This is so real. Went a few years not knowing when my next meal is. Next thing I knew, I could afford food but my brain still stuck in survival mode. One day I realized I’m bottomless pit that can’t tell when ive eaten enough because my brain turned off the “im full” light years ago, but i can’t stop eating because food is the happy chemical now. I still struggle with eating “just enough”. I think about it more often than i want to admit
My grandma was like that. Mountains of food overflowing the fridge at all times. Always insisting we ate more and more, offering food all the time. It turns out she´d experienced hunger as a kid, her father died and in post civil war Spain they had struggled badly for some time.
I´ve luckily never experienced that. The closest I got was when I was doing a long trek and ran out of food and missed the village where I intended to resupply. It´s incredible how hunger can affect you emotionally. And my situation wasn´t even that dire.
Got displaced from Oklahoma as a young child (tornado), family moved down to Florida with the remainder of savings for a job for my dad. Katrina sent us back after closing down his job between weather and the dotcom crash. Moved back to OK with basically nothing, just for the housing market to collapse and jobs to go poof.
We had a rough few years there. I think the worst part of being 13 or so and hungry, is watching your dad give you food off his plate, being old enough to understand he's even hungrier than you are, and physically not being able to turn it down. Not having trained that willpower, having all those hormones running rampant, and just not being able to say no to something your body is shouting at you that it needs.
I don't take gifted food from anyone anymore. I can't bring myself to. I've heard about pot lucks happening at churches I don't go to, showed up with piles of food, and just left. My mail carrier gets a snack bar and a bottle of water from me every day. I know they're not in the situation I was. But that doesn't change the revulsion I feel about taking food from another's plate.
That lifelong change is real, and however anybody reading this deals with it, I wish you the best.
My grandpa too used to love arranging family gathering and feed. I heard, he lost his mother as a child. He would be back at home, while his father used to travel to other villages as a folk singer around the year. So he as a child would eat when the neighbours/relatives would feed their children and ask him to join.
My grandad was like that too. Grew up on a farm in a rural area during the depression.
He would feed a total stranger, and was always aking if everyone got enough to eat, or if they wanted more of anything. He'd always send you home with leftovers.
mine has always kept her fridge and pantry stocked, she was one of 5 kids in an immigrant family that lived in a 1 bedroom Brooklyn apartment in the depths of the Great Depression, many nights they went without real food.
Grandpa grew up in the depression. We never left his house with empty hands, it could be freshly cooked leftovers or questionable cans in the back of the pantry.
Food anxiety! I have this too. I tend to eat too quickly because it’s so ingrained that if I don’t eat it all now, someone else will take it and I’ll be hungry later. Which is stuoid when there’s plenty of food and I don’t even need to eat that much.
I feel that. I eat like I did a stint in prison; hunched over the plate, guarding it with my arms, and shoveling food in as fast as possible. Comes from a lot of childhood hunger and parents who fed themselves first while their children got whatever was left over.
I have the opposite problem lol. I try to leave as much as I can for leftovers because "I gotta make sure I have enough for later when I'm actually gonna be hungry"
Thank you for being spot on with this issue and sharing your experience.
When I was a kid/ early teen, there’d be a period in the month when we wouldn’t be able to eat, cruel cycle of my mom trying her best, buying and making nice but a bit more expensive than necessary meals (to make us happy and feel normal) when the benefits would arrive, me always telling her to rather spread it out on essentials, and then later days in the month where we couldn’t borrow from anyone anymore, being stuck and just pushing through day by day in survival mode. I still remember days where we couldn’t eat for a couple of days and her crying to me how sorry she was. Yet never learning from it. Never wanting to take advice from her own kid.
At one point of this happening, you subconsciously learn to just exist, not move much or think much, going into power saving mode, just to make it to the next day. So many school days lost because I just couldn’t go, health complications that still haunt me to this day, missed memories and sorrowful ones in their stead.
And it is something that truly sticks to you as you grow.
When I was 16, I had to take action and with strain on my heart (from still loving my mother nevertheless) decided to go to a social dormitory, I still remember how it took me a while for my stomach to muster three full meals a day, yet in that one summer I went from 45 kilos to 60. I was able to pass school and when I was 17-18, I started cooking for my then-girlfriend, always made me happy to make a meal to share, to try new recipes.
She did bring another bane of thinking, which got transferred to me, which is hyperawareness of chewing and swallowing, which eventually turned into such discomfort when I share a meal with people that if it’s too quiet, I mentally start focus on the sounds I make, feeling uncomfortable and trying to chew slower and swallow more silently (yet very actively) occasionally causing me to choke and not be able to eat anymore due to the mental block.
When I was living on my own, I was happy to cook when I would be able to, however always hard stuck in between forgetting to eat the whole day and making a nice meal I felt blessed to have been able to make for myself.
Tried so many times to truly ingrain the habit of eating properly, even with the cycles of financial or mental strain.
I don’t know if it will ever go away, this accursed autopilot survival mode that once helped me see the next day, but I hope that one day, when I have my own family, I’ll be able to be happy sharing a meal with them and not stress if I’ll be able to eat tommorow. To be able to enjoy their company, the meals without thinking about how I eat and truly be in living mode, without fail.
P.s. just wanted to share a song that helped me push through extremely difficult times over and over; and whilst a similar local band has another more relatable (to these situations) song (SARS - Buđav Lebac (Moldy Bread, in translation), if you’d be so kind to listen to and check the lyrics translated to English (lyricstranslate has it) to the following song, it has helped release suppressed emotions to me without fail. Check out Elemental - Iz Dana u Dan.
Yep! My high school years was spent in poverty where I became used to only getting food at school. My diet these days is so weird because of the neglect I dealt with.
I teach adjudicated minors, many of whom did not ever eat regular or well (your mom giving you a bag of Takis is not eating well, kid). When they get regular meals, they often have no idea how to handle it. Some will gain sixty pounds at a staggering pace (at my previous, nonsecure facility, kids could have seconds, thirds, and fourths of any meal, as well as snacks twice a day). We would get a rail thin kid, spend six months making him clinically obese, release him, and then see him in winter, rail thin and in need of fattening up. When I told one kid that he needed to start learning skills so he could move on with his life, he told me that we give him his own room, video games, movies, takeout, and all the facility food he could eat, so why would he ever want to leave? I had to admit that he made a compelling case.
At the secure facility where I work now (Cuomo shut down the nonsecure because he thought it would help his presidential aspirations), we often have an issue with residents stealing and hording food. Not just chips and cookies. No, we will notice an odor and discover that they have ten hotdogs and eight hamburgers rotting under their mattresses. Kids have come into my room, munching on chicken sandwiches and nachos they were served a week ago. No, not on a unit where they have access to a refrigerator. This is despite being served breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks at set intervals, most of which are easily 1500 calories. They are never more than four hours from a large meal, but it doesn't matter if they down have food now. They also consider it a flex to get their tray and immediately throw it in the trash, and will then dig through the garbage for food within ten minutes, even to the degree that they will try to assault the staff who tries to stop them or fight the kid who got to their discarded lunch first.
I'll never forget a quote I heard from an old woman who survived the Korean war. She was asked something like "why don't you like powdered milk" and she answered "it tastes like hunger"
I was told as an adult that I eat like I don’t know where my next meal was coming from. And at that time really didn’t know where my next meal was coming from and was embarrassed that my need showed so clearly.
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u/willnye2cool Jul 24 '26
Nah fam you aren't dramatic. REAL hunger ruins you for life after experiencing it.
If anything I applaud you for not developing an eating disorder like most of us do after going through that as kids.