Hi, I’m Chicken Nugget Girl!

I’m your typical mid-twenties post grad gal living right outside of Washington, D.C. I was born and raised here in the D.C. metropolitan area.

Since I’m not a famous celeb yet (my ultimate goal in life is to be on slash win SURVIVOR), I’m currently the office administrator of a small law firm.

Just in case you’re wondering about the cast of characters I refer to sometimes on Chicken Nugget Girl…

Tuna = my fiancé. 🙂

Why chicken nugget girl?

Growing up, I was the pickiest eater ever. I refused to eat whatever the rest of the family was eating. I would stomp my foot and demand my own kid’s meal. I remember forcing my dad to cut the crusts off my daily Pop-Tart (I would ONLY eat the brown-sugar cinnamon flavor) so that I would only have to eat the gooey, sweet inside.

I didn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, since I didn’t like jelly – I would only eat plain peanut butter sandwiches. Since I didn’t like hamburgers, at cook-outs and barbecues, I would eat a plain all-beef hotdog, no ketchup and no bun, cut up into little pieces.

My dinners usually consisted of Kraft mac and cheese or the chicken flavor of “fast noodles,” a.k.a. Ramen. I wouldn’t try ketchup or pickles until I was about ten years old.

Now don’t get me wrong, my parents didn’t just feed me junk food. I learned about what makes a good nutritional meal and somehow got plenty of nutrients. I was a healthy kid.

Most little kids probably grow up eating like this. But usually, they grow out of it. By the time most kids are in high school or college, they’re eating normal adult food (i.e. lasagna, Chinese food, etc) and grow out of eating plain peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

I didn’t.

I’ve always been the person that gets the exact same order every time I went to the same restaurant: no _____, with _____ on the side, please. I was the girl that never had a hamburger from McDonald’s (only chicken nuggets) because I didn’t like the texture of ground beef. Until about a year ago, I only liked fake nacho cheese, as opposed to real shredded cheddar cheese. I hated soup, fish, and cooked vegetables. I would only eat plain cheese pizza – no toppings of any kind. I didn’t even like different brands of pizza! Only Domino’s.

So…we’ve established that I was a snotty little brat about what I ate.

My BIGGEST pet peeve was when people would force me to try something. “Just try it, try some, c’mon – try some.” NO THANKS. If you like it so much, you eat it. I actually walked out on a first date one time when I got severely made fun of for ordering chicken fingers at a Mediterranean Bistro. Whatever. I took them to go.

I don’t know if it was a control thing, or what – but to this day I still won’t try something if someone really harps on me about it. I have to try things on my own time.

The thing is, now I do.

I started trying different foods when I started clean eating. Since there are a lot of foods you should avoid when you are clean eating, I had to add some new ones to my repertoire. I would see a recipe that looked good and would buy the ingredients and try it on my own terms. Sounds pretty straightforward, but it was a big breakthrough for me!

I tried quinoa (pronounced KEEN-WAH, even though I called KIN-OH-AH for about two months before I realized I sounded like I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I was boasting about my new favorite recipe and my friend said, “Ummm. I think it’s KEEN-WAH.” Oh.) I tried bell peppers and spicy hummus and sweet potatoes. Once I tried new foods, I even started to crave them. Who knew.

Cooking was another story. Because I hadn’t really eaten “grown-up” foods before, I had no idea how to cook them. Clean eating includes having a lot of protein, and since I loathe am not a fan of cooking meat, I wanted to use hard boiled eggs as my protein source on my salads for lunch. I didn’t know how the hell to hard-boil an egg. I knew you did it on the stove….in some water. Want to know what happened next?

Yes, I watched youtube tutorials on to how to hard-boil an egg. The first batch didn’t turn out so well.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that anyone can change their eating habits to involve cooking and clean eating. Anyone can start living healthy. Legit – if I can do it, anyone can do it.