Cold food went down when hot food would not

I found that eating something small before I felt hungry was the whole trick. Waiting until I wanted food meant it never arrived.

Gabe, answering your question directly rather than going round the houses.

Room temperature turned out to matter more than anything else on the plate. Straight from the fridge and straight from the oven were both impossible for a month.

Mine lasted about five weeks and then more or less stopped. I still get a mild version for a day after a step up and I now expect it.

Fizzy water helped me and flat water did not, which makes no sense and was consistently true for about two months.

Please do not push through a whole day of nothing on principle. I did that twice and both times it made the following day considerably worse.

The texture thing surprised me. Anything with more than one texture in it was difficult and simple, uniform food was fine.

I have read this twice now. Thank you for writing it.

Smell was the trigger for me more than taste. I could eat things I could not be in the room while they cooked, which took me weeks to work out.

Ilse said something I want to sit with for a second.

The thing I would flag is that not being able to keep fluids down is a different category from not fancying food. If you are in the first one, please ring somebody today.

Mine was worst in the evening, which meant dinner became the hard meal. Moving the substantial part of my day earlier fixed most of it.

Plain crackers in the bedside drawer sounds ridiculous and it is the single most useful thing anybody in this circle ever told me.

Grateful you posted rather than kept it to yourself.

The thing that changed it for me was a slower schedule agreed with my prescriber. Within a fortnight the eating side was manageable again.

What helped enormously was somebody else doing the deciding. When my partner just put something in front of me I could usually eat it; when I had to choose, I could not.

Coming back to say it lifted. Five weeks of genuinely difficult and then it went, and I have eaten normally for eighteen months since.

Something practical: I kept a bag of what I could actually manage in my work locker, so a bad afternoon did not turn into a bad evening.