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The days when food is simply unattractive

Reduced appetite and food aversion are not the same experience. Reduced appetite means smaller portions of things you still like. Aversion means the idea of eating is actively unappealing, and foods you normally enjoy can seem faintly repellent — often the richer, denser ones, which are frequently the protein.

This comes and goes, and is commonly worse in the days after a dose increase. The practical question is not how to eat normally through it, but how to get the essentials in until it passes.

Two things to protect

On a difficult day, aim at protein and fluid and let the rest go. Protein because a prolonged shortfall in a calorie deficit costs lean mass, which is the outcome most worth avoiding. Fluid because the consequences of falling behind arrive fast and make everything else feel worse. Perfect nutrition on a bad day is not the goal; those two are.

What tends to work

• Cold over hot. Heat carries aroma, and aroma drives much of aversion. Cold food smells less. Chilled yoghurt, cottage cheese and cold chicken are often tolerable when the same things warm are not.
• Plain over rich. Fat is slow to leave the stomach and can make fullness heavier. Leaner, simpler preparations tend to be easier.
• Small and frequent. Five small things across a day beat two attempts at a meal, and each one asks less.
• Salty and tart over sweet. Many people find sweetness cloying during aversion, while sharp or savoury flavours — lemon, pickles, broth — stay palatable.
• Ready-made over cooking. Preparing food involves prolonged exposure to smell, which is often the hardest part. Something that requires opening rather than cooking removes that entirely.

Working around the smell problem

If cooking is the obstacle, the answer is usually to avoid cooking rather than to push through it. Food someone else prepared, eaten in a different room from where it was made, with a window open, is a genuinely different proposition. Our dishes pages are organised around exactly this — each one can be bought ready-made or cooked, depending on which you have in you today.

Keeping the bad day from becoming a bad week

Aversion tends to pass, often within a few days of a dose change. What turns a rough patch into a longer problem is a stretch of days where very little goes in at all — fatigue builds, dehydration builds, and eating becomes harder still. Keeping something going, however unimpressive, is what stops that spiral.

It also helps to have the easy options already in the house before you need them. Deciding what to eat is much harder on a day when nothing appeals, and a cupboard with three tolerable things in it removes that decision.