Surprisingly, I was not one of those kids that avoided their vegetables like the plague. I loved broccoli and peas when I was growing up, asking for them with my dinner. Apparently, I also ate salads at a young age which I distinctly remember topping with Italian dressing. I didn’t love all vegetables equally and until just recently, I wouldn’t touch some of them. Then there were foods that I gave up for the better part of my teenage years and early twenties, that are staples for my recipes.
Isn’t it crazy how we continue to change and grow no matter where we are in life?
I think it’s quite beautiful actually. Over the years we change, grow, and hopefully improve, and I have found that my taste palette has done just that. Being a vegetarian for years allowed me to try a lot of foods and vegetables that I would have never otherwise touched.
Flexible dieting has encouraged me to try even more foods and recipes that I would have never touched before. For that, I am so thankful that I found flexible dieting and that is has allowed me to learn about nutrition and meet my physique goals. The best of both worlds!
Foods I Used to Hate That I Now Love
Chicken and Turkey
I think this is the most obvious of all foods on the list, simply because I used to be a vegetarian. I gave up fish and meat when I was 17 years old, but always missed fish in my diet such as salmon and shrimp. When I started tracking macros about two years ago, I quickly learned how get the most out of my macros and one of those ways to incorporate foods that were mostly protein.
After a lot of thinking, I decided to add chicken back into my diet in early early 2017. It took some time, but chicken has become a staple in my diet. In the last six months of 2017, I also started incorporating turkey into my meals, and find that it’s great for homemade burgers and meatballs.
Mushrooms
Talk about a food that brings high volume! I was a vegetarian for years and mushrooms are one of the vegetables that are recommended as a meat alternative because of the texture. And that was the reason that I avoided them for so long. I hate the texture of mushrooms. That being said, I recently gave them another try to add volume to some of my meals, like my egg whites and stir fried rice (and rice cauliflower). With the right amount of garlic powder and crushed red pepper flakes, I’m starting to warm up to mushrooms in my dishes. And you can add a bunch for a very low amount of calories.
Tomatoes
Let me be very clear – I used to hate tomatoes with a passion. I would dig them out of my salads in restaurants and do everything I could to avoid them. Then I tasted a fresh, from the garden tomato on a trip to California. Right after that trip, I started adding more tomatoes to my salads, egg skillets, and as a snack. Last summer, we planted six cherry tomato plants in our garden, yielding nearly endless tomatoes in August and September. There’s nothing better than ripe, garden tomatoes and I can’t wait until they’re back in season again.
Zucchini
Here’s another vegetable that is very high volume that I never used to think twice about. When I found that zoodles (zucchini noodles) were a thing, I gave them another shot since pasta is a little more difficult to make fit my macros. After I got a spiralizer for Christmas a year ago, zucchini became a staple. I’ve shared a few recipes using zoodles including a low-carb shrimp scampi and tuna with zoodles salad.
Green Beans
Here’s another vegetable that I used to hate and would pick around if it was on my plate. That was until I tried fresh green beans and cooked them in a way that I wanted. So here’s my warning: never eat frozen or canned green beans – ick. Now I eat green beans weekly, oven baking them as a side to go with my egg white breakfast muffins.
What foods do you love now that you used to dislike? Do you think some foods are an acquired taste or do we grow to like new foods?
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