But despite my skepticism, I went ahead with the Whole 30 diet starting on the first day of school. For those of you who are not familiar with Whole 30, let me lay it out for you.
30 Days:
- No Dairy or Dairy Products
- No legumes (beans, peanuts, etc.)
- No grains (no bread, no recreating bread products with W30 approved materials, no oats, no granola...)
- No Sugar of any kind (no honey, no agave, no stevia, no fake sugars...)
- No alcohol
No big deal right? HA! And all of this I decided to take on on my first day of the new school year. What was I thinking? But I did my research. I bought the book. I spoke with friends who had done Whole 30 in the past. I found a support system. I even had someone who was going to try it with me for a few days. I did my meal prepping and planning and I was off to the races.
The book tells you what you can sort of expect each day of the 30 days and it was all really accurate. The first day was no problem. It was fun trying something new. But the next 9 days are pretty brutal, which I can't even sugar coat for you because no sugar on Whole 30. If you have never detoxed from sugar before, let me tell you... it's pretty awful. Now I have never detoxed from like drugs and stuff before so I don't want to minimize that but some days during the first 10 of Whole 30, it really can feel like you are detoxing from something serious. After the first ten days, you get into a groove, but sometimes find yourself dreaming about non Whole 30 foods. I remember a dream I had where I ordered a bean, rice, cheese, and sour cream burrito and when they brought me my food, I realized that I literally could not eat any part of it (all Whole 30 no no's). After the dreams end, however, about midway through, you hit your stride. They call this stage Tiger's Blood. You feel like you could conquer the world. It was during this stage that I had zero head aches. I was sleeping better than I had every slept in my life. My clothes were fitting better. And my gym workouts were filled with energy.
One of the goals of Whole 30 is to help you isolate things that may have been in your diet for years that you have an intolerance to. The things that you are not allowed to eat are things that people traditionally have intolerances to. As you come off of Whole 30, the idea is to slowly start reintroducing those things back into your diet so that you can determine if you have any intolerances so that you can avoid them. I determined that certain beans make me feel nauseous and excessive amounts of gluten gives me headaches. I also lost 8 pounds in the 30 days and several inches off of my waist.
Since Whole 30, I have kept a fairly Paleo diet (very similar to Whole 30 just with less restrictions). I make my own food way more than I eat out. I have made my lunch everyday for school this year. Overall, since August I have lost around 20 pounds and have gone down one jean size. I am now on my second round of Whole 30 to kick off my year without gluten (see my last post). I am learning more about my relationship with food and focusing on what I put into my body. I'm realizing that I enjoy creating and playing with new recipes and am often excited about what I am going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Even when I am not on Whole 30, I find myself reading labels constantly and choosing to buy products with natural ingredients rather than fake stuff.
I can honestly say that Whole 30 has changed my life and I am excited about the prospect of more cycles of Whole 30 to come.
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