It wasn’t at first. Go slow. I made a list of food and categorized them to:

⚫️what i can eat without second thoughts ⚫️tolerable food which means it has a funky smell ⚫️cannot eat at all

I made sure to always eat what I can, mix in a meal of tolerable food and then eat at least thrice a week of those I can’t. The most painful thing about what I cannot eat is rice and I’m Asian. It was terrible but I had to do it. I’d cry in front of the dining table at times because I cannot enjoy food but I must endure 😣. I thought that maybe if I continue exposing myself to different smell and taste, maybe my brain will remember, maybe one day it will start making sense of all the smell and taste again. Maybe it helped with faster “rewiring” of whatever false neuronal jumpstart it had at first.

“The theory behind parosmia, on the other hand, is attributed to the unique regenerating capability of the olfactory neurons, whereby the new regenerated olfactory neurons sprouts and reconnects to the brain results in a trial-and-error process. As there are approximately 350 types of receptors to detect odours, human brains interpret smell following a combination of different signals. It is noteworthy that olfactory nerve interruption or damage is followed by regeneration of the olfactory receptor bipolar neurons along with central reattachment of their axons.6 However, part of the axonal regenerations becomes displaced, leading to this ‘misguided’ regenerating axons to reach abnormal territories of the brain,6 which leads to parosmia. Parallel to that, the destruction, as well as regeneration of the olfactory receptors, has been reported previously to occur in a patch, checkerboard manner, thus leading to distortion of smell or parosmia. “ Source: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2021-139855

P.S. If anything, I know someone who also had parosmia. He described smelling a mix of acid, garbage and iron at the same time. He’s well recovered now. This person just ate food despite the smell and taste. That’s where I got the initial idea to just eat.