Getting wife to become Primal. page 2

[saady]

This is hard.
Does your wife believe primal is correct, but she's just not wanting to do it? Or does she doubt the premise? Or perhaps it is too inconvenient?

[EagleRiverDee]

My family doesn't eat primal except for dinner on my night's to cook. Then they eat what I cook. But since eating primal is delicious (hello, steak and veggies!) I don't think they're complaining. But they do love their pasta and bread. They eat what they want for breakfast and lunch.

[Ayla2010]

Well I do the shopping and cooking, so my husband ate what I did in the beginning, but he wasn't really interesting in switching.
But then he naturally stopped eating bread at work, and then if he does have that or some other crap, he realises how bad he feels, so doesn't want it anymore.
In your situation id agree with just waiting I guess. You will have to do what you do and hope she follows eventually.
Maybe get her to read It starts with food, and see if she will just try for 30 days and see how she feels.

[jgrohol]

I was going to post a new thread about this, but figured I'd search first. I'm in the same boat as you and probably some others.

I've been through it all in the past 20 years with weight training, sports, diet, and weight-loss. I went primal about 2-1/2 years ago and still going. It's not a diet, but a lifestyle. This type of lifestyle just makes sense and I cannot get enough info about it by forums or books out there. I never had to struggle with it and all of the dynamics of it just make sense to me.

NOW, for my wife. She's an extremely picky eater. I've read the responses here and I think my wife wins on that part. HA. She doesn't like any vegetables, but will eat broccoli every now and then. She doesn't like ANY fish. She used to eat chicken but that went out the window. She has digestive problems so she stays away from foods that in today's conventional wisdom will tell her to stay away from, ie. bananas. She basically eats any "food" that's bland in taste and color and high in carbs. She'll go to town on rice, PNB sandwich, pasta, potatoes, etc. She gets 'hungry' every 2 hours or so and complains to me when I say I'm not hungry. I'll get the "you need to eat at least 3 times a day" routine. I do get her to eat a salad with me with some olives on it. I'm sure if I challenge you to send me a food you think she's like, she'd probably hate it. ha ha ha.

I do care what she eats, but I never pushed her. I did my thing and I watched her eat hers. She keeps telling me that I eat weird. I do more of the cooking in the household. The one night I made primal stuffed peppers and I shredded cauliflower and carrots into them as filler. I thought she was going to throw her stuffed pepper at me and leave. She apparently HATES carrots. I tried to tell her she couldn't taste them and they were small. That didn't really matter. To me, her food dis-likes are all mental. She already has it in her head that she doesn't like it.

Now she is pregnant with our first child and it got me thinking about her diet. I mean, even with the conventional wisdom type of eating, humans have been producing offspring just fine for years and years. I'm not worried about the health of our child. I just wish I could lean my wife in my direction just a little bit. She swallows a handful of vitamin pills a day and I think she can do without them if she were to eat a little better.

She's a reader. She reads something every night before bed. I tried to get her to read some sort of Primal book. It didn't have to be Mark's, but something in that category. She said once that she would read one, but that hasn't happened yet. Maybe to even get her to read one of Mark's blog postings so she at least knows where I'm coming from.

Every time I pop out a comment from a result of primal, she has an answer.
For instance:
I have slipped from the primal way over the last summer and just got back to eating that way again. I, once again, lost about 9 lbs in two weeks. My wife says that's because I'm eating less and was just water weight.
I told my wife that my tendonitis went away in my knees and big toes. She says that's because I haven't been working out a lot in the same way recently and not using those muscle/tendons.
I tell her I'm not as hungry throughout the day and she says that's because I really am and I'm just holding back/pretending that I'm not.

So even thought you go through your primal ways and realize what is happening and how well you are feeling, it may not persuade others to go that route. My wife is always the one to say "They've done studies on it, that's how it works". I always ask her to show me one of the studies about that subject so I can research it and read about it. That usually leads to a tangent conversation about something else and we never talk about that again. Why? Because she can't produce any studies on what I'm asking for.

I was always the one that didn't care how society was. I was my own human being. Now that I'm studying primal and researching the attributes of being primal, I am no different. I live in Pennsylvania, and I am a network engineer at my job that requires some sort of "dress shirt" and khakis. But guess what, I'm still wearing my five-fingers to work. People make fun of me, but I don't care. I feel great wearing them. I still park further away so I can walk more into the building. I take the stairs... etc. You get the point.

After my rant here, I'm not sure if I even contributed anything to this post. I am just voicing my opinion on how I expect someone that I love to be primal in the same way that I am. Even not that, but just smarter about the way we eat. Even before I went primal I always studied food intake and I always believed that what food we put in our bodies had a lot to do with how we felt and how our bodies reacted. I never believed that "in moderation" was completely true. I feel that the people I love should be on the same boat as myself and I get frustrated when they shrug it off. They don't even have to go primal, but understand that what we eat is more of a deal of how we feel than most people believe. My wife doesn't always feel the best, has those digestive problems, and has more health issues than I do. I believe eating better can most likely take some of those away.

Thanks for reading this and any advice is always greatly appreciated. I may not have given ANY advice to this topic, but I felt like I should've chimed in.
Grok on!

[Annieh]

This is a greater challenge than eliminating pizza from my diet.

The biggest problem - and probably the only problem - is the fact that she's an incredibly fussy eater and hates fat (unless it's minced meat or nuts). Oilive oil, olives, avocados, animal fat (not rendered like tallow or lard), you name it....NOTHING!

Has anyone else been in a situation like I am? Did you change your partner's mind somehow?

Edit: although she does like fish, it's pretty expensive to buy on a regular basis!

You can't change her mind but you could try to help her enjoy the great bits (without necessarily letting on about it).

Even though it's expensive, I'd go with the fish and anything else primal that she even hints at liking. Nothing wrong with minced meat or nuts. Not every one likes to tear into a tough steak.

How long have you been primal? The longer you continue doing this as a lifestyle, the more likely some of it is to rub off. But probably not if you try in any way to push it.

Also, I think a lot has to do with who does the shopping and cooking. If you're the cook, you can possibly temper her fussiness a little bit over time, but it will require some sneakiness and a LOT of patience (speaking from experience here). However, a word of warning: this won't work if she feels like I do in regarding this area as my domain. I would not be happy if my dh were to suddenly try to make me change the way I do it, I hated it when he even took on one night a week.

[eKatherine]

To me, her food dis-likes are all mental.

So true. There are likes and dislikes, but scratch the surface of food aversions and you find childhood issues. I have dealt with these for clients.

[vwaggs]

Don't push is great advice! Just come out with little facts here and there about health matters. You could also have her watch In Search of the Perfect Human Diet. It is very informative!

[Mr.Perfidy]

I'm just going to go ahead and light the fuse...

I think that women are picky and overly selective, arbitrary eaters for the fuck of it, to watch men scramble to accomomdate their ludicrous limitations. Every man I know with a woman has a problem with this, myself included. Either they are doing it to fuck with us, or, their psychology is so different than males that they are somehow emotionally affected in childhood by food items and remain loyal to them. Something though is not right about woman diet.

[nikitakolata]

I'm just going to go ahead and light the fuse...

I think that women are picky and overly selective, arbitrary eaters for the fuck of it, to watch men scramble to accomomdate their ludicrous limitations. Every man I know with a woman has a problem with this, myself included. Either they are doing it to fuck with us, or, their psychology is so different than males that they are somehow emotionally affected in childhood by food items and remain loyal to them. Something though is not right about woman diet.

Umm, no. Men can be just as picky. I dated a guy that wouldn't eat cheese, ever. He had never even tasted cheese and he wasn't allergic to dairy or anything; he drank milk daily. My husband hates any and all peppers. So, both sexes can have issues. I know just as many men with food preferences as women.

[Mr.Perfidy]

I know a few men like that too. Generally, other men say that they "eat like women," as in, "conform to their general experience with women, not men."

There's seriously something to it. In my wife's case (also a pain in the ass with menu limitations) I think that her idea of good food comes from happy memories of her daddy on the jersey shore- she only eats garbage that you can buy from a boardwalk stand. Literally nothing else. I finally convinced her to try a piece of a banana the other day, (we have been married almost 6 years now and I have never seen her eat a piece of fruit or a vegetable) and she gagged like it was rotten meat. It CANT BE PHYSICAL. I do not believe that physiologically it is possible to treat a perfectly good banana that way. Therefore it must be psychology.

Maybe male psychological upbringing just innoculates us from whatever issue that is.