I am having difficulty meeting my 2500 calorie minimum. One problem is that nothing I have tried has been palatable because to me it has no taste. Ice cream tastes like chalk, bread tastes like chewed cardboard, etc. It is all so unappetizing that I cannot bring myself to eat it. I love ice cream and milkshakes and could eat/drink those until two weeks ago, but not now. On a whim I even tried childhood favorite, Pixie stix (flavored powdered sugar in a straw) thinking they might be palatable but without any ability to taste sweet flavors they were like sand. I would like to think that the absence of taste would leave things tasting like water, which tastes fine to me and which I have no trouble drinking, but that is not as simple as that unfortunately: I am not left with a neutral taste, but with a distorted, unpleasant, unnatural taste.

Another contributing factor is the mucous, which causes me to have nausea if I have been unable to avoid swallowing it. I also have anorexia, a general loss of appetite probably due to simply feeling so punk from radiation (my treatments just ended yesterday).

I have tried broths, juices, protein powders, about everything I can think of or that the dietician recommended but none of them work for me. I am using anti-nausea meds prn and that does help, as does starting earlier in the day when the mucous is not as much of a problem. I am subsiding on high calorie Boost mixed 50:50 with whole milk, which works, but am having trouble drinking enough because of the issues above. I am lucky in that swallowing pain is not a problem most days. I have found that the colder the solution the easier it is to drink.

The only thing I can think of is just pushing myself to force down much more Boost than I have been the last week (only about 1200 cal/day, way below the 2500 minimum my treatment team wants me to have and the 3500 that would be ideal). So if anyone has other ideas or hints for getting more Boost in, or anything else that might help, that would be great! Thanks.

PS--I am hoping to avoid a feeding tube unless I have no other options.