15 year old fussy eater

System

Hopefully he'll grow out of it, my brother was fussier than me and now east a much more varied diet.

Sadly at 28 i am a lost cause and don;t see myself ever getting any better. Its not through lack of trying, but try as a might even forcing myself to try certain foods still results in it triggering the gag reflex I do try and make myself try new things, like last night i forced myself to try some squid, hated the texture and the taste, but hey i tried :rotfl:

Gloomendoom

My wife was a fussy eater when I met her. The list of disliked foods was long and included all vegetables, seafood etc. I seriously questioned whether I wanted to pursue the relationship. I'm a human dustbin so find fussiness hard to understand. My view was/is that there are so many people starving in the world that fussy eaters need a hard kick up the bum.

Anyway, she is now mostly cured. The only hurdle that remains are peas. I'm working on it.

She reckons that her fussiness was triggered by a desire for attention. She is the eldest of a largish family.

rachiibell

Most teenagers want to eat that kind of food!

First of all food should never be thrown away. I wouldn't dare throw something my mum cooked me away! I would cook enough for him if he wants to try it and if he doesn't it would be frozen as a home cooked "ready meal".

If he doesn't want to eat it fair enough, he can cook for himself that night. Don't buy instant food so that he actually has to put the effort in.

Also I would be making sure that at least one night a week you are cooking a family meal you know he will enjoy. If he keeps refusing that then it's more about him not wanting to eat with his family.

If you keep indulging his behaviour by providing him with his favourite foods after he's just thrown a meal you spent time, effort and money on straight in the bin then you will end up with a whole house of picky eaters!

DD265

As a now 27 year old, some of my favourite meals are things that I wouldn't touch as a child/teenager.

Initially I was going to say he'll probably grow out of it as he gets older but it does sound like there's more to it.

If bulking up is indeed what he's aiming for, could you point him in the direction of counting macro-nutrients? This at least will push him towards a more balanced diet even if it isn't varied.

A chap called Michael Matthews wrote a book called Bigger Leaner Stronger. I have (being female) the Thinner Leaner Stronger book and really rate it.

BritishBibliophile

xXMessedUpXx wrote: »

Sadly at 28 i am a lost cause and don;t see myself ever getting any better. Its not through lack of trying, but try as a might even forcing myself to try certain foods still results in it triggering the gag reflex I do try and make myself try new things, like last night i forced myself to try some squid, hated the texture and the taste, but hey i tried :rotfl:

I'm so glad you wrote that as I'm exactly the same! I'm a terribly fussy eater and I really feel my gag reflex kick in to the point where I can barely swallow and come very close to throwing up.

Sadly it's mostly with fruit and veg so I don't have the healthiest diet Tried all kinds of things over the years, and my parents spent years trying to get me to try new things. Nowadays I can eat tomato-based pasta sauce (but not a solid tomato), baked beans, kidney beans (stuck in a chili), and if red peppers or carrots have been chopped up small then I'll hide them under potato/rice and manage to swallow a few done, but I can't eat carrot sticks or even roasted peppers. If I know it's there, my throat closes up.

My Mum does a nice carrot and potato soup, which gets put through the blender. I can eat that, but if she chops up some celery and chucks it in post-blender then I have to eat around the celery as I just can't stand it in my mouth

Probably should have looked in to some kind of counselling years ago, might have saved me a lot of problems in the long run.

Vikipollard

I'm afraid I am old school on this. Mine were brought up that if they didn't eat what that day's meal was, they didn't eat. I always insisted that they tried something they said they didn't like - because most of the time they hadn't tasted it before.

DS1 would avoid fruit if he could, but not because he didn't like it - he just wanted the chocolate biscuit instead. Compromise was he had to bring the apple core home in his sandwich box in order to be able to have cake/biscuit after tea. He gips trying to eat prawns or cucumber though.

DS2 would not eat eggs or mushrooms. He actually gagged when I asked him to try a mushroom and I have never pushed it since. He eats round them in any meal he has, but never makes a fuss. At 23, and post-Uni, he is quite happy with eggs now!

I can't eat most mince as it made me feel lousy. Until, that is, I discovered the <2% fat kind (turkey), which I love. It wasn't the mince I didn't like, it was the fat.

I'd echo what others have said; bin the pot noodles and takeaways. Full of c**p, salt and sugar and five minutes later he's hungry. Let him make the pizza at home, and chicken (not KFC fried) stir fry with noodles.

Mojisola

Vikipollard wrote: »

I'm afraid I am old school on this. Mine were brought up that if they didn't eat what that day's meal was, they didn't eat.

I can't eat most mince as it made me feel lousy.

And yet your children had to eat whatever you gave them or go hungry?

Vikipollard

Mojisola wrote: »

And yet your children had to eat whatever you gave them or go hungry?

I didn't say that I didn't eat it. I did. It made me feel sick. It was cheap, and we didn't have much money and I wouldn't have dreamt of saying yuk to my Mum.

The point is that half the time they would say they didn't like it without even trying, yet press them on it and they wouldn't just try it, they'd eat it all.

If I'd rolled over without pushing it, they could easily have convinced themselves they couldn't eat something.

I was 46 before I worked out it wasn't mince I didn't like, just fatty mince. But my kids had the benefit of a better diet than I did (albeit we didn't have bolognaise unless it was leftover meat from a joint that had been minced up!).

KiKi

Of course there are things that we all don't like - that's fine. I don't think it's right to force kids to eat things that they genuinely don't like.

But the OP's son will ONLY eat pot noodles, pizza, takeaways, fried chicken and bread. That's not about not liking a few things - that's really, really bad for his health, and does sound like he just wants to eat junk.

Takeaways tend to include at least one of meat, rice, pasta, veg or curry - yet he says he doesn't like those things. The thing is, he probably does - he just likes them in takeaway form where they are full of fat, salt and sugar which makes them more 'tasty'.

There's a real difference between forcing kids to eat what they don't like, and allowing them to eat only really bad food.

KiKi

kerri_gt

Just as a thought, and going down the route of him being more involved in cooking, do you have 'The Takeaway Secret' it's full of home made 'takeaway' recipes which you can cook at home but taste like the 'real thing'. I'm not saying they're all healthy but I bet they are at least healthier than actual takeaways. Let him choose some recipes to cook perhaps as a 'control' compromise (teen / mum thing)