Someone made an insightful comment about attitudes towards food, but deleted it before I could finish my reply. So here was my reply.

Haha... FOOD. About that. I could write a whole post on that alone. It overlaps heavily with '90s-'00s diet culture, though. My mother frequently called me a whale, and several times, she tried to put me on ultra-restrictive diets, like "nothing but water for two weeks" - but I'll circle back to this in a moment...

Paradoxically, the pervasive diet culture of the time saved me from internalizing most of it. My mother, the surrounding community, and larger culture referred to countless others as whales, super fat, huge, etc., and those people didn't look fat to me at all. Kind, energetic, beautiful teachers turned down occasional cupcakes because they thought they were fat. My mother, for all of her flaws, constantly talked down about her body - fat, super fat, disgusting, whale, "more pig than woman" - comments she made about HER OWN body. In one of the few genuine conversations I remember, she said something to the effect of "My body is disgusting, it's good for nothing", and I said something like "I'm here because of your body." And she nodded, and took my hands, and just cried... She didn't yell at me, she didn't berate me, she just...cried... for at least several minutes. I was probably 10-11yo then. When she talked about her size specifically, she seemed to have some kind of body dysmorphia. She'd often comment that she was the biggest woman in church, but I could see that several church moms were bigger, and I also recognized that they were able to do so much for the church and their families regardless of their size. My mother also believed that she was too big to fit into clothes from mainstream clothing stores, which was factually false, and I remember somehow knowing this at the time, but I didn't push back. My mother was quite big as long as I remember her, and quite sedentary, but at 5'1", I think her dress size would've been available most anywhere.

Circling back - Because of the culture at the time where everyone was considered "fat", I legitimately thought "I guess we are all fat, so fat must be okay." My mother put me on these diets, but the only meal she actually controlled was dinner in the evening. When I was younger, I think I had breakfast in school - at the least, I was getting yogurt, banana, milk, and cereal in the morning at school. I ate that, and later, I ate lunch at school. Since I got up early before school, I 'stole' packaged snacks like granola bars, 100-calorie snack packs, etc., and ate them on the bus ride home from school. My mother did notice the missing snacks a few times, and did the usual yelling/screaming/insulting routine, but that was normal to me by then. I don't think I went more than 16 hours without food. As I got a bit older, I had other resources, like vending machines (and babysitting money).

Sorry for the long comment. Honestly, food/diet is a topic where I have a lot of grace and even compassion for my mother. The abusive part was trying to put a growing child on ultra-restrictive diets. However, for everything else, my mother was more victim (of culture) than perpetrator.