Tell me how to eat normally.

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Ok, that might sound like a strange request but right now I am still struggling with eating right. I live on 2 or 3 foods. I try adding another one since variety is supposed to be good but all that happens is that I add it to my staple foods and live on that and eventually drop one of the first 2 or 3 and eat whatever the new addition is.

I'm a vegetarian, a picky eater, and get depressed if I eat too much sugar. I'm picky enough that most things you might suggest are things I won't like. Anything with tomatoes, except enchaladas and one brand of canned vegetarian chili. Anything with mushrooms or olives. Anything with tomatoe sauce. No green peppers. I don't like any of those foods and can't handle eating them.


There are more that I am probably forgetting to list.

And I hate to cook. I hate taking time to eat. I don't sit down, just stand there with a yogurt and some fruit, or take my food to whereever it is in the living room I was before.

Yet I really need to eat better.

Advice? I know I have posted something sort of similar before but could really use your advice.

Thanks.

Learn to cook. Takes a lot of time to learn (and sometimes to do,) but learn to cook, cook everything you eat yourself. You'll be forced to use many ingredients, some things that you probably never knew you were eating (onions is a great example of this, lots of people hate onions but onions flavor about everything you buy) and then have a wider array of foods in your diet. If you cook everything yourself, too, with a pan on the stove, it helps you control your diet better, as let's say you want lasagna. Instead of opening a can or box of frozen lasagna, you gotta actually make lasagna. Suddenly you don't want lasagna as much, and then you make real lasagna and savor it because of all the time it took to make.

Also, if you reheat stuff, try reheating it in a pan, too. Instead of the microwave. Like if it's something with sauce, you can just throw it in a pan and heat it up like a can of soup. Tastes much better than reheating in the microwave.

Try salad wraps/quesadillas. For the wrap, just buy some salad mix at the store, add your favorite fruits/vegetables/dressing, and wrap in a tortilla. For a quesadilla, I like to stir-fry a variety of vegetables (zucchini and plantains are some of my favorites but I have strange food tastes lol), then put them inside a tortilla, fold it, and put it on a skillet for like 1-2min on each side (until it browns). It tastes even better if you coat the tortilla with butter, but makes it less healthy too lol.

Both of these don't require much cooking time at all, the wrap takes me about 2min to make (I eat these for lunch a lot), the quesadillas closer to 7-10min. There's also a few really good frozen vegetable mixes at the store that I buy sometimes; there's one with pre-seasoned corn/black beans/bell peppers (red ones lol) that takes about 5min to cook on the stove, it's really good!

Eat some meat. Vegetarianism isn't normal for human beings.

I heard we were vegetarians by nature... We only started eating meat because the supply of vegetarian foods couldn't meet our requirements as population increased. There's an article below if you would like another source to go with that.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of The China Study, explains that in fact, we only recently (historically speaking) began eating meat, and that the inclusion of meat in our diet came well after we became who we are today. He explains that "the birth of agriculture only started about 10,000 years ago at a time when it became considerably more convenient to herd animals. This is not nearly as long as the time [that] fashioned our basic biochemical functionality (at least tens of millions of years) and which functionality depends on the nutrient composition of plant-based foods."

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-fre ... 14390.html)

That's interesting. The Woolly mammoth went extinct about 10,000 years ago, and human hunting is cited as playing a role. Of course, this means the mammoth would have been hunted for centuries before 10,000 years ago, meaning some humans, somewhere on the planet were eating meat before the birth of agriculture.

French cave paintings from over 30,000 years ago depict humans hunting deer.

Personally, I don't buy the natural vegetarian myth.

Yep, I also learned in an anthropology class that tooth decay only became a problem after agriculture started, because that's when people started consuming more plant-based food (aka, more sugar). When they just ate meat, their teeth were just fine!

Please don't turn this into a good/bad about vegetarianism. We can make our own choices as individuals. Start your own thread for an arguement.

To those who did stay on topic, thank you.

I wasn't intending to answer any further. I simply suggested meat in the diet might be a good idea to help you eat normally. When another poster answered and provided a website that I found dubious, I felt it necessary to address that.

Please don't take it as some personal attack on your lifestyle. If you're confident in your veganism, they why so upset?

I am vegetarian as well, and a picky eater. I force myself to cook one new meal a week off of recipes I get from food networks website. Some recipes work, some don't, and some are close enough that I can cook them again with some modification.

My staple foods are, cashews/peanuts/almonds, veggie baked french fries, home made veggie chili, fresh fruit, hummus with either pita bread or a bagel, peanut butter and jelly. I am working on a good black beans and rice recipe for my taste.

How many times a day do you eat? I also find it is easier to handle diet variety when I eat 5 or more separate small meals in a day with nuts and fresh fruit as snack items.

I hope this helps you eat a better variety!

I'm also veg, and a lot of the stuff bison mentioned is huge in my diet as well. How do you feel about lentils or chickpeas? Those make good additions and there's a lot of fairly simple stuff you can do with them. A lot of times too I'll take a can of some decent soup, I like Amy's if you can get that brand where you are, and dump half a can in a pot with about 1/3 cup rice and 1/2 cup water, simmer that on the stove for around 20 minutes till the rice is a good consistency and there's not too much liquid left (time and amount of water might vary depending on what type of rice you use, just keep an eye on it so it doesn't burn and add a bit more water if you need to). Should make about 2 servings. It's super easy but pretty decent for you, and you can sub lentils, grains, beans, or whatever for the rice. Anything you can toss some quinoa in is good. You can usually pick quinoa up cheap in bulk or even prepacked and it cooks like rice but it's one of the few complete protein grains out there plus having other good stuff you need. Dried fruit is good, if that's not too much sugar (natural sugars might be easier for you than processed sugars?)