Reply #42: A lot of people seriously don't know HOW to cook or eat healthy [View All]

[conflictgirl]

I'm serious, for the most part I am one of them. I grew up eating processed food and fast food. Now I have at least cut out the fast food and we mostly eat from scratch at home, but I admit that I buy things like frozen meals (Lean Cuisine kind of things) to take for lunch for work and we still eat nowhere near enough vegetables. My eating preferences have vastly improved over my family of origin but I am apparently far from many here.

I do still eat a lot of stuff that the "typical American" would not - e.g. I would rather have brown rice, or at least long grain white rice, over minute rice; I like slow cook oats rather than the instant ones; I actually like beans. But I'm just being completely honest here. I know what things I'm NOT supposed to eat but after a lifetime of growing up eating those foods, it is very hard to know what I should be eating instead. I avoid things like artificial sweeteners, fried foods, sodas, etc. and I make my own bread, and I'm not a big meat eater. But I have no idea how to prepare really healthy meals and frankly, a lot of the healthier meals I've read about sound completely unpalatable to me. I can only imagine that millions of others are like me as well.

So it's not necessarily about people wanting to make excuses about why they don't eat healthy. Some people really don't know how to do it. Or really have such deeply entrenched taste preferences for typical American foods that if you try to take them from McDonalds all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum, say eggplant and spinach, with no steps in between, it's not going to be appealing at all to them. It's not about them making excuses, it's about finding a way to help them adapt their tastebuds.