What do you do if someone HATES vegetables?!

I'm not gonna be much help. I hate veggies too. I eat approximately 0 servings a week. *shrug* Doesn't appear to have hindered my weight loss any!

V8Vfusion is really good. has veggies masked by fruit taste yum

also has a ton of sugar....not the best choice.....juice in general is bad, even if its pure juice no sugar added, its the equivalent of drinking a coke........

this reminds me of Jessica Seinfelds book Deceptively Delicious... maybe you could look into that

This was my advice. That book has the best cauliflower mac and cheese ever!

Do you have a food processor? I hide veggies in my kid's food when they get really picky about what is for dinner.

For instance:

If I am going to make something like beef or even chicken tacos, I will puree some tomatoes, spinach, or peppers into the meat. It actually makes the mix taste wonderful.

You can do that with almost anything. If a meal has some sort of sauce, then add extra veggies- or even make up a sauce of your own that goes along with her diet. The sky is the limit here.

I thought of the Jamie Eason Live Fit trainer and she has a list of acceptable foods and serving sizes, if you want to help her make a list of the things she likes:
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/jamie-eason-livefit-trainer-approved-foods-list.html

Just because you hate toothpaste doesn't mean you don't brush your teeth. Just because you don't like soap doesn't mean you don't bathe.

Every morning millions of people who don't like going to work, do so to earn a check to satisfy their responsibilities.

What does not liking vegitables have to do with eating them. I don't like most of them. I eat them because my body needs them.

"I don't like them." is acceptable from a 3 year old. Much past that, it's time to grow the hell up.

I actually thing trelm makes a really good point. I TOTALLY accept "I hate avacados" (which are fruits, anyway, no?), but "I hate all veggies," is a completely different statement from that.

So actually, I made another suggestion above... But I also agree with telling her to suck it up a little bit.

I actually thing trelm makes a really good point. I TOTALLY accept "I hate avacados" (which are fruits, anyway, no?), but "I hate all veggies," is a completely different statement from that.

So actually, I made another suggestion above... But I also agree with telling her to suck it up a little bit.

But she didn't say she hates them all. She only likes a few. So you start with those and encourage her to try new ones or try things prepared in different ways. But saying she "must" eat them no matter what she thinks of them isn't going to work.

I've always LOVED veggies and am very adventurous with trying foods, so it is hard for me to even fathom how I need to approach this with her.

There is probably a physiological reason for that. Some people can taste chemicals in food that other people can't, in much the same way that color vision is variable - i.e. color blindness and (theoretically) tetrachromats. Have you ever done a PTC or PROP taste testing? It's these little sheets of paper impregnated with a chemical that some people can't taste it at all, some think it is bland or only mildly bitter, and some people think it is terribly bitter or even nauseating. There is a genetic basis for this particular difference in tasting ability, and people who taste these chemicals strongly are called supertasters. Research has shown that people with this genetic variant are much less likely to eat vegetables regularly, and unfortunately, are also much more likely to get colon cancer, probably as a result of poor fiber intake. There are also a variety of other food types that supertasters tend to avoid, but there is enough variability that I think there are probably a lot of other genes involved. Long story short: some vegetables may taste much more bitter or otherwise disgusting to her than they do to you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9h425217p82g2g73/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/mn4132184g0w42p7/

Part of me is tempted just to tell her to buck it up and decide how serious she is about being healthy and make a choice to branch out...and start gradually working in more veggies. Or should I just work with what she likes (which is high in starchy carbs) and only focus on overall calorie intake and exercise?

If weight loss is the only goal, then calorie intake restriction and exercise will suffice. There is no inherent need to eat vegetables at all to lose weight. I lost 22 lbs recently with relative ease and I practically never ate vegetables outside of some occasional carrots and a limited selection of beans. Vegetables do help to lose weight though, because they are filling and generally low calories, but it is by no means required. It is however difficult to get all of your micronutrients every day without vegetables, and like I mentioned above, fiber intake will probably suffer. To compensate I religiously take multivitamins, try to make up the difference at least somewhat with fruits, carrots, and V8, and eat a lot of other high fiber foods.

Is it possible to change her tastes? Perhaps. I don't deny that some food aversions are psychological in nature. But hers may not be. In my case, there are many vegetables (among other foods) that cause me to gag and vomit. I have tried over and over again to gradually acclimate myself to some of them, cooking them differently, garnishing them with different things, psyching myself up for 20 minutes before and convincing myself that it will taste great, and it still happens. I can eat some of these foods that ordinarily evoke this reaction when their taste and texture are destroyed by being cooked in a strongly flavored soup with some more palatable things, but that's the only way I've found that works, and it doesn't work for everything. My mother desperately tried the "sneaking them in" thing with me and it rarely worked. I can still remember when she tried the cauliflower mashed potato thing....disaster. I kind of hated her a little for trying that.

The best piece of advice I can give you is that trying to make her feel ashamed about not having the willpower to eat the things you want her to eat is counterproductive. Try to put yourself in her shoes: what if someone told you to drink a quart of motor oil, and if you can't stomach it, it's just because you're weak and you'll never be healthy? Just try a little motor oil at a time and build up to the full quart. It sounds silly, doesn't it? That's how it felt for me being told to eat some foods. My family gave me so much $#!7 about food when I was growing up, telling me how ungrateful I was, and that I just didn't know what was good. At times I refused to even try things just to spite them for how bad they made me feel. I was probably 13 or 14 by the time they all finally got the message that I would not budge, and finally stopped trying to make me eat things that make me feel sick. From then on they were content to just ridicule me every other meal, and they continue to do so to this day at family gatherings, though thankfully much less frequently. Please do not do that to this girl. It accomplished nothing in me. I still eat roughly the same things despite years of emotional turmoil and embarrassment, and any progress I have made in trying new things has happened only when I have been away from that kind of inane criticism. If you want to help her, then find out what she likes first, and then build slowly from there, introducing new foods rarely and not demeaning her if she can't tolerate them. You can also find healthier variants of the foods she likes that are lower calories and better nutritionally (lower carbs in her case, perhaps lower sodium and higher protein as well). Check out a book like "Eat This Not That."