When You Only Like a Few Vegetables
You don't have to learn to love kale. How to build this around the few vegetables you'll actually eat.
"I only like a few vegetables." · "I'm a picky eater and most of these recipes have things I won't eat."
Then build it on the ones you'll eat. There is no vegetable in this approach that's compulsory.
The honest position
Variety is genuinely better — for the microbiome particularly. But eating three vegetables consistently beats eating nine of them for a two weeks and then abandoning the whole thing.
Start where you actually are.
The reliable ones
Most people who "don't like vegetables" will eat several of these:
Tomatoes · cucumber · carrots · sweetcorn (starchy, so treat as a carbohydrate) · peppers · green beans · peas · roasted zucchini · roasted red onion · avocado · lettuce.
Three of those, on rotation, is enough to build meals around.
Preparation changes everything
A lot of vegetable dislike is texture and preparation rather than the vegetable.
Roasting with olive oil and salt makes almost everything better — broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts are transformed by it and unpleasant boiled.
Raw and crunchy suits some people far more than cooked and soft. If cooked carrots are unbearable, raw batons may not be.
In soup, where texture disappears entirely and you can blend.
With fat and salt. Vegetables dressed in olive oil, butter, cheese or a proper dressing are a different food from plain steamed ones. The fat also slows the meal down, so it's working for you twice.
What can substitute
If vegetables are genuinely limited, other things do part of the job:
Legumes — fiber and protein together, and often more acceptable than vegetables.
Berries for fiber.
Nuts and seeds.
Oats and other intact whole grains.
You'll get less variety than the textbook version, and the structure still works.
The thing not to do
Don't build the week around vegetables you're planning to learn to like. That's a plan for a person you're hoping to become, and it fails predictably.
Try this week: roast whichever vegetable you dislike least in olive oil at a high temperature. It's a different food roasted.
Education, not medical advice.