I’ve been very overweight for a long time. Lately I’ve been trying to eat healthier and lose weight. (among dealing with other nutritional deficiencies.)
One of the big problems I have though is that I have a lot of trouble eating foods with weird textures, smells, tastes, etc. This of course includes a lot of vegetables and some kinds of healthier proteins like fish.
A doctor I was working with recommended talking to a nutritionist who is familiar with these kind of problems. However, I didn’t find them to be that helpful. They didn’t really have a good understanding of what kind of things bothered me and didn’t really seem to want to learn or incorporate that into a plan. I got a lot of “Well can’t you just try to put up with some of these things that bother you?” So eventually I gave up with them. So I’m back to eating either miserably small portions of unhealthy foods (which doesn’t really solve the nutrition problem and makes me hungry) or a handful of rather bland healthier foods that are fine to eat but just make me sad.
Does anyone have experience navigating these kinds of problems? What did you do? Do you have any suggestions? Types of foods, recipes, resources that deal with this, etc?
“Well can’t you just try to put up with some of these things that bother you?”
That’s pretty invalidating.
Personally, I have problems with runny things, eggs, floppy/over cooked vegetables, that squeaky feeling from biting on slightly boiled green beans, and cold food.
Fish is understandable. That can have its funk, flakes, and squeaky squish. I prefer a deep fried tilapia, but that probably wouldn’t help. I can see mahi and salmon being weird with texture.
What vegetables are you trying to get more of?
As far as vegetables go, there are some specific ones that bother me then some more general textural annoyances. One of the specific examples that comes up a lot are non-processed tomatoes. Fine with sauces and ketchup and stuff like that, but actual tomatoes smell weird, they ooze, they’ve got seeds, they’re squishy, etc. This has been kind of a big problem because sooooo many sandwiches and things feature tomato as a major part of the flavor of the dish. I could ask them for no tomato, but then usually all that’s left is like lettuce and some other lower flavor ingredients. At that point I might as well just get something else. Just in general if I have to get rid of some ingredients from something I don’t know enough about what to replace them with to still end up with something that’s supposed to taste good together.
More generally, textures that make the food harder to eat, like there being tough/rigid bits, especially if they’ve got long shapes can be a problem. We get this spring mix for salads, and I kinda tolerate it, but the stems on some of the leaves can be really annoying. Green beans, snap peas, etc also have a similar problem, especially when they have those stringy bits. Then there are things that are just unpleasantly squishy. Then there’s some stuff I can kind of tolerate in some dishes, like bell peppers in a fajita, but I’d pick around them if they were in something I had to more actively select bites of like a stir fry.
It can be a bit tough to explain all the little ins and outs of it all. I kinda want to be able to find new varied/healthy things to eat and actually enjoy, but it’s been tough searching for things that don’t run into some random problem like these.
