Better Eating

Hi there!

I'm a 20 year old autistic girl and I have been struggling with my eating habits for my entire life. Now that I am an adult, I want to get better at eating. 

My diet is very limited so if anyone knows any good and simple reciepes/cookbooks for food with simple tastes and textures that would be great.

All advice welcome.

  • People often tell me that. I'm sure there's a good one out there already. There's too many books and not enough people reading the good ones!

  • how about you writing a introductory cook book ? just an idea :)

  • I'm being dull and not understanding the question. What do you mean?

  • I'm a bit cautious about cook books, I think they can lead you to not developing cooking skill and being dependent on them. I'd say buy veg you like the look of, take it home and just try and cook it. Lots will be just ok, some failures, some will work. And slowly you'll teach yourself.

    One book I would recommend is Jane Grison's Vegetable book. Most of the people I know who are really into cooking rate it their top one.

    I used to teach an evening's intro course to vegan cooking, so here's a handout to that with some recipes and tips on how to change your diet: docs.google.com/.../edit

  • I’m 34 I’m in the same boat when it comes to food I’m getting better though I switched from full sugar Pepsi 6 cans a dayGrimacing to mainly water and I never go a day without eating fruit still eating a lot of crap it needs to stop 

  • You need to give us more information on why your diet is limited for anyone to suggest a solution, What is your food nightmares ? 

    Because if its vegetables you have a problem with then a food processor and blender might be an ideal solution to alter the texture of food so it is more manageable. They also allow you  process vegetables to small chunks or a paste that can enable you to hide extra vegetables in foods like pasta sauces, curries and stews. 

    If your like many of us on the community page and have a sensory processing disorder the environment and colour of plate can affect the taste in food or tolerance of the texture. 

    Investing in freezerable and microwave safe containers are a good idea because you can batch cook and freeze food that you've cooked because many people on the spectrum will eat the same thing over and over again and sometimes we can get sick of it for a while. this also makes eating better a lot easier because meals need reheating. 

    You could start with making small changes for example changing chicken nuggets for vegetable or vegan alternative but be careful not all vegan alternatives are better for you.    

  • EasyMeals by Rachel Allen is a cookbook I used when I was beginning to learn cookery. It's got lots of quite simple recipes explained clearly with usually not too many ingredients. They all taste good too.

    A tip I can give you about eating more vegetables which are very healthy and always good on the side of any meal is try to boil them very lightly. Some vegetables like cabbage can be cooked in about 1-2 minutes, others like carrots a few more. But usually the longer vegetables cook the more mushy and awful tasting they become. A lot of people think they don't like vegetables because they're used to eating them over-cooked.