People like me are the reason 100-calorie snack packs were invented.

As an infant, I was abnormally rotund—it didn't help that my parents fed me fried fish before I had even begun teething. When I was a toddler, I went to an air show with my uncle and broke his budget after consuming the contents of his picnic basket, some concession stand food and an entire family-sized bag of peanut M&Ms. After that, Dad took his best shot at setting a better example by screwing me over on the most treasured part of childhood: school lunches.

While everyone else got to eat their $1.10 FDA-approved hot lunches washed back with a carton of Dean's chocolate milk (the kind where if you pinched it open incorrectly you had to peel apart the whole top and drink it with a straw), I got the following well-balanced meal:

• PB&J on Iron Kids bread with the jelly soaked so far through that the napkin Dad had tucked in with the Ziploc DISSOLVED
• Lightly salted tortilla chips
• Assorted fruit cup
• Six-ounce can of Dole pineapple-orange juice, which I painstakingly rationed to ensure I would still have a backwash sip left for after my last bite

If I was lucky, I would score Gushers or some other treat Dad had found a coupon for in his alphabetized coupon holder, but I never got Fruit Roll-Ups because Dad had his own food dehydrator and gave me crap like dried banana chips instead. Some days he would swap out the PB&J for leftover gumbo in a thermos, which by noon became lukewarm, separated itself into oil and solids, and smelled of body odor.

Between these [mostly] odorless, tasteless brown-bag lunches and being forced to sit boy-girl-boy-girl by last name, there was no one who loved me enough to trade. So I had to bide my time for two events:

1. When the monthly school menu was distributed, I got to circle three days: Pizza Day, Nacho Day (eaten fast enough to avoid the nauseating top layer of cooled cheese skin), and Spaghettios + Bread Roll Day. One of the few times I tried to deviate from this arrangement, Dad made me pay the cafeteria lady in pennies.
2. Parent Visits, when I and three friends got to sit at a special table, dining on a special meal. Dad always brought Pizza Hut, so suddenly those boy-girl people who refused to trade would become my new best friends.

Despite the healthy lunches, my dad was (and remains) awesome. While everyone else had decorative lunch boxes, he rolled old school with brown paper bags and took time every morning to draw stick figures on them with permanent marker. Some days his artwork would even extend into the bag, where he would scribble comics on any available writing surface, including my jelly-soaked napkin. He also did a killer impression of Pee Wee Herman (pre-public indecency), and he always set aside a stick of beef jerky and string cheese for the mid-morning snack we removed from our cubbyholes to maintain our blood sugar and attention span.

Looking back, I see what he was trying to do: he was trying to teach me the importance of moderation and a healthy diet. He failed miserably. What actually ended up happening was akin to the dog that swallows its bone or eats a used Q-Tip because he/she is afraid you'll take it from them: I ate my friends' parents out of house and home (seriously—one mom even had to tell me to lay off the Starburst popsicles), and I still freak out at family-style meals where I know I'm not supposed to hoard but also don't want to share.

So when I think about the long-term merits of my boxed lunches (healthy) vs. hot lunches (unhealthy), what it really comes down to is this: don't expect either option to matter if you've already fed your fat infant fried fish instead of formula.