Fussy Eaters (merged)

nuttywoman

My son who is now 23 has always been like this.Right from the word go he`s survived on cheese sandwiches, cooked pasta - nothing else, dried cereal etc. It was a nightmare !!
At his leaving do at school , everyone else had a 3course meal in local hotel, cost them £15 which was not bad price but i had to pay the same for him as well.That consisted of dried pasta, garlic bread & chips !!!!
He`s now over 6ft tall and does a heavy manual job lol

Forgot to say, a relatives son - whose in his late 40`s is exactly the same as my son lol

sandiep

My wee one simply doesn't have the patience for eating. We have tea at the table together, one meal. And she finds every excuse not to sit & eat. It's not that she doesn't like the food, at the end she generally picks up all the cold food and simply shoves it in her mouth in one go. Her favourite program is "the tea party program" (come dine with me), and she can tell you the names of virtually all fruit & veg, and has a real genuine interest in food. She just can't be bothered with spending a lot of time eating.

But, she starts the day with porrage, has porrage for supper, lots of fruit & veg, and i'm not going to get stressed about it. She's happy, healthy, rarely gets ill, can't walk anywhere runs everywhere, makes good progress at school.

I know, that if I plonked her in front of the telly with her tea, she''d probably eat the lot whilst distracted, but I don't want to do that. I'll stick with table, and I figure, with time, she'll sort it out.

SugarSpun

My brother's 20 and is incredibly fussy - my husband went to culinary school and has cooked professionally, so dinner here tends to be something wonderful. Brother was here and simply ignored anything on his plate he didn't recognise, and when Husband asked if he'd not enjoyed it he just said he didn't like it. Husband resorted to asking him to at least try it before rejecting it, and to my very great surprise he did - grilled marinated courgettes and roast duck have now been added to Brother's repertoire of Food He Will Eat.

Please persevere with your son, OP - there is nothing more frustrating than an adult who's not grown out of whining about "not liking" food they haven't tried.

jellyhead

I'd have done the same Isica, the tiniest try of something is a big compromise for him.

What does he have on his lunch time sandwich? Most of the fussy eaters I've known will only have butter, or maybe jam.

He eats spag bol which is wet, so it doesn't sound like his eating issues are as bad as could be.

I got my boy to eat spag bol at age 9 (yes, I know it's wet, but he went on a week's camp with school and ended up trying simply because he was starving - the extra exercise made him hungrier). He still came back much lighter and looking like an extra for the thriller video but there was cereal every morning so it wasn't total starvation.

Anyway, once he'd agreed to eat spagbol (a small amount, separately on the plate, not touching his spaghetti until he wanted it to) he tried chilli con carne and loved it. From there he agreed to try tiny mouthfuls of other wet things. He hates gravy, stock etc. but will eat some chinese foods now.

This took years though - as I said he was 9 before he'd try wet things. The dietician said the key was not to force him, not to argue but to give him time to relax about food and realise that it wasn't the big scary thing he imagined it to be.

looktothefuture

The rule in our house is, try it once and if you don't like it - you HAVE NO CHOICE but to try it another time (a few days later, made fresh - I don't do heater-uppers!!) and if you still don't like it, fine!

My youngest SS (8) is brilliant at trying anything and generally likes it after the first try. He'll literally eat everything he's given, apart from anchovies (and i don't blame him!). He loves all veg, fruit and even some south african food (I'm south african). He's never given us any problems when it comes to food - the fruit bowl is out for him to have as much as he wants during the day (instead of snacks of crisps and sweets) and there's a tupperware in the fridge of nibbles of cucumber, carrots, peppers and tomatoes for when he fancies it!

My eldest SS (14) survives on a diet of tins! Anything in a tin is good food according to him! Tinned spagetti hoops, tinned ravioli and tinned all day breakfast... needless to say I've him sitting at our dinner table gagging and snuffling the food into his mouth like a pig when he's had no choice but to eat the food he's been given - Tough t*t really... you eat what you get given or you starve until you go home! Simple!

Buttonmoons

My 3yo DD is fussy aswell.

She's getting better lately, though still won't really try main meals, I think the sauce and all the veg mixed in put her off, what a carry on I had with her trying to get her to taste spag bol - she didn't, so she got put to bed, where she promptly fell asleep, and woke up the next day ravenous and ate 2 bowls of weetabix and an apple!

She won't drink milk so gets plenty of yoghurts, she will eat mash potato, so I add cheese. Just gotta be sneaky until they start accepting things. Hoping nursery will help her to be less fussy.

jellyhead

My 3, sorry 4 now, year old is eating the carrots he planted and watered, they're the baby carrots that were free with the BBC dig it promotion. It's not too late to plant, we planted our last ones yesterday. He also ate the baby sweetcorn that he grew himself last year.

He tried a nibble on lettuce that he'd grown too. He hated it, but he was relaxed and happy to try it, because it was his own. He won't try beetroot or tomatoes though, even though he grew them lol!

broughy

kr15snw wrote: »

Im the opposite unfortunately. My mum gave in to me and let me eat what I want.

Now at the age of 22 I still cant stand any fruit and most veg, simply because I never got the taste of it as a child

Keep going with the 'eat it or go hungry' tactic. I wish my mum had done this to me.

I agree with this. I too am in this camp, and think I have actually become a worse eater as I've got older. I'm incredilbly fussy, although I do try to have a shot of eating new things, but find it very difficult and I find that a lot of things, I don't like the taste simply because its new.

I wish my parents had stuck it out and taught me to eat properly as a child. I don't blame them for not having done it though, I'm sure I put them through hell!

carolinosourus

Hi! Sorry to just jump in without reading all the posts, but I have an ex who at 29 would only eat:
Cheap sausages, mcdonalds cheese burgers, potato waffles, heinz baked beans, tesco value mild cheese, mash, shop-bought meat pies, spag bol made with only mince, tomato and very finely-chopped onion, cheese and tomato pizza, bacon, white bread, tomato ketchup and that's about it. And things had to be premium brands, like the waffles, beans, bread and ketchup.

He was like this because when he was younger, if he decided that he didn't like something, his mother would immediately put her dinner aside and cook him something that he wanted to eat. He still lived with her at 29, and she was still doing it. She ended up having to cook about 4 different meals for everyone.

It became a nightmare and was one of the reasons we split up, also it meant we couldn't go anywhere nice to eat and any takeaway that we had had to be mcdonalds or pizza!

What worked on us when we were little was that if we didn't want to eat something then we weren't getting anything else. We soon learnt that if we made a fuss we went hungry. And remember, he won't starve over night

I find it really interesting watching Supernanny, while some people I'm sure might have problems with her, as I don't have children I consider it to be entertainment... Anyway, there was an episode that I watched on 4OD about a young boy who had had stomach flu when he was small and as a result had a terrible relationship with food, made worse by the fact that his mother would shove food down his throat and basically force-feed him. While I'm sure you're not doing that, it might give you some hints or tips about how to encourage him to eat different things? Also maybe a reward system based on whether he'd eaten his 5 a day? Pure juice and dried fruit counts as a portion, would he eat things like that as snacks?

Sorry if I've just repeated what everyone else has said!

Edit: meant to add, if you get stressed about it at mealtimes it's very likely that he will become worried about eating at all, if he won't eat something then fine, just let him sit there while you all eat. If your son is anxious around mealtimes that will make him even less likely to eat.

briona

Have you tried making food look "fun"?

I saw an article in today's Daily Mail (not my usual choice of paper I hasten to add!) about a man who makes cartoon character sandwiches to encourage his fussy 4 year old to eat! And it seems to be working... Might be worth a try.

Article and inspiration below.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1207758/Yes-OK-play-food-Dad-turns-food-cartoons-encourage-fussy-son-eat.html

http://funkylunch.com/gallery.htm