Limited Diet

Post Reply New Topic

Is anybody else a picky eater? If so, what advice could you give me on trying new foods?

JUST DO IT!
edit: You are really overthinking this

When I simplified my diet too much, I was missing many nutrients. Even restoring the seasoning helped. Given that this is 2020, I would definitely stay vegan, and learn to cook rather than abuse my health with processed food. When I was young, we didn't get all the stories about people with terrible fecal problems.
When I gave up butter a few years ago, I thought I'd miss it, but I increased my use of olive oil and my body is quite satisfied with that, so no cravings developed.

Easy for you to say. I can't speak for the OP, but I have an EXTREMELY limited diet and am terrified of strange foods. I've tried your "just do it" idea and I cannot "just do it". I'd have to be sedated in some way to try something new. You might as well ask me to fly instead.

I used to too. You just gotta not think about it and try it the more you think about it the less you are gonna want to do it. I'm not gonna say i'm entirely over it. But you gotta just push past it. Honestly if it's realyl that hard for you to try something new there is nothing i or anyone else can do to help you.

I'm and I still am.

First and foremost, it's a psyche thing.
To overthink or to get overwhelmed by sensations you do not like.
It's just way, way easier to just spit it out or avoid it in the first place.


To literally 'just do it' -- start a bit easier and/or make it easier.
Smaller bits of servings and/or pick off certain parts and bits you may find less comfortable. You may gradually try to take more and remove less.
A drink nearby to down it.
Or another food or additional flavor to follow through.

During the process, and if it's a taste you have to acquire; do not be so impatient.
If you're impatient you're just going to give into whatever your mind resists.
Taste itself is usually an easier to process.
To cope, you may give yourself a bit of a break by stop smelling. But not breathing through the nose while eating can be tricky or hard.

Touch related tasting is harder.
It may shock you surprise enough into spitting because you bitten something that sounds or feel something unexpected.
Thus smaller servings and ridding certain parts to pick out.

Acquiring any tastes takes time and commitment. It gets a bit easier with experience.

If you happened to like something new, then do enjoy.

I'm not a "picky" eater, but if I were in your position I'd look for foods that don't have the smells/textures/ingredients/whatever you dislike. Find foods that are similar to what you do like.

I mean yeah it all comes down to one thing you just gotta do it.

i'm a picky eater like you. today i had sausage for lunch. i absolutely hated it, can't stand the texture and the taste but i ate it anyway because i knew i had to. it's not healthy to have a restricted diet. cough medicine sucks too but i have to take it if i want to get better. i do the same reasoning for food. i didn't eat a large amount of sausage, i ate some, the rest i gave it to my cat (she was very pleased ), but hey, at least i'm proud of myself. when i had lunch i tried not to think too much about what i was eating, i just chew it and got it down the esophagus. that's it. try not to think too much. and remember that having a good diet helps you avoid unpleasant illnesses down the road.

My diet is fairly limited but with due regard to getting all the nutrients I'm supposed to need. So I buy flour, yeast, raisins, potatoes, spinach, mushrooms, onions, garlic, olive oil, sunflower oil, nuts, hummus, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, soya milk, tea, green peppers and eggs. I don't buy much else. Usually pressure from other people gets me to eat things with other ingredients here and there. For some reason I don't like fruit very much, so I add a bit of vitamin C to things in case I get scurvy or something.

I've lived that way most of my life without coming to any obvious harm, so I guess I'm not missing much. I stick to a very small number of simple recipes. So the work and expense of eating is fairly small, and I have more time for other things. I'm not particularly interested in variety, I don't crave to have something different every day. I've more found a few things I really like and I haven't got bored with them. Very occasionally I start to feel bored and then I might try something I've not had for a long time, but that doesn't happen much. The main thing is to keep it all reasonably simple. Cooking is OK but I usually have more interesting things to do, and if I stick to the same few recipes then they get very easy.

If I was worried about not getting all the right nutrients, I'd try to analyse what was in my food and see if there was anything missing. I tried to do that a long time ago but it was taking too long and I gave up because I wasn't particularly worried about it.

Start gradually. Take baby steps. Get a small piece of it, play with it, lick it, whatever you have to do. Tell yourself it's healthy and good for you before trying it. Eat a food your enjoy after trying it. That will help your mind associate new foods with something positive (the psychological term for that is classical conditioning and it's been proven to be effective). What I described above is called gradual exposure therapy and it can be used to overcome many problems such as social anxiety, sensitivity to criticism, and a hesitation or fear of being yourself. Combining gradual exposure therapy with classical conditioning (associating it with something positive) is very effective.

Back when having a "Neurosis" was in fashion (before the 1980s), there was a popular idea that the more foods a person disliked, the more "Neurotic" that person was (and vice-versa).

Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving chronic distress, but neither delusions or hallucinations.  The term is no longer used by the professional psychiatric community in the United States, having been eliminated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980 with the publication of DSM III.  However, it is still used in the ICD-10 Chapter V F40–48.

^
It's a shame the terms neurotic and psychotic are going out of fashion after I took the trouble to learn what they meant (as explained in one book I read) - I still find them useful, with neurotic meaning somebody who has nutty ideas that trouble them because they know they're nutty ideas, and psychotic meaning somebody who has nutty ideas that they accept as reality. That definition probably went out with the ark, if it was ever particularly in, outside of that book I read.

But applying the term "neurotic" to people's food habits is new to me, and doesn't fit in with my archaic grasp of psychiatry at all. Maybe in spite of their attempts to make it objective, psychiatry still has a lot of fuzzy art in it along with the science.

Hold your nose and down the hatch?

On a more serious note...
I aim for nutrient dense foods.
That way I can eat the smallest amount of food without missing out on nutrients.
Basically I eat for health rather than pleasure.
i don't know your food aversions, if texture or taste makes you retch that's a hard one to get around, unless you can find a form of that food which you can tolerate.
For example, rice is a killer for me, but I can eat it in sushi and tolerate, even enjoy it.
You could try juicing, or incorporating a new food into something you already eat.
It's hard to give advice without knowing what your particular issues are.

I don't have this problem too bad at all. My main dislikes are: Milk, eggs(to an extent), Beets, Cauliflower, warm broccoli(I like cold though oddly), peanut butter and jelly, bananas, and liver.

I'd like to become more of a vegetarian, maybe most of the time.

Yes, I am a picky eater. I always have been since I was little, as I wanted to know what was in my food. Part of my issue is that I have food allergies that aggravate the decision process of what I can eat and what I cannot. I am allergic to eggs and alcohol, so those are naturally out of my diet. My father was allergic to fish (which runs in my family), so I simply do not consume it. The only seafood I occasionally eat is fried shrimp. I do not eat avocados because the texture is too close to eggs for me. I do not eat rice because it spikes my blood sugar too much. Asian food is completely not appealing to me at all.

It was hell for me to go to picnics where everyone brought food to eat. I could never tell what was in many of the dishes, so I would either eat what my parents brought or do without. My relatives were always trying to force strange foods on me, so I stopped going to those events because of that problem. I have avoided workplace luncheons because of the same issue. Some people just do not understand that I have very good reasons why I am not interested in trying their cooking, no matter how good of a cook that they think they are.