1000 Recovering Picky Eaters Needed Again

If you've been following FwKA since last Spring, you know about my 2010 campaign to find 1000 people willing to become recovering picky eaters.  In honor of some nutrition students and Jamie Oliver's upcoming Food Revolution series, I'm doing the challenge again.  In that post I wrote:

What is the biggest obstacle in the way of people choosing healthy food? Taste preference. I don't know anyone that doesn't want better health through food. But do you eat food you don't like? Didn't think so. So how do you develop a taste for wholesome food you don't like?  

A few weeks back, Sally Kuzemchak, MS, RD and instructor for a Nutrition Intro class, wrote me and asked if the recovering picky eater challenge was still ongoing.  She wanted to have her students take the pledge as part of an assignment.  I let her know the challenge officially ended, but invited her students to go ahead and take the pledge.  Sally blogs at Real Mom Nutrition.  By sharing the recovering picky eater challenge with her students, she is empowering a new crop of nutrition students to lead their future patients to a healthier lifestyle by first changing their mindset.

How do you change your mind about liking a food?
First you have to change your mindset.  Your mindset has to become, I'm capable of learning to like new foods, instead of I'm a picky eater.  One your mindset has changed, your thoughts will change.  You will start thinking, I don't really like carrots raw, but they're decent cooked.  Once your thoughts about the hated food start changing your actions change too, I'm going to make carrots as a side dish this week.  Then as you're eating those carrots you've disdained your whole life you think, huh, these are actually not so bad,  I might try them raw next week.  After experimentation with some raw carrot recipes, a mindset change led to a change in results.  You used to avoid raw carrots, but now you've found a way to like them. 

I'm renewing my quest to find 1000 people who will pledge to learn to like a food they think they hate.  I assure you, it's addicting.  Once you learn to like a food you've avoided all your life, you'll want to see how many more walls you can break down.  You'll probably discover, you're not really a picky eater like you thought.  Picky eater becomes a discarded label that was responsible for decades of misconceptions about food.

In 2010 I found 113 people that signed up for the recovering picky eater pledge.  I missed the mark by a long shot.  Part of the problem was the widget I used from Change.org to track participants.  It required people to enter their address and send a letter in order to sign the pledge.  I suspect that was a big barrier for a lot of people to join in.  Another problem was my lack of PR savvy.  I'm still pretty blind when it comes to PR, but I've picked up a few tricks in the past nine months.  I went through press release writing 101 last week.  Might as well put my new skills to good use and write another one!

No excuses this time folks.  All you have to do is be willing to learn to like a new food and leave a comment on this blog post.

Will you Pledge to become a Recovering Picky Eater?
Are you with me?  Are you tired of saying "no tomatoes" to the waiter when ordering a side salad at a restaurant?  Are you ready to stop avoiding baked chicken because the bones creep you out?  Are you ready to embrace the mouth feel of raw crunchy carrots or nuts?  Is there a dish your spouse loves that you can stand because it contains onions or a feared vegetable from childhood?  If you are ready to leave your picky eater label behind, leave a comment on this blog post in this format:

Hi, I'm (your name). I pledge to learn to like (disliked food item) in the recovering picky eater challenge.

To leave a comment, scroll down to the bottom of this article, click the comment link that looks like this

Posted by jenna at 5:20 PM 0 comments

Join the Food Revolution
Wanna be part of the Food Revolution?  Tweet about the recovering picky eater challenge.  Blog about the challenge.  Post this URL on Facebook.  Email the URL for this post to your friends and family and ask them to do the challenge with you.  Send a story to all the media contacts you know.  Call me up and interview me on why I'm convinced that if people could dial up their preference for real, whole ingredients and dial down their taste for processed food that's chemically engineering to taste amazing their health would improve. 

If you're not convinced that mindset influences how you approach food (or how you view your kids' food preferences) read this article by Christina of the blog Spoonfed.  She talks about the dangers of the picky eater label.  Why not be done with your picky eater label and while you're at it, stop thinking of your kids that way too?

Stick Around
I'll be checking in with you pledge takers to see how your quest is going.  Subscribe to Food with Kid Appeal via email or blog reader so you can check in and let the gang know of your progress.


Calling All 2010 Pledge Takers
If you were one of the 113 pledges last year, pop in and say hello.  What's your eating life like now that you have a new mindset about food?