One of the things that was an oddity about my upbringing, was that my parents always frowned on drinking with dinner. Anything even water, any meals I just chose dinner. We didn't drink with meals. Sometimes tea or water or diluted juice afterwards, and later in life this seemed to have been relaxed. But the notion as I understood it was that you weren't supposed to wash your food down.
Whenever I went to a friend's house for dinner I was always asked what I wanted to drink. Usually water or milk was offered, but occasionally soda too (that last one I think because I was a guest). I would usually just decline as I didn't really like drinking milk. To me most of their foods were more moist than I was used to anyway -- everything from salads with creamy dressing to white bread to breaded and fried fish vs. broiled.
In my binging days, I probably consumed the most milk of any time in my life. Outside the little cartons in grammar school, I've probably only truly drank a half dozen glasses of milk in my lifetime. But in the binge days, how does one inhale a box of cookies? Well, dunking in milk of course. When I had pizza or fast food out with friends, I was already at an age where for some reason I had diet soda. But one has to wonder how much more easily/faster that burger goes down the hatch when "washed" there with sips of anything in between. Binge eating was almost always accompanied by drinking something -- usually diet soda or coffee. Milk wasn't drank, it was used to soak ;-)
I wonder how much of the overeating in general these days might be due to our national infatuation with drinking something all the time, both between meals and with.
