Do You Find Yourself Eating The Same Things All The Time?

[petunia_843]

I have to admit that I'm a creature of habit. Before this year, I ate a lot of the same things all of the time. I would order the same things in restaurants. I ate a lot of different things - Asian, Italian, Mediterranean, along with barbeque and American comfort food, but I would be eating the same stuff from those selections. Now that I'm eating differently for health reasons, I find myself eating even more of the same things all the time. For instance, breakfast - I have two go-to breakfasts: eggwhite omelet with turkey bacon and an orange, or plain greek yogurt with berries and turkey bacon. For lunch, I am eating a lot of sandwiches, salads and fruit. For dinner, it's usually baked chicken with vegetables. I have branched out a little, I have added taco salad to my repertoire, but that's not saying much. There are just some things that I feel I should branch out with more. I have never eaten much French food, for instance. My fruit intake is limited - I am not eating kumquats and mangos and papayas, and maybe I should look in to expanding my palette. On the other hand, I tend to go to the same foods over and over again because I like them, and I know what to expect.

What about you?

[mikan]

My breakfasts and lunches tend to be.. the same, for the most part. Breakfast is usually toast, toasted bread rolls, or toasted English muffins; or cereal. I only get fancy on weekends or special occasions. Lunches are almost always sandwiches. Dinner though, I try to mix it up. I complain when we eat the same thing for dinner more than twice (leftovers, or cooking something again). Variety is good - I need it, otherwise I get really bored with what I eat, and then become really picky.
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[milyssa]

My husband can eat the same thing over and over and over again. He has the exact same oatmeal breakfast each morning and his lunch is pretty much identical every day.

I can't do things quite at that level of sameness, but when I switch things up, it's pretty predictable! I try to only have one type of cereal open at a time, but I rarely have a 2 boxes of the exact same cereal in a row. This morning, even though I'd be opening a new box of cereal, I grabbed a packet of hubby's oatmeal instead. Sometimes I make smoothies. We're currently not eating meat at all for Lent, but when we did, my meat sandwich for lunch was usually the same each day, but I'd shake it up a little if we had certain veggies, or by putting a different cheese, or by adding mustard. Maybe taking a peanut butter sandwich instead, or eating soup when I'm home on Mondays, or by taking a snack-y lunch (yogurt, veggies, fruit, fiber bar, etc) instead of having a main focus (sandwich).

AND we have favorite things that we'll do for dinner, but usually switch dinner up frequently. We usually eat the same one or two things for the majority of the week. We also always make homemade pizza on Wednesdays, and it's always the same thing...except when I insist we need a change lol.
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[town hall]

I almost always eat the same thing for breakfast (muesli), and it doesn't bother me at all, but I dislike eating the same thing for lunch or dinner two days in a row. I currently have lunch at home as I'm not working, so I'll have soup or a sandwich or a poached egg and salad or leftovers if there are any. We have a basic rotation of dishes that we are quite bad about breaking out from; our ordinary, weekday evening meal list is something like:

- risotto (using whatever vegetable sounds good at the time - leek, beetroot, asparagus etc)
- wholemeal pasta or gnocchi with either homemade tomato & vegetable sauce or pesto and something like courgette
- pie or quiche and some form of potato + veg
- stir-fried veg and tofu with wholewheat noodles
- probably very inauthentic vegetable & bean fajitas
- baked potato with salad veg and beans/ houmous or veggie ragout
- pizza
- when my (vegetarian) partner is out, I might have some chicken (baked, with salad and vegetable) or a bacon sarnie

At the weekends we might make a curry or a lasagne, but trying new recipes is very rare, which I'd like to change.
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[PrickleyPete]

During the week I eat the same things every day like a robot-
-Activia vanilla greek yogurt, blueberries and walnuts
-banana
-sandwich of cheese, hummus, tomato, spinach
-pie of eggs, ricotta, 2 veggies and sometimes more cheese
-few times a week I might also have a Romain salad with added tomato and cucumber

On the weekends I am totally off my routine and will often get a veggie burrito or a bagel and lox. I also tend to eat a bag of frozen veggies that I season as a meal, Skyr Icelandic yogurt, and often Mexican which is almost always spinach quesadillas.

I pretty much only drink water and coffee with an occasional Co ke Zero thrown in.

So yeah I tend to eat the same things like every single day.
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[ruggedchick]

When I'm trying to lose weight (which is now), I pretty much eat the same stuff. I have overeating issues and if I don't schedule exactly what I'm going to eat, it gets out of control, fast.

Coffee, water, unsweetened iced tea, soups, salads, microwave meals, grilled chicken, grilled fish, veggies and brown rice.
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[daysleeper]

For the most part I eat the same thing in cycles, especially whilst dieting. I just find it entirely easier to minimize my choices when I'm trying to constrict my calorie content.

During hardcore diet mode its always the same 10 things.
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[chickenhawk]

I think I'm a pretty adventurous eater- I've come a long way from my picky childhood- but I definitely have a list of 'standard' meals. The particular vegetables can change within each one, but sometimes I do get bored with myself.
Breakfast is the least variable. It's more of a slow honing process. 2 eggs and toast, or oatmeal with (apple/banana), nuts (almonds, though I got a bag of pecans, which blew almonds out of the water), raisins/craisins, cinnamon, flax meal. If mangoes are good, one of them cut up into yogurt with granola and a drip of maple syrup is pretty excellent.

Lunch, I'm usually a mess. Leftovers are the best, or cheese and crackers and fruit, or go out for a sandwich. I had a turkey sandwich streak a year ago, when there was no time and nowhere to buy food near my job, but that's over.

Dinner standards:
Roasted potatoes, with other root veg, chicken sausage.
Potatoes another way (though the gentleman friend is way more likely to mash them than I am), broccoli, chicken sausage (or maybe some other meat? But that's gentleman friend's territory also).
Burrito with sauteed beans, kale, onion, then some cheese or yogurt or avocado.
Pasta, jar sauce, whatever veg is in the fridge.
Tortilla pizza- for nights when I would otherwise do pasta, but I also have cheese, and want food NOW.
Miso soup variation- add noodles, tofu or veg. This is my favorite "convenience food" as of late, because even with just tofu and dried shiitake and kelp it's great.
Fried sesame tofu/noodles on salad. Nom. This and the soup come from the awesome Japanese place I worked at in college.
Stirfry- Whatever veg, slapped together soysauce/ginger/sriracha sauce, brown rice.
Thai curry- stirfry, but with coconut milk and curry paste. I've been off this for a while, it's always sort of a production and I can't always nail the results. Maybe I'll try again soon..

I try to cook at least twice as much as I'll eat, so I can have a lunch or two to bring to school. Sometimes on weekends I'll go more elaborate with chopped salads or crockpot soups, and then try to eat them all week and get sick of them. The magic of leftovers is a delicate balance.

Dang, I look like I eat all kinds of stuff. I'm pretty proud of that list! If you want to trade your dinner on autopilot details for mine, lemme know!

[ali171]

I'm kind of the opposite. I eat different stuff every week. I might keep one or two recipes from the previous week that are great to move on to the next. The problem with this is we don't have many favorites and it takes me a while to get a grocery list together. I can't help it though, I see too many awesome recipes and then I want to try them.

If you are looking to spice things up, just surround yourself with awesome recipes. Websites that allow you to bookmark or compile menus are good because you can save up a list and just pull it up as you are working out your food plan for the week. I love vegweb.com and food.com is also great because it has a recipe sifter. Both sites have 1000's of recipes. For fancier fair, epicurious.com is good. I'm going to work on repeating some recipes more often and establishing some easy favorites.
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[geekychic]

We have a rotating cast of characters. Breakfast and lunch for me are usually similar: oatmeal for breakfast (what I put on it changes), and usually leftovers or a sandwich for lunch.

Dinner during the week is usually something easy. I say all we eat is "stuff on rice" and that's kind of true. Generally we eat chicken, baked or in a stir fry kinda deal, with whatever veggies we have and pasta or a grain. On the weekends, we usually do something a bit more labor intensive or fun. I like having things I always make because it means I can get dinner together easily, with things we almost always have.

I get bored a lot easier than the dude, and if I do I just text him at work (he works in a grocery store:)) and say "get such and such for dinner because I am sick of stuff on rice". Sometimes if something is on sale, he will get A LOT OF IT. We have so many freaking mackerel steaks in the freezer right now, ha!

Summer is coming (far too quickly for my liking), which means we will start doing cold crudites for dinner. I LOVE that. Just veggies and cheeses and olives and pickles and maybe some cold sausage. YUM.We do this a lot in the summer because we are too cheap to put the air conditioner on. There is no way in hell I am standing over the stove when it's 95 degrees and humid. :P
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[weezil]

I eat a lot of the same things over and over, but I'll also try new things and I eat all kinds of food.

Being at work during the day limits the availability of food to what I bring and what's in my desk drawer. I usually bring a banana and have desk-cereal for breakfast. Most days, I bring a salad for lunch. I keep some just-add-water noodle soups in my desk for second lunch, as well as tons of nuts and dried fruit for elevenses and snacks.

Cooking at home depends on who does it. My husband will make a stir fry out of anything we have around. I'll figure out how to make nachos out of anything (so far, cauliflower and paneer are my two favorites), or make something with pizza dough or puff pastry. We're not shy about finding new recipes and trying different stuff in general, especially when we had the CSA and got all kinds of vegetables we'd never bought before. But often the new foods will end up used in our basic formulas, so it's not *that* different.

When we go out to eat, we usually go to the same restaurants over and over. At most of them there is a Certain Thing I order because I can't eat that thing quite enough. Other places, I'll eat whatever. Sometimes we're limited by vegetarian menu options. Some of the restaurants we love have more seasonal menus that change frequently (at least for dinner) and I'll try new things when we go.
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[bookselves]

I like that so many of you eat breakfast! I consistently have just coffee every day. :)

When I am working odd hours and haven't packed food, I eat basically the same takeout items all the time because there's limited selection. In restaurants, I often order the same things because I live in a tiny city and there are only a couple veg options wherever I might be. Although, I also tend to know the people working & I will make substitutions like nobody's business until things are optimized to my personal taste, ha.

At home we tend to get really into a couple of things at a time and eat them often, but the recipes tend to vary over time.
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[aliwa]

No, I eat different things, all the time. I usually cook and bring lunc boxes for lunch with food to heat up, so then it is the same. But otherwise. No. I cook at home, as I said, and the thing I have made the most is probably oven pancake. Which I've made... maybe 12 times total in my life? So I tend to switch a lot. Of course there are variations on the same theme but not exactly the same.

I used to improvise a lot, but now I tend to use more recipes. Partly because it tastes better, partly because I get more variation.

I heard somewhere that most people have 7-10 dishes that they stick to, but I... just don't. The boyfriend however, is very predictable. It's either pasta+tomato sauce, spinach pie, or pancakes. It's very good though!
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[Kendaljay]

For breakfast, yes usually. I was switching between waffles for one-two weeks and then sausage&biscuits for one-two weeks but I got really sick of that. So now I'm doing a Bento type box and I am loving it! I'd love to get some real Bento boxes, but I need 5 because I have to do them all at once or it won't happen. Right now I'm just using some cheap tupperware that I got at the dollar store...it has a divider at least so it works. I'm still working out the kinks of what works and what doesn't, but this week I have:

Half a turkey dog cut up in small pieces
4 club crackers
a cheese wheel with those wax wrappers
handful of green grapes
3 frozen strawberries
handful of rice cake crispies chocolate which did NOT work at all and got totally gross and soggy. blegh.
And my apple juice taking the place of Dr Pepper

I like the variety and small cut up pieces and it almost feels healthy lol...
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