Picky Eating

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Hi Everyone,

I have incredibly sensitive taste buds. I can even taste the difference between white chedder cheese and orange chedder cheese, and I can't abide almost any spices except for salt. This makes eating healthy incredibly difficult. I am a picky eater, and while I have a few vegtables I can tolerate if I force myself, there are none that I actually like. Everyone says I just have not found a way of preparing them that I like, but considering I don't like tomato sauce, dressing, maynoaise, alfredo, pasta, soup, garlic, or very many things of a similar calibur. Does anyone have any advice? I don't want my taste buds to make me an unenergetic blob.

I don't know how sensitive your teeth are, but you can anaesthetize your tongue either by masticating ice chips or you can use anaesthetic drops or gel on your tongue just before eating, so that you can't taste as acutely.

if you're that good you could get work as a taste expert. They get paid shedloads of money too.

Blend some of the vegetables or fruits you don't like into a smoothie along with enough of the fruits you do like to cover the taste.

That's the best idea I can think of without knowing exactly which foods you do like and which foods you don't like.

I'm not a very healthy eater, but I am picky and have found ways of dealing with that. Though I don't eat vegetables other than carrots, so I can't offer any advice on that. The smoothie idea sounds good, though I probably won't try it.

What I do is eat very simply. Two bananas for breakfast, a sandwich and a few pieces of fruit for lunch. Dinner, if I don't take the easy way out with hot pockets or a bowl of cereal, is meat cooked in some way. For example, I can cook chicken on the stove, oven, or in the crock pot. I use recipes to look up cook times. Usually I'll use a stripped down version of a recipe, for example, a marinade for the chicken with only the ingredients that I like. Sometimes instead of a meat dish I'll have a potato.

So what I'm saying is make a list of some basic things you do like, find recipes for those things, and then cut out all the parts of the recipe you do not like. Because really that long list of spices, the clove of garlic, and the onion are not essential parts of the recipe, the meat will cook just fine without them.

One thing I do that is healthy is eat a load of fruit. I love fruit, I could eat it all the time. If you regularly eat chips or other unhealthy snack foods, try replacing those with fruit. If cost is an issue, just make sure you are getting fruit in season, I'm always able to find something under $1.50/lb if not under $1.00/lb.

I'm pretty picky, but more toward texture than taste in many cases. I've found two things that have worked well:

1) Eat plainly. I rarely use spices or crazy methods of preparation. Nowadays when eating out I find most places use too much spice in their foods and it is somewhat overwhelming. I just want my chicken to taste like chicken.

2) Blend or mask. The only way I can eat avocado is to blend it into a smoothie where the taste and texture are masked. Similarly, my salad dressing of choice is a 2:1 mixture of apple cider vinegar and honey. The vinegar is good for masking anything in the salad that I don't like the taste of.