Picky Eaters

I think the tendency might be to eat less, when you actually need to eat more. I have a daughter that is a fairly picky eater but she still eats. Find things you like and make sure you're eating enough. What does it mean when you say "picky eater." I'm always looking for ways to improve my daughter's choices so your experience might be helpful here.

I am also a picky eater but I have the opposite problem. I rarely eat meat and I don't like most of it. I love salad and veggies :flowerforyou: and can (and usually do) eat a salad for lunch every day. My biggest frustration is that I get bored with eating the same foods and have to change up my choices. I have found that I have the most success when I have taken pretty much nothing away from myself, then I am not pining away for the things lost. I just really watch the portions that I eat. So I would say, stick to what you DO like just make sure you are tracking the amounts you eat. Good luck!

I find this interesting. My daughter eats only chicken and turkey and some fish (like salmon and tuna). She would not eat veggies at all as a grade schooler, she is in high school now. Just from practice and trying it different ways, I have discovered she loves carrots, tomatoes, snow peas, celery, cauliflower, green beans in a can, and sweet red peppers. She'll tolerate salad occassionally. She loves pastas and bread and potatoes but eats them in moderation. Her weakness is really the high fat, high sugar snack foods like chips, fruit juice, granol bars, cookies, etc.

Okay, so in an effort to help her eat better, I take what she likes and work from there. I make the meat item with seasoning only, very simple yet flavorful. Then I make salad with romaine or baby lettuce (never plain only iceburg) and I ask her to eat 1 cup, loosely packed. I make sure I include one of the vegetables she enjoys as a side dish, sometimes I put it on the counter as our "dinner making snack" and she loves that. We only have one starch at a meal, either potatoes or corn or a roll, but never all of them. I do pasta often as I can steam any kind of vegetable I want, including brocolli and a bunch of other things she would normally not eat, and then I blend them and put them into the sauce with a small amount of ground turkey.

I've been a preschool teacher for years and what we found was that when we cooked things different ways we often hit on something kids would eat. For myself, I don't like cooked veggies at all, prefer them raw, will tolerate them lightly steamed. I would not eat a combination food like pizza or even a soup or stew or casserole until I was 25 as I could not stand the flavors to mix. Keep trying, your tastes may change as time passes.