Indian vegetarian cooking with a small appetite

Started 15 January 2026 · 13 replies · 100 hearts · read 1.6k times

AshwinBengaluru, IN · 15 January 2026

6 months ago

A question rather than an update: Indian vegetarian cooking with a small appetite

Anyone else navigating this? I feel as though every piece of advice I read was written for someone with a completely different week.

What I am after is the version of this that works when nobody is helping, because that is my situation and most accounts assume otherwise.

I have a plan for the ordinary weeks and no plan at all for the unusual ones, and the unusual ones are where everything has gone wrong.

No hurry. I have a fortnight before I need to decide anything.

TanviMumbai, IN

I keep a note of what actually worked during the difficult fortnights, because from inside a good month I forget entirely.

PietPretoria, ZA

The thing I would flag is not to let this become a project. Mine did for about two months and it was exhausting and unnecessary.

Stepping in to say that asking for help with logistics is not a smaller kind of asking. It is most of what makes this sustainable.

NemoneLewes, UK

Building on what Piet wrote rather than answering the original question.

My family eat the same things I do and nothing about the household changed, which was more achievable than I had expected.

MorayElgin, UK

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

The texture changes early on were a bigger obstacle for me than the protein arithmetic, and nobody had warned me about them.

BrynAberystwyth, UK

Something practical: I batch things on a Sunday, which sounds tedious and takes forty minutes and covers most of my week.

7me too 1

CloverTotnes, UK

My honest report is that I eat better now than I did before, mostly because I finally had to think about it properly.

NoleneDurban, ZA

I would say ask specifically for somebody who knows plant-based eating. The first person I saw clearly did not and it wasted an appointment.

MableBolton, UK

Something that helped was accepting a repetitive week. The same four things, most weeks, and my dietitian was entirely content.

9me too 8

TorrinAberdeen, UK

What Nolene described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

What surprised me was how much easier this got once my appetite settled. The difficult stretch was months three to six and then it resolved.

AshwinBengaluru, IN

I found the restaurant side harder than the home side. Two constraints at once narrows a menu considerably.

Gently: nobody needs to justify the shape of their week here, including the members whose weeks have no shape at all.

PietPretoria, ZA

What Ren described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

What helped was one very boring reliable breakfast that I have eaten roughly six hundred times and still do not mind.