Page 31 of Big Girls Do It Stronger

Chapter 17

Veggies, Palate Changes, and the Wilder Way

by Jack Wilder

Ihate vegetables. If you’ve readBig Girls Do It Running, you know this already. I’ve hated vegetables my whole life. Just ask my mother, she’ll tell you. In fact, I can think of a story from my childhood that may illustrate how far back and how deeply ingrained my dislike of veggies really goes.

When I was a kid, my parents had a hard and inviolable rule: you don’t get down from the table until your plate is cleared, ESPECIALLY OF VEGETABLES. I swear they made that rule up just to troll me. I mean, maybe not, they may have just wanted me to be healthy and eat my veggies, since everyone knows veggies are good for you. But as a stubborn three-year-old? It was a rule designed to torture me. I’d eat my chicken, I’d eat spaghetti, I’d eat meatloaf, I’d eat potatoes and rice and bread and corn and whatever else, but veggies? NOPE.

The story goes like this, as I remember it, with a few details provided by my mom:

Family dinner—my mom and dad, my older sister, and me. I don’t remember what the main dish was, probably Mom’s special chicken paprika with a baked potato ... and lima beans—my arch nemesis. I ate the chicken and I ate the potatoes, but I just couldn’t stomach the lima beans. To me they tasted like an old gym shoe mixed with Elmer’s glue and moldy Satan hork. Nope, nope, nope. So I delayed. I tried all my tactics—whining, crying, refusing, arguing, pushing them around the plate so it looked like there were fewer beans ... but to no avail.

“You’re not leaving the table until you finish ALL of the lima beans, Jack,” my dad insisted.

But ... I wanted toplay. As it was, I’d been at the table for something like an hour and a half already, because I was the slowest eater in the family. Mom and Dad were done, and my older sister had eaten her food and was in her room playing already—I spent my childhood absolutely convinced my sister used to sneak her veggies onto my plate ... and years later she actually admitted that she DID do that, now and then. So yeah, just little three-year-old Jack by himself at the big old table with a plate full of veggies, my toys calling my name ...

And a set of parents who insisted I couldn’t leave the table until it was clear of all veggies. I’m not usually a very literal person, but at that point, I was at my wit’s end. So I took their words literally: I shoved all the Satan beans—I mean lima beans—into my mouth, chewed them enough so my cheeks weren’t bulging, and then got down from the table and started playing.

Over an hour later, my mom asked me a question, and I couldn’t respond, since I had a mouthful of lima beans. My mom realized what I’d done, and how long I’d been on the floor playing with a mouthful of partially masticated lima beans, and finally realized how committed I was to the cause of not eating lima beans. She let me spit them out and never forced me to eat lima beans again, although the war to get Jack to eat his veggies waged on for the rest of my life.

I haven’t touched a lima bean since, and will not until my dying day.

When we were first married, Jasinda was unaware of my hatred of that food. She once made a frozen veggie medley for dinner and it contained lima beans. I had an epic tantrum, which led to me telling her this same story, and announcing that there was no force on earth that could make me eat lima beans.

That hasn’t changed. That willneverchange. I call it a traumatic incident involving lima beans, kind of like lima bean PTSD. The rest of my childhood, as I said, was punctuated with daily fights to get me to eat broccoli, green beans, peas, etc., with my parents usually winning. When I grew up and moved out, I stopped eating veggies entirely, at least partially because I ate like a bachelor: e.g. fast food, canned chili and soup, pizza, and all that garbage. Then I married Jasinda, and we had kids, and I had to start eating like an adult, meaning real meals with real food ... and VEGETABLES.

“You have to set an example for the kids, Jack,” my wife would tell me, usually accompanied by her distinctly Jasinda eye-roll. “So try to eat at least SOME veggies and not make a big deal about it, so the kids will eat them.”

Joke’s on me, though, because even before we started the Wilder Way, our older kids all discovered that theylovedbroccoli and were willingly to eat most other veggies. Our oldest daughterLOVESBrussels sprouts, which is still utterly baffling to me.

It was my younger boys I had to set an example for, so I had to eat my veggies and act like it wasn’t torture all over again.

“You’ll learn to like veggies when you’re older, Jack,” my parents used to tell me. Yet, whenever the subject of vegetables came up as an adult, I’d insist that I was pretty sure Iwasolder now, and Istilldidn’t like them.

Well ... enter the #WilderWay.

As you’re no doubt familiar, we started small. We cut out sugar at breakfast, and then at lunch, and then at dinner, and then we cut out all sodas and sugary drinks. And then we eliminated all processed foods and pre-packaged carbs. At the same time, we started adding in new foods, most of which I’d always insisted I didn’t like.

And, at first, I didn’t.

Sweet potatoes were one of the first things we started adding. I had a hard time with that. I didn’t like the texture, and really hated the flavor, with the rare exception of sweet potato French fries, if they were cooked extra crispy. Then Jasinda and Nanny Karri started making these sweet potato sliders, which are baked slices of sweet potato, chunks of chicken breast, chicken bacon, and some kind of delicious ranch or Greek yogurt sauce with lots of spices and FLAVORGOD seasoning ... I think the recipe is in the back. I wasn’t sure about them at first, but I ate them. The next time, I was like, eh, I guess they’re okay. And now, a few months later, I look forward to them ... especially if my sliders have the sweet potatoes baked extra crispy.

It’s the same story with avocado and guacamole and broccoli. I never really hated broccoli, I just didn’t care for it. And then my wife started making broccoli with lots of spicy stuff on it, cayenne and chili powder and Everything Spicy FLAVORGOD, and lots of garlic ... and I’d find myself adding more to my plate. It wasn’t immediate—it took a few months of detox, and gradual palate change, and just plain old eating it. I knew it was good for me and I had to set an example for my kids. And I did learn to like broccoli.

Avocado was a surprise to me. I’d tried guac a few times and was just ... meh. Don’t hate it, but don’t love it, won’t eat it. Then we started adding avocado to things like sliders and sandwiches and burrito bowls and tacos and breakfast burritos, and I realized ... holy heck, Ilikeit. So we bought a container of organic, non-GMO, spicy guacamole, and I ate it with the Red Hot Blues corn chips ... and Ilovedit. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I realized this. I’d just assumed I still didn’t like it, and then suddenly I did. It was like magic.

Green beans? Meh. Steam them and serve them plain? Ugh-UH!—as our little boys say. Add spices and some flavor and seasoning? Yum!

My point is this: give yourself time. Give your kids time. Give your husband time. You’ve been eating the same kinds of foods your whole life. As humans, we fall into ruts, and we sink into familiar patterns. At some point we just decide we don’t like salad, or veggies, or sweet potatoes, so we eat other stuff and just keep avoiding those things out of habit. We pick up a bag of chips because it’s quick and easy and tasty. We stop for McDonalds because it’s on the way home and it’s already 5:30, and by the time we get home and put together a meal and eat it’ll be 6:45. The kids should start getting ready for bed at 7:30. I’mtired,and cooking sounds like ahorribleidea. Or heck, it’s Saturday, let’s just order a pizza. Quick, easy, tasty.

It’s habit. It’s convenient. I did it my whole life, and for most of my kids’ lives.

And then we forced ourselves to examine our eating habits, the reasoning behind them, and—even more difficult—we examined the consequences of those habits: all this junk food is quick and easy, but it’s killing us. It’s making us fat and lazy and weak and slow—I’m talking about myself, here. That was me, and I didn’t even realize it. But then my wife had heraha!moment and introduced the Wilder Way to our family and, by degrees and in increments, I discovered new energy, new strength, new motivation ... and a new palate for food.

I wouldn’t eat fast food now ifyoupaidme.I wouldn’t eat regular pizza, or donuts, or chips, or candy, or the most decadent chocolate-y dessert you could find. I wouldn’t. Icouldn’t. The very thought literally turns my stomach. This didn’t happen immediately, and it wasn’t even necessarily fast, but the change happened. The same is true for our younger kids. For them, it’s still happening. We sometimes still have to cajole them into eating their veggies, but they do eat them, and every time the fight is shorter, and I know eventually they’ll stop fighting it altogether, because their tastes will have changed.

Consistency is the key to this. We always offer our kids healthy snacks, now. Before the Wilder Way, our kids ate the hot lunch at school, which was whatever was on offer. Our kids go to a small local elementary which actually provides healthier-than-usual school lunches, but as we embarked on this nutrition journey, we realized that for our kids to truly have the healthiest lunch possible, we’d need to send them with lunches from home. We make them cold cut wraps, PB+J sandwiches on sprouted bread, soups they can heat in the microwave at school, all with sides of blue corn chips, healthy popcorn, sliced fruit ... and veggies.