Hi Readers,
Thank you for those of you who voted on my Insta Poll @manokulifestyle on Instagram. By popular demand this article relates to food. Please follow me on Instagram to continue having a say on future blog posts ✍🏾
I know the struggle my fellow picky eaters, and it was this picture circulating around twitter that made me think about writing this post (and made me wonder how someone could spell lettuce with an S 🙄). 
Now depending on what kind of picky eater you are will determine how relatable this post is to you, but I can only talk from my own ridiculous habits. If you are not a picky eater and are reading this, then I’m sure you know someone who comes straight to your mind. Anyways I have come along way in the past 2 years, and it’s laughable how poor my food options were. I had like a set 4 meals I’d eat, and that was it. From the list above I still don’t eat 50% of the items, which isn’t bad compared to a few years ago when it was around 65%, so I’m still a recovering picky eater.
I ate ZERO Veg Unless you count eating Baked Beans (it counts as 1 of your 5 a day) but that is as far as it came. If I ordered egg fried rice from a restaurant, I would take out every single piece of sweetcorn (shouldn’t have been there in the first place 🙄). I would never order meals that came with vegetables, I acted like they were poison, it was something that I had held on to from a really young age and never grew out of. Bless people in my family for trying, but I was stubborn and would protest against all vegetables. I’d be told I couldn’t leave the dinner table until all my food was gone, which I took as a personal challenge…2 hours later I’d be sat at the table, fully content, with all the veg still on my plate.
Well my fellow picky eaters, a time comes in your life where you’re going to have to make a change. You’re no longer young enough to get away with it, especially in public. So, I started small, with stir-fries, I’d add one vegetable at a time and built it up from there, by the end I can say thanks to this method I can eat mixed peppers, mushrooms, carrots, baby-corn, mange-tout and broccoli. It took time to adjust, but it was a conscious effort of mine, and especially with my goal of losing weight, I needed to up the veg intake, I couldn’t maintain my smaller portions of food without veg because I would be starving, whereas with them incorporated into my meals, I would be much fuller for longer.
However as I said once a picky eater always a picky eater 😂 my list of veg I don’t eat is much longer: peas, sweet corn, cabbage, tomato, cucumber, asparagus, kale, cauliflower etc…. but you’ve got to start from somewhere 🤷🏾♀️
Juice is not a substitute to fruit
Similar to my vegetable relationship I ate practically no fruits. Marketing campaigns lead you to believe that juice is a healthy alternative (another 1 of your 5 a day) but there can be so much added sugar, you would be better with a can of coke. Anyways I’m still not really a fruit person, my pickiness really flares up with fruit, the only one I really eat often are grapes (must be red) but I’ve cut out juice completely from my life. I’ll never drink juice at home, it’s become a treat now when I go out but in general H20 all the way 🙌🏾.
Seafood 🦐🐙🐟
Fish Fingers!
e so proud of myself when I ate these, I’d be thinking oh yeah, all that Omega-3 😂. That’s as far as I went with seafood. Fish fingers are still epic, I’ll eat them proudly in my 80s with no shame. However people around me seemed to love seafood, I needed to know what all the fuss was about so I wanted in! The thing with being a picky eater is that half of the foods you don’t like you’ve never eaten before, which is annoying because you could be missing out on the most amazing foods. I eventually started eating prawns, calamari, salmon, tuna, cod etc, bit by bit and it was life changing, finally another source of protein other than chicken 💃🏾. Something a bit more sophisticated to order when dining out.
So to my fellow picky eaters, I’m not sure if I were reading this, I would jump into eating the foods I’ve been skeptical about for a long time, but honestly even if it is baby steps, you’ve gotta give it a try. If you’re a picky eater trying to lose weight and you haven’t incorporated some of the items I’ve mentioned above, you will struggle, simple as that. You don’t need to go from 0 to 100, even 0 to 3 will do 😂 your body will thank you for it.
If I can eat a plate like this…
then anything is possible, there is hope for us all ✌🏾
Thanks for reading if you’ve made it all the way to this last sentence 😂👏🏾👏🏾
Victoria
I don’t know if I had been in denial during the past year as to how much weight I had put on. Some people would say things like “you’re not that bad” 🙃 but I know my body better than anyone else, this wasn’t me, the weight had come on so quickly😔.
Manoku 