MY high school PWO meal @ McDonald's... must have had this 100 times: 4 double cheeseburgers with mayo and ketchup, large fry, large coke, 2 apple pies. Never gained a pound, but felt like crap.

When I was a child we would eat massive bowls of cornflakes (+ milk, of course) and spoon white sugar on top by the truckload...and I mean, by the truckload.

[*face-palm]

The Pizza and beer diet

two things we ate a lot of: my moms homemade mac and cheese casserole. rotini pasta for a higher surface area and more trapped cheese sauce, and the sauce made with both extra sharp cheddar and monterey jack, with cayenne pepper and fresh nutmeg. panko topping, butter and bake until crispy. paleo or not, its still going to be my Last Meal.

the other thing is really just a new england thing, but is just the best local comfort food for yankees: cod cakes, baked beans, brown bread and depending on the season dessert is either strawberry shortcake (spring), blueberry grunt (summer), apple pie with a thick slice of cheddar cheese (fall) or indian pudding (winter). typical church basement new england supper, and i LOOOOOVE it.

I called it Pizza Taco- I'd microwave a Totino's Party Pizza, fold it in half, and eat. Or I'd roll it up and call it a Pizza Burrito! In my Weight Watchers days, my dinner would often be a bowl of tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich made with Nature's Own High Fiber Wheat, fat free american cheese, and fake butter spray, followed by a Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich.

I didn't grow up on it, but ate the occasional fried ice cream. Wheat AND sugar deep-fried in oxidized PUFAs. Beat that.

My favorite dinner that I frequently requested my mom to make was tuna noodle casserole. Tuna, elbows (macaroni, not actual elbows), Campbell's mushroom soup, baked with crushed potato chips on top.

I also remember fondly:

Appetizer tray: celery with peanut butter or cream cheese, carrots, olives

Dinner: Fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, peas, jello with peaches, cottage cheese, bread or cinnamon rolls

Dessert: Apple pie with ice cream

And yes, we ate like that all the time! We always ate right at 5:00, so we often had snacks before bed - PB sandwich, milk shake, bowl of cereal or ice cream.

My mom has always made a great "garbage soup" which is just whatever manner of veggies and soup starter she can come up with and put together. Though her soups are more like stews.

Lasagna. I make GOOD lasagna...

10" thin-crust pizza from a local place, topped with spinach and Canadian bacon, and washed down with some RC cola. Their pizza is a but a fading wistful memory. ;-)

This was not a typical daily routine, but usually after 20 weeks of dieting for a bodybuilding show the next few days of eating or should I say gorging consisted of:

Pizza, Doughnuts, fruity pebbles, loaded sub sandwiches, baklava (my favorite dessert) ice cream, anything fried, pasta, and of course whey protein so I wasn't in a negative nitrogen balance...lol. Suffice to say I would destroy my physique in less that 48 hours.

Also, when I started bodybuilding in college I bought into the "off-season" diet that the pro's would do, so my days would consist of eating close to 400-500 grams of carbs and 4000k calories (I am 5'5"). I remember my friend and I used to training for 2 hours and immediately drink 50 grams of whey with 60 grams of dextrose and then 1.5 hours later eat an entire cheese pizza each. Of course, we would wash that all down with some cupcakes or cookies. Surprisingly, I hoovered around 15-18% bodyfat.

After all that I wondered why I had IBS..lol.

Pasta. In all forms. I love pasta....particularly with red, meaty sauces. Funny, since I have been a endurance person (runner, triathlete) for most of my life, the carbo-loading spaghetti dinner was a staple of my diet for so long that I thought I would miss it more than I do.

"notorious sad meal"? - - - - - hmmm...

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a milk-based millet gruel with butter and honey (+ bread/butter sandwich + sugar sweetened black tea) - a taste of my childhood

I used to make omelets with egg whites and pancake batter mix (out of a carton and spray can, respectively). Now, they were really freaking good and actually a better texture with egg whites than regular eggs, to defend myself, but a decent example of my old ridiculous diet.

I was a cereal fanatic! I would take any and all boxes of cereal in the cabinet and mix them all together to make one big bowl of deliciousness. And you know how it is with cereal....you can never stop with one bowl! I'd eat at least 2 or 3 bowls at a sitting, and this wasn't even for a meal! I was one of those people who always viewed cereal as a "snack" since it never filled me up, but would eat 2-3 huge bowls at a sitting.

Was also a big fan of peanut butter and banana on a cinnamon raisin english muffin. I would literally have that every morning for breakfast. That meal was the hardest thing for me to change when I switched to paleo. As good as it tasted, though, it never filled me up for more than 2 hours.

I live in Texas - we do Standard American Diet tex mex style! Chalupas on processed, pre-fried corn tortillas, topped with canned refried pinto beans and kraft shredded cheddar cheese (potato starch keeps it from clumping). When I was a vegetarian I ate mine with Morningstar Farms textured vegetable protein. Mmmmm, did I love that wheat-soy-corncoction. I think I put sugar-enhanced salsa on mine too to fulfill my vegetable requirement.

I had to eat at least three to feel slightly full. Now, I eat veggies with 1 and 1/4 pounds of grass fed lamb and go to bed sated. ^_^

-My roommate and I in college once had a meal of corn on the cob and Ritz crackers with peanut butter. That was pretty ridiculous.

-One time I had a nutella and cheese sandwich on potato bread...followed by poptarts.

-The last meal I had before going Paleo was a bowl of Fruity Pebbles in 2% milk, then a Wawa chicken-bacon-ranch hoagie.

-Growing up, I used to fill a tall glass with cookies (usually oreos or chocolate chip), pour the milk in, let the milk soften the cookies, drink the milk, then eat the cookies with a spoon.

The emblematic meal for Notorious S.A.D. to me was macaroni and beef, which I knew as "Red Devil" growing up but is called "American Chop Suey" where I now live. For extra SADness it was often served with a side of garlic bread. No matter how much of it I ate, I would always go back for more half an hour after dinner, after the initial pasta bloat subsided.

I get a "bleah" feeling just thinking about it now.

My mom didn't like to cook when my brother and I were young...she often made us beef pot pies (the frozen ones she could buy for 35 cents each and sometimes TV dinners. Then, an hour later when we were hungry again, we would walk up to the corner store with pop bottles and buy coke slurpees and cheetos. MMMMM. I don't think I could eat that stuff now without having a serious stomach ache and sugar crash.

Pasta, Pizza and the weekly Chinese take-out was the norm around here...Damn I love me some crab rangoon... I am saving about $150 - $200 a month not ordering take-out so it is all good.

My husband is from NOLA and he makes the best red beans & rice...miss that for sure.

Bangers and mash with onion gravy in a Yorkshire pudding. But I'm better now. :)

Peanut butter and Jelly Sandwich. Grew up with this for lunch every day, and pasta for dinner most nights.

Being in Central NJ, a lot of people "retire" here from NYC:

Pizza (I have around 10 pizza places/italian restaurants in my town, not counting fake places like Dominos/Pizza Hut/Poppa Johns)

Deli Sandwiches/Subs/Reubens/Meatball Parm Subs

Mac and Cheese (fresh and from a box)

Cereal (Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Mini Wheat, Honey Bunches of Oats)

PB&J

At Thanksgiving, if I only had Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing, Cranberry Sauce, and Apple Pie, I would have been happy.

When I was growing up there was a place near my house called Spaghetti Bucket (or something like that). They had the sauce on the bottom and the spaghetti on top in a pale (I remembered about this place when I had the Pepperidge Farms Frozen Garlic Bread). Very convenient for babysitters.

My town actually has an Italian American Festival (Fried Cheesecake anyone?, sign for "Donate Blood and get ticket for Free Zeppole") and a Bagel Place considered to be one of the best in the area (luckily I have always been more of a sit down breakfast guy more than a breakfast sandwich one).

Lasagne sandwiches.

It's funny to me that the most SAD meals are the ones that arrived via immigration recently. The old school meat and potatoes or thanksgiving turkey are practically paleo compared to a pile of spaghetti and garlic bread, or a chimichanga (and the basket of chips), or a Yoshinoya rice bowl. When I was growing up these foods were exotic treats you ate in a restaurant, and I ate them without restraint. As they became more common I still gorged on them because that's how I'd learned to eat them.

Pancakes. I have fallen of the Paleo (probably Faileo I'm afraid) wagon again and again and again by eating those pancakes from the supermarket. And they always turn out to be disappointingly not as good as I had in mind. But still I eat the whole damn package in some sort of zombie-mode and sometimes even throw the last one away, as the symbol of my (renewed) dedication to eating Paleo.

Pinto Beans and Ham Hocks served over buttered cheesy grits or sweet cornbread. Served with a side of dirty good collard greens and some FRIED MOTHER-EFF'iNG CHICKEN. All washed down with Southern-style SWEEET TEA. Finished off with blueberry cobbler and vanilla ice cream.

I'd do it again on a cheat, except that gluten and legumes tore me up so bad last time I had to call into work. Corn isn't so bad to me (hence my cheat of choice being really good authentic tacos), but the cornbread (dad's recipe is 50/50 white flour and cornmeal), cobbler, and beans? Kills me.

When I worked a factory job at age 18 I would come home at 3pm after my 10 hour shift and eat a whole box of cereal, dry, as my afternoon snack before dinner at 6.

Looking back on growing up with three squares a day and dinner ALWAYS at home, I think cereal is the worst thing my parents fed us. Addicting stuff. They had no idea. Oatmeal would have been way cheaper and at least slightly better on the nutrition scale (being more like 0 rather than -8 on the scale on -10 to 10).

My parents are old-school German Appalachian, SDA, and we were pretty poor growing up. Most of our diners were what they grew up eating: vegetarian pinto beans with Crisco for flavor, potatoes fried in Crisco, canned sauerkraut, and depending on our budget that week we may have had beef hot dogs cut up in it. In the summer we'd usually have raw cucumbers and tomatoes instead of sauerkraut. To give my mom credit, though, when she heard how bad Crisco was she stopped using it and switched to canola. Obviously not the best option, either, but it's still CW.

frozen meals and casseroles.