How To Care For Someone Who Is Closed-minded On Eating Habits

Harvard University: When it comes to overall health benefits, it seems that dairy is neither a hero nor a villain. 

For years, my chronically sick husband has been on a diet that is heavy on cheese, butter, milk, sweet yogurt, sweet juices, bread, cakes, extremely sweet fruit juices, Haagen-Daz ice cream. He can drink a whole bottle of sweet orange juice from the grocery store in just one day.  I have been unsucessfully trying to make him eat a more balanced diet.  This is why when my husband's rheumatologist asked me if my husband had been eating well, I was dead silent.  I saw an expression of wonder on the doctor's face when I didn't say anything.  I felt like I was being judged and I felt uncomfortable.  But what could I say?

In retrospect, my husband has always been very radical on his diet. When I first met him, he was eating nothing but the packaged protein bars, drinking protein shakes made from canned protein powder that tasted awful and he had been eating those whole grain  bread from Trader Joe's that  felt to me like a load of brick, that tasted to me like  sawdust and that smelled totally stale and awful to my nose.   He was also taking bottles and bottles of vitamins and supplements from Trader Joe's at the time.  Microwaving the Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners was what he did on a daily basis for dinners except when he visited with me  on dates and took me to the restaurants.  Even at the restaurants, he was specific on certain food, like he would totally not eat any side veggies that came with the steak or fish.  He always asked his meat to be grilled to the point where it was burnt to my standard and the waiters' standard, but well-done to his standard.

As he fell chronically ill, he had totally abandoned the whole grain bread, the frozen dinners from the grocery stores, the protein bars, and the cans and cans of  protein powder that I once spotted  a very fine-print  warning on the can label that said "This product may contain lead."  He gave up these foods  because he felt that he had been trynig to "eat healthy", and yet he became the few most unhealthy in this country, so he would just rather enjoy his life by eating white bread, cakes, ice-cream, butter etc.. So he literally went from one extreme to another.

Throughout the years, I had tried to make him eat in a more balanced way.  I do recognize that the core reason for my failure had been that I tried to "make" him change eating habits.  Such attempts of mine had resulted in lots of fights between the two of us.  It takes two people to tangle so I have to accept my own responsibility for taking my husband's mean rejection of my intervention on his diet very personally.  I was too quick to feel upset when my husband shouted down my proposal  on cutting down dairy prooducts. I was too quick to feel hurt when my husband threw insults at my suggestions after I shared with him what I read from the latest health article popped up in my phone, calling me ignorant and accusing me of nagging him all the time.

I'm writing this post to remind myself that I'm just going to stop trying to change the way my husband wants to eat.  It's time for me to just relax and give him the freedom to make his own choice, even though it can be in my opinion, a very bad choice.  At this point, I would rather avoid all hurtful arguments than making him change his eating habits.  The only thing I can do now is to keep making the Chicken Soup whenever I can because it's something that my husband seems to willingly eat without me "making" him.  This Chicken Soup at least introduces some diversity in his dairy heavy diet.