Teenage Boys!

So, I have a teenage boy that is a bottomless pit! The child eats EVERYTHING!!!! I can't keep food in the house. Each week I spend approximately $200 at the grocery and by Friday, he is crying that there is nothing in the house to eat?!?! Where did all the food go? In his leg? Where? 

I have come home to find him making his lunch with the food I bought to make the family dinner. All I can do is sigh and move on to look for something else or just say, "Tonight is fend for yourself." I have gotten him Hungry Man dinners and other types of microwaveable food and he says he doesn't like any of them. I am clueless on how to keep him fed.

Tonight I come home from running and smell pasta thinking he has heated up lasagna from the night before, no it's my Smart Ones meal I had gotten to take for my lunch next week to work. Thought he didn't like microwaveable foods? Apparently he likes the ones he isn't supposed to touch. Do I have to write my name on food that I have set aside for my lunches?

I have hidden snacks so that they can have them for their lunches. Bottled water is completely a waste of money, he drinks a 12 pack in about 2 days. Boxed juices might make it 3. Chips might make it through the weekend, if he is gone to a meet or something to occupy most of the weekend ;)

I love my son, but am not sure I can afford to keep feeding him!

I found this study and it proves my point:

(Reuters Health) - Parents of teenage boys often believe they are being eaten out of house and home. A new study suggests they're right.
In a lunch-buffet experiment involving 200 kids ages 8 to 17, researchers found that boys routinely ate more compared with girls their own age. But boys in their mid-teens were the most ravenous of all -- downing an average of nearly 2,000 lunchtime calories.
The pattern makes sense, given that boys usually hit their growth spurt -- putting on height and muscle mass -- in late puberty, according to senior researcher Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, of the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Yet, while teenage boys have a storied reputation for packing it away, there had actually been little objective evidence that this is the norm.
"There's a lot of folk wisdom that says boys can eat prodigious amounts, but we haven't had much data," Yanovski told Reuters Health.
To fill the gap, he and his colleagues had 204 8- to 17-year-old boys and girls come to a lunch buffet on two separate days. On one day, the kids were instructed to eat as much as they normally would during lunch; on the other day, they were told to eat as much as they wanted.
Overall, the researchers found, boys ate more than girls did at each stage of puberty. Prepubescent boys -- generally between the ages of 8 and 10 -- averaged nearly 1,300 lunchtime calories, versus 900 among prepubescent girls.