bars), Laffy Taffy (watermelon flavor only), and Kool aid.

I do admit though, If I can find the watermelon laffy taffy with the seeds in it today I would buy the whole box, I miss those things.

As a child and teenager: Hostess cupcakes (they were made with beef fat then ;-) ), Doritos, Chips Ahoy, white bread, McDonalds, pixie sticks, Dr. Pepper, greasy cheese pizza, Matt's Cookies, margarine, corn oil, M&Ms, Crisco .... bleh!

In my 20s through my mid to late 30s: Donuts, Dr. Pepper, McDonalds, chicken fried rice, too many pizzas to count, Burger King, chocolate chip granola bars, I can't believe it's not butter, Clif Bars, Powerbars .... It's no wonder my metabolism went haywire at the age of 38.

Hilarious thread. Quite a walk down memory lane.

The only other thing I'd add it Hawaiian Punch. We always had cans of that in the fridge. Sends a chill down my spine to even think about it now.

Oh and can't forge the box of Ayds appetite-suppressant candy that was always in the "goody drawer". This stuff was big in the 70's. Nice fudgy little candy squares supposed to knock your hunger out. It did...after I ate half a box of them.

I used to eat Saltines by the sleeve (4 sleeves in a box). That may not be as horrible as some of the things mentioned, but the quantity makes it worse. I probably craved the salt, and didn't have the sense to just eat some by itself.

Growing up on a farm, we ate better than most kids of the era (70s and 80s), but far from perfect. On the plus side, we had our own meat and most of our own vegetables and fruit, and my mom cooked everything from scratch. No mixes, and they still don't have a microwave. We ate a lot of eggs, and fried things in homemade lard. Home-grown potatoes were a daily staple. We only got soda on birthdays, and didn't get sugar-coated cereals, just stuff like Wheaties and Cheerios (upon which we were allowed one spoonful of sugar per bowl). If we went into town for something like a doctor's appointment, we might get to split a package of Neccos when we stopped for groceries. Sounds pretty good, at least compared to what most kids were eating. A much lower sugar load, and a lot of good animal fats and proteins.

But when it came to the things we didn't grow ourselves, we tended to buy cheap (like most rural folks I've known). So margarine instead of butter, corn oil for anything calling for a liquid oil, processed cheese spread instead of cheese, the cheapest sandwich bread on the shelf, etc. We ate plenty of homemade baked goods, made with white flour, white sugar, and margarine or corn oil, plus plenty of cheap bread and pasta. Pancakes every Sunday, with corn syrup or jam. We made jellies and jams that are a marvel of culinary engineering -- how do you get two cups of sugar into a half-pint of jam? Sweet pickles were another sugar bomb: 8 cups of sugar in 5 quarts of pickles.

So we ate a lot of sugar (at least it wasn't HFCS) and refined carbs and vegetable oils, but still probably not as much as the average kid, and it was balanced by a lot of good stuff. We were pretty healthy kids -- maybe a little chunky at times, but not bad -- until we moved out on our own and dived into the soda and junk food we'd been missing all those years, and plumped up fast.

My mother(who was overweight)would take us to buy the marked down candy after holidays.There were always chips,sweets,sodas ect in the house.When I was about 12,my parents decided to "get healthy".Being the early 90s,this meant fat free versions of everything we were eating before(those horrible Snackwell cookies stand out the most).My best friend and I both had serious eating disorders.We'd make contests out of who could eat the least during the week,but,on the weekends when left to ourselves,we'd order pizzas and breadsticks,then clean out the kitchen.In my 20s it was taco bell,pizzas, Chinese take out, French toast made with heavy cream,butter,and eggs, deep fried burritos,beer,sodas.Became a vegetarian for a few years,lost the weight I'd put on from all that crap,but felt like hell and suddenly got very fat in a matter of a months.Celiac disease killed the veggie lifestyle,but I was still pounding cane sugar and starches from rice and potatoes.Lost weight,still felt like hell.Finally said enough is enough and stopped. The single most disgusting,death food I've cooked, ever was something dubbed"An Early Grave".Bascially a deep fried soft taco loaded with cheese,wrapped up inside a pizza and the whole thing is deep fried, then served with Marie's super chunky blue cheese dressing for dipping.Yes, it's still $%^& delicious.