Interesting topic and a lot tell.
An important starting fact is that in my country, there have been real food shortages all the way until the end of the 80's. Oh the wonderful joys of communism... And even afterwards, despite the shortages have ended, there has been a lot of financial inflation and/or imbalance between incomes and costs of living. Because all of this(I presume, my parents' stance on food was that it has to be first and foremost filling. The taste is very much secondary.
It's pretty funny to think now, but I grew up without really knowing how tasty food can be. Back then, eating was for me something akin to a boring and not very appealing chore, just to get rid of/prevent the hunger. Strangely enough, and to my great dismay, this did not prevent me from getting kinda fat in my adolescent years - but it had to be just a hormonal imbalance, as the problem largely corrected itself over the next decade.
Especially that I'm not physically active for the most part, but let's keep to the food topic for now. I guess what helped is that I'm physically unable to eat too much and too fast - trying to do so makes me sick. So while I'm not thin like a stick (it would be impossible because of my skeletal features anyway) and I do have some... let's call them,
metabolic reserves - they're still limited and don't define me.
As can be expected from the story so far, I didn't pick up much in terms of useful cooking knowledge from my parents. I had to learn things almost from scratch, which occasionally was causing spectacularly failing experiments. By trial and error (and online sources), I managed to get half-decent at this. Still the biggest change was when I met my wife; she's very skilled at cooking and has learned most of this by herself. I've always been content with helping her with all manners of preparations (and dish-washing afterwards), the main part of the job belonged to her. But it turned out I learn well enough by just observing, and when forced to by the circumstances, I found myself fully capable of following even some rather involved recipes. It's still much better when we can share the workload, those meals can get really elaborate on occasions!
It's a good place to boast a little, I'm proudly boycotting all manners of fast food.
Haven't been to any such chain in my life, the only exception was when my good fox bro invited me to KFC. That, and the pizza - if you consider a home-made one, or one from a pizzeria, to be a junk food too. Cause my order of preference is as follows, depending on what's available: home-made from scratch by myself - home-made using "prefabricated" dough - one from pizzeria (actually
going there, I don't think I ordered a delivery in my life) - frozen one from supermarket.
Interestingly, it seems like my parents got better at cooking in the last decade. Guess this could have been my wife's influence too, some dinners she invited them to have showed them just what can be done in the kitchen, and how good can it get.
Now, to get back to matters concerning physical activity. As one can imagine, in a society which didn't have surplus of food for the longest time, a "needless" physical activity is considered something to be avoided. This stance is strong among the older generation even today, I recall my sister's friend being asked by her mother why is she exercising, cause "it will get her tired" - and yet another friend of ours was jogging only around midnight cause people were giving him funny looks otherwise (also me, when I took to cycling just for fun, was occasionally being asked why am I even doing this when I have no need to go anywhere!...).
School was trying to correct such stances, but with abysmal results. The teachers didn't care about such unimportant details as individual differences - and so, being naturally very stiff in the joints, I was forced to make stretching exercises just like everyone else, which was like a torture to me. I'm pretty sure I was getting some tendon damage, judging by the pain - but nobody was giving a damn about that!
Luckily, eventually I got an unrelated little accident, which while minor, gave me a medical excuse to skip this PE hell altogether and permanently. No, I did not cause it consciously, but thinking about it now I'm pretty sure that I
attracted just such an event.
As mentioned, somehow I came to like cycling, just for the sake of it. And long walks in nature, including rough terrain. Other than that - I actually conform to the societal stances. The bad experiences from school make me intolerant to any exercises, sports and such. Now, don't get me wrong: I can
work. I've been known to carry a whole set of furniture up to a fourth floor all on my own (in limited-size pieces of course), dig pretty big ditches with a shovel, transport blocks of pavement tiles with a wheelbarrow - and only the hastened transport of enormously huge and unwieldy wooden boards managed to exhaust me for real. But the moment I have to do exercises - that is, an effort which is being done all in one place and without immediately visible results - I very much furiously nope the hell out of there.
Another related thing is that I didn't have a car so far, so I'm used to actually going to places, and to carrying the groceries in huge amounts, sometimes for considerable distances. So at the end of the day, I don't think I'm very unfit, even as my lifestyle is rather sedentary otherwise. My specialty is sustained long-term effort - if you don't push me to go too fast or to take too much in one go, I can move a mountain for you, it will just take a longer while.
