[Rant/Vent] My mom's obsession with my weight.

I don't know if any of this is normal, but my friends say it isn't.

My mom decided, from when I was around five, that I was too fat. She's kind of a health nut in general, but this was a big thing for her. She would try to control my food all the time; there were only two breakfast foods she was okay with me eating (two types of hot cereal). At a point when I learned how to make eggs for myself, she would flip out constantly, because she thought the eggs were going to make me fat.

She was really restrictive of my sugar intake (there were times where she wouldn't let me eat a meal or for the rest of the day if she caught me with candy or sugar.) But it was other foods too; she would police my bread intake- no white bread, if I was eating a sandwich, I couldn't have more than one piece of bread. I love bananas, and she would make all these comments about how the bananas were going to make me fat.

She almost never let me buy a school lunch; she always packed my lunch, and it was often not stuff I liked all that much. I remember once trying to ask her if I could buy lunch, since all the food seemed so good, and she cut me off, saying that I wouldn't be able to control myself and eat pizza all the time and get fat.

I used to ask kids in elementary school if I could have one of their cookies or a couple of their chips. Kids caught on, and since I wasn't popular to begin with, they started giving me bits of their lunch, waiting for me to put it in my mouth and then saying they licked it. This one time, a girl said I could eat her snack and then went and told the teacher that I stole her snack. Sorry for the tangent.

Having taken a few psychology classes, I know now that if you restrict a kid's food choices, they unconsciously want the forbidden food more. I used to steal food from the kitchen all the time; my dad used to agree not to tell (he would also sometimes get me foods I wasn't allowed to have, such as sweets, and not tell.) When I was ten, I started stealing loose change out of a jar my parents had so I could buy candy. There was a huge blowup when my parents caught on to this a few months later.

I developed an eating disorder when I was ten; it went on until I was twelve. When I was first restricting my food, my mom and my grandmother encouraged it, trying to help me diet. At the start, I went several days of eating apples and nothing else, until my mom told me that all the carbs in the apples were going to make me fatter. I finally started seeing a doctor after a few months of my family being fully aware that I was making myself throw up.

Even when I was recovering, my mom was trying to control my food. My parents had a bunch of instant oatmeal packets (it was one of the only things I felt safe eating), and there was one morning where I put in two packets instead of one. My mom saw that and said that I was going to gain weight, and that I was showing unhealthy eating habits. Her justification for trying to control my food like this (for years after I recovered) was that I would be bulimic and anorexic again if I gained too much weight.

During my recovery period, if she wanted to win an argument or get me to stop bothering her, she would tell me I had gained weight or that I looked fat, which she knew would get me out of my hair as I would go and exercise for hours.

I still don't like wearing tight clothes around her. When I wear tight shirts or bathing suits around her, she makes all these comments about how disgusting it looks on me. I went to the gym with her once when I was thirteen, and I was wearing a bathing suit. She started commenting on how I had these bulges of fat around the front side areas on the bathing suit (I learned from a friend a couple of years ago that this is breast tissue, not fat.) She went on, saying that my therapist had asked about how I'd been eating because he thought I'd looked fat, he just hadn't wanted to tell me (looking back, it was probably because I'd only been recovered from the bulimia for a few months).

There's a lot more to this, but I've already cranked out a mini novel, so I guess I can stop here. I still really hate how I look a lot of the time, and I never feel thin enough. It was only after I left for school that I realized how much I enjoyed clothes shopping, because I no longer had someone commenting on how fat and gross all the clothes made me look. I'm getting better, I look at myself in the mirror and like what I see a little more each day. But it's been hard.

TL;DR My mom openly thought I was too fat most of my life and tried to control my food, even though she's very overweight herself (I'm at normal weight, for the record, according to my doctor.)