I would be very surprised if whatever insurance the young woman has doesn’t cover a physical.
You can’t afford it or don’t have the time until a health issue becomes chronic and debilitating. I sympathize because I don’t like going to doctors, especially when I feel as if I am more knowledgeable about my health condition than the doctor who spends five minutes looking over blood test results. But ignoring genuine chronic unwellness is a recipe for lifelong problems. If she doesn’t make time to be healthy, she isn’t going to be able to keep working or doing the other things that she considers important. It’s a rule in search & rescue that the first person you rescue is yourself if you can, because putting or leaving yourself in harm’s way just makes the rescue task more difficult for everyone else. The same general principle applies to health and wellness.
Stranger
This.
For most people, their twenties is a time when they can indulge a bunch of bad habits and still be outwardly quite healthy. If this woman’s diet is so bad that she’s constantly sickly, without significant change her prospects for future health and happiness are grim.
She ought to take this as seriously as she would a major illness.
Does she have a microwave and a freezer? Perhaps you could gift her with a big stack of relatively healthy types of frozen meals. If she has enough energy to cook Ramen noodles she certainly has enough energy to cook a frozen dinner. If they are there, perhaps she will eat them. If she eats them consistently, perhaps she will regain enough energy to start looking after her own nutritional needs.
She’s always had colds, flu, bronchitis, since she was a young child. Also rashes, ear infections, yeast infections, strep. Anything that goes around, she gets! So it’s hard to say ‘your poor eating habits are making you sick’, but surely they don’t help.
I think I might start buying some healthy frozen things to give to her when she comes to visit, Amy’s Burritos, things like that.
Supplements and vitamins aren’t going to fix the bad diet described in the OP. The only thing to fix it is a good diet, or even a mediocre diet to be honest.
I get being tired when you get home from working. You can still prepare better meals than she is in less than 15 minutes. As noted, just adding a handful of frozen vegee mix and some canned meat to the ramen soup would be a vast improvement (and it’s a meal technique I’ve done myself many a time).
That can be used also for stews, rice, beans…
beef or pork roast, veggies, chili, mac & cheese, etc. A crock pot is really versatile cooking tool.
ETA: Perhaps a crock pot cookbook would be a nice gift.
This is going to sound insensitive, but just because she is neglecting her health does not necessarily mean she is depressed. And some might find it evidence suggesting she is NOT “not a dummy.”
She sounds irresponsible to me. If she lacks adequate insurance and gets herself good and sick from neglecting her diet, who does she expect to pick up the tab?
A lot of people work hard and have outside interests, yet find a way to eat decently. (Of course, many millions of Americans eat and overeat crap.) Presuming she doesn’t live AND work in a food desert, and doesn’t lack access to PeaPod, sounds like she is just not making this a priority. If she cared to, she could find any number of solutions. Hell, she could even do well enough with primarily ramen and salads, so long as she occasionally added an egg, some meat, beans, nuts, a variety of veggies…
I’m often amazed at the HUGE variety of prepared foods available at the supermarket - salads, soups, sandwiches, etc. A single good meal a day can go a long way - she can choose to have it at any time. Or she can buy frozen or canned veggies, blend up a smoothie.
Sounds like she just doesn’t care enough to get good food. Adequate nutrition isn’t rocket science, and preparing tasty food is not necessarily either expensive or time consuming. If she thinks pills are a substitute for a decent diet, well, further evidence against “not a dummy.”
If she is mentally or emotionally ill, she should seek assistance. If not, well, she is an adult…
Sorry again for sounding harsh. You don’t state your relationship to her, but if she is not mentally/emotionally impaired and if she doesn’t care enough to do something this straightforward, I’m not sure what you could do to change that.
On edit - add in immature, self-absorbed, and attention-seeking. She’s ostensibly a competent adult, yet she has her neighbors and you concerned about her, helping her perform basic tasks…
One issue I detect is that her lack of proper nutrition affects her motivation and energy, so she is less inclined and equipped to deal with it. It’s a downward spiral.
IMHO trying to make her into a home chef overnight, or drastically change her shopping habits are too high of a bar to overcome.
She needs one simple thing she can do for now that will help. I think she needs to try to really increase her protein intake on a regular basis. That will help with her energy and motivation, then she can/maybe/will get better at planning her own eating. I would recommend buying cases of Ensure, or another packaged protein drink, at Costco and getting used to downing one a day, moving into two a day. She just has to make sure she always takes a few with her when she heads out the door in the morning.
Baby steps…
If you can buy ramen, you can buy a pack of lunch meat, or a can of chili or something else equally as easy to “prepare”. It’s not the best way to eat, but it’ll get some protein in her if she does that once in a while instead of just all those noodles and lettuce. If she’s just really into salad, she could always tear up deli meat and throw that in the salad.
My std advice to “too busy partying with recreational drugs to eat” folks:
Keep a stack of Snickers (they really are filling) or banana or apple or ? - anything you can grab and eat immediately, even in transit and a huge botle of multi-vitamin and minerals.
Get the chew-able vitamins if pills don’t work!
BUT: Get Something, Anything in your stomach to slow down the nutrients.
My older sister (the “Pretty” one*) spent her husband-hunting years eating Jello and vitamins.
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- born 1947. I hope to gawd that she is the last of the generation to actually “Hunt Husband” - hanging out in a College Town even if you aren’t a student, going for “Mrs. Degree”, predation, Husband Hunting.
The story doesn’t make sense. There’s something more going on.
I lived in Japan for several years and everything there is based on the assumption that you have a spouse to shop and cook for you. They only really sell produce in stores - almost no frozen or canned foods - and stores close before most men (like me) get off from work. I would pack my freezer with as much frozen food as I could on the weekend, but my freezer was too small to hold enough to carry me through the week. It was hard to eat proper given those restrictions, and being too overworked to go to the store properly every weekend or cook for myself. I ended up having to order pizza delivery an ungodly amount of the time.
But in the US, “working late” shouldn’t mean getting home at 1am at most jobs, so it should still be pretty straightforward to get to the store. Or, even if it does, an American apartment and refrigerator should have plenty of room for canned and frozen foods and an American supermarket should have an amazing array of possibilities. While these might not be as good as fresh produce, they should be fine to cover all nutritional issues so long as you pick a good variety of products. And there’s nothing “easier” about preparing ramen than heating a can of minestrone or a packet of beef szechuan. Nor are these products all that expensive to get.
To me it sounds like she has an eating disorder. There’s just no practical reason, in the US, for her to not be able to eat healthily. She might not be able to eat “hand-cooked from fresh produce” healthy, but definitely many levels above “risking malnutrition”.
So I could recommend something like buying produce, dicing, and throwing it into freezer bags immediately, so that she can quickly and easily cook during the week. But that doesn’t really sound like the issue here.
I would suggest that you have a better discussion with her about exactly why she’s choosing to only eat salad and ramen, with the aim of migrating that discussion towards talking to an eating disorder specialist. She might need to start taking therapy.
I agree that it sounds like she has an eating disorder. It beggars belief that a healthily hungry person wouldn’t buy a stack of frozen dinners, in that situation.
Which leads us to the next question: does salinqmind know her well enough to broach the topic? And if not, does he know people who do?
Not to mention that there are numerous stores that are open 24/7 (I work at one) so even if you are getting off work at 1 am there are still open stores you can buy food at.
Hell, worst case in the boonies there are 24/7 truck stops that sell food more nutritious than what the OP’s friend is eating.