A two week look at whole30;

Halfway through the 30 days! Wooo! For anyone who’s interested, or just starting, or wants to know what it’s all about, I’m here to share my personal experience.

I’ll give a quick overview of the diet in case anyone is unfamiliar, but if you want the full details, check out the whole30 website. Basically you avoid the following groups: (1) sugar, (2) alcohol, (3) grains/processed carbs, (4) dairy, (5) legumes. In addition to completely cutting these food groups (again, I’m not getting into the nitty gritty–visit their website for that), there’s a couple of other principles that I took to heart. These are (1) no replacements. No pancakes no matter if they’re made out of whole30 acceptable ingredients. No ice cream made out of fruit. (2) Don’t weigh yourself for 30 days. Focus on eating and smart choices and how your body feels.

My thoughts? Well firstly, it’s hard. There are a lot of groups to be wary of and take note of when shopping and eating, and I haven’t really even navigated the whole eating out scene on this diet. Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life? Not even close. But I really don’t get excited about food on this diet, and that makes me a little sad. As you maybe can tell from visiting this food blog, I love food and I love finding delicious recipes. I’ve found okay ones, and a couple keepers that I’ll be sharing with you (like this banana almond butter chia pudding), but honestly a lot have been just “meh” and not worth sharing. It doesn’t help that I am NOT a coconut fan and a lot of creamy recipes and flour substitutes are coconut based.

I’m not going to beat myself up for slip ups. While the Whole30 guidelines say that as soon as you consume something off limits you should start over at day 1, I’m really not buying it. Especially not for a first time through. I’ve “fallen off the bandwagon” several times already, mostly through not having the appropriate ingredients on hand. Like for example, I was in the middle of making breakfast egg muffins and realized I only had a canola oil spray to coat the muffin tin. Did I throw out the batch and run and get coconut or olive oil spray? No, I used the dang canola oil. 12-hour day at work and I’m exhausted and haven’t prepped dinner? Frozen veggie patty that had chickpeas in it. Buying Rx bars and totally forgot peanuts were off limits? Still ate it. Once I recognize my mistake I’ll try to correct it, like grab a better spray oil next time I’m at the grocery or don’t buy the peanut butter snack bars again but for things like that when I diverge from the diet, I refuse to beat myself up about it. They’re still healthy options that are enabling me to continue the diet and they’re not intentional. (We’ll ignore that one night of stuffed crust pizza…)

To start requires a monetary investment. In starting this diet I had to invest around $200 on foods and condiments and things that technically satisfied the requirements. Things like whole30-approved mayonnaise and salad dressings and almond butter. They add up fast when you’re shopping and have a whole set of requirements previously irrelevant to your shopping habits. But it also shows you how much crap is in your pantry.

I feel better. I’m unfortunately a little sad at how much better my body feels. It means I can’t ignore the results and write it off as a fad diet. I have less violent up and down swings in my mood on a daily basis, and I have much less bloating.  I feel like I’m slimming, but I haven’t jumped on a scale yet, and I’ve been upping my daily exercise so it’s hard to treat the variables independently. But whole30 is also not sustainable. I cannot and will not permanently change my diet to follow these rules. Do I hope to incorporate some of the ideas and principles? Yes. Will I give up cheese and carbs for the rest of my life? Heck, no. Will I look more at ingredients and try to cut out things with added sugar or crazy ingredients that don’t belong? I hope so.

How do you stick to it? Meal prep, baby. You cannot do this diet without investing time. And don’t forget about the shopping piece. If you’re eating more fresh fruits and veggies, that means you need more trips to the store for fresh stuff. You need to have snacks on hand (I snack, deal with it whole30) that satisfy the requirements and enough variety that you don’t go looking elsewhere. Start with a list of 20+ whole30 meals that look good to you so when you’re searching or tired after work you’re not tempted to give in and go for that fast food. Make some backup freezer recipes and keep them in stock. Pick a few things that bend the rules but don’t break them like baked french fries or fruit as an “after dinner snack”, for when you’re craving the old life. Give yourself no chance for excuses.

What do I like most about whole30? Defined rules. Sure, I don’t know the mantra by heart. I pay less attention to the avoid MSG/carrageenan/sulfites rule (I literally had to go look it up on the website while writing this to remember what they banned). But the fact is “avoid” rules actually do make it easy to some degree to sort through the food everyday throws at me. Does it have some form of added sugar? Out. Is it a whole and natural food, fruit or vegetable? In. Is it a dessert? Out. I also really like the prioritize how you feel about yourself. Between whole30 and working out more, I feel much more in tune with my body. I really hope at the end, the number on the scale will be less than when I started. I won’t lie, I’ll be disappointed if it’s not. But I like that the focus isn’t on weight alone, and in the past I’ve found that weighing every day or even every week often gets me discouraged because it’s a long process and you can’t always see results that quickly and it fluctuates naturally.

Will I do it again? Maybe. Honestly, while I’m curious to see where the last two weeks take me, it’s not feasible in my life long term, and even less so in the summer we’ve got friends visiting, reunions, trips–the list goes on. I don’t want my day to revolve around asking people if they’ve added sugar to some dish or packing my own lunches to go to a friends BBQ. While there’s value in health, there’s also value in socializing and not having people roll their eyes at you across the table when you ask the waiting if there’s “sugar or dairy or preservatives or…” in every dish on the menu. I also have a huuuge problem giving up free food. Unfortunately for me, I confront that one every week when work is nice enough to buy our team breakfast, usually bagels/doughnuts/muffins, that sort of thing. It makes me sad to pass up free food. Also cheese. And alcohol. And happy hours. And meeting friends for dinner.

I think the way forward for me is to (1) finish this whole30 round. (2) introduce dairy back into my life. Cheese literally makes everything better. Probably legumes too, since I like hummus and tofu, and peanuts (3) if I’m trying to make this change more permanent, I need a cheat day approximately once a week. A day where I can grab drinks with friends or explore a new restaurant with Tyler. Can I cut down? Yes. Can I give it up? No. Nonnegotiable. It’s worth it for my quality of life. If I do whole30 again, and I think there’s a reasonable chance I will at some point, I’d like to extend it and add the food groups back one at a time to see if I can identify any food groups that are particularly antagonistic to my health.

Have you tried whole30? What’s your experience? Did you like it or love it or hate it? Leave me a comment below!

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