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Abstract

e plate of muffins that someone brought in to work.If that sounds twisted to you, then that’s OK. I get it, this diet isn’t for everyone.But if it sounds kind of empowering to know that you can look down the point of a slice of caramel turtle cheesecake and walk away with no regrets — you may want to give it a shot.Since my first time through, I’ve done the Whole30 twice a year. It’s kind of a reset button for my body and my diet. I used to dread starting it, knowing the struggles of skipping the queso dip and ordering seltzer when everyone else drinks a nice chardonnay. But the more I do it, the more I find myself looking forward to it.<h2 id="b245">Here’s What I Like About the Whole30</h2><ul><li>I feel powerful when I turn down foods that I know are unhealthy. I have said no to birthday cake, wedding cake, movie popcorn, cheese samples at the grocery store, celebratory beers after a day of skiing, slices of pizza at kids’ birthday parties and the bread that comes before the meal at restaurants. Hear me roar.</li><li>I sleep the unicorn fairy sleep of an imaginary friend who lives in a sleeping bag in the back of a warm, dark cave. I go to bed earlier, since I’m not snacking or drinking. I sleep all night and when I wake up, I am in go mode instead of stalling in coffee mode for an hour.</li><li>My heart rate drops. Yup, figures, I’m also a Fitbit nerd. When I look back at my heart rate over the course of a year, I can easily pick out the month-long dips where I did this diet. I mention this, because it proves to me what a million magazine articles and documentaries can’t: healthy food = healthy body.</li><li>My mind is clear. I can’t tell you if this is psychological or physical, but it’s 100% true. Here’s a stat to prove it. In January of 2020, I wrote eight articles on Medium and they got about 21,000 reads. I also did the Whole30 diet in January. Since then, I’ve written the same number of articles. But with the addition of cheese and bread into my diet, my reads each month have been less than 5,000!</li></ul>Here’s What I Hate about the Whole30<ul><li>It’s really hard. I mean physically hard. It means planning every bite of food you will take in the morning. No takeout, no snacks from the convenience store. You have to always be thinking about what you will eat next. You have to chop and slice and package and prepare almost every bite of food you eat on this diet. When I have evening meetings, I pack three full meals in a beefy tote bag. Then I have to wash them all and repeat. It’s hard.</li><li>I miss flavor. There’s a whole lot of ink out there trying to convince everyone that Whole30 cooking tastes just as good as any other foods. I’m sorry but it’s just not true. Riced cauliflower is not the same as Jasmine rice. Most sauces and dips have sugar, corn syrup or other thickeners, so they’re not allowed. There’s a lot of liars that will tell you that a fat slice of a beefsteak tomato on your burger is the same a ketchup. It’s not. Accept it and move on.</li><li>Shopping takes a long time. Especially if you’re new, you’ll have to read the label of every item you want to by. It will be disheartening to see that a lot of the staple foods you usually eat a

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re not allowed. You’ll have to dive into new sections of the store to find enough calories to sustain you. For example, I bought frozen parsnips. Not great, but it’s good to try new things, right? Anyway, don’t try to shop in a hurry or you will leave disappointed.</li><li>I feel just a tiny bit sad all the time. This is a big topic that I’ll mostly leave alone, but I’ve realized how closely tied together foods and emotion are. Foods are an easy way to celebrate a small victory or ease the pain of a tough day. I’m sorry, but snacking on peapods at the end of the workweek just isn’t the same as a plate of nachos with friends. It’s not that peapods are bad, they just don’t evoke the same joie de vivre of melted cheese!</li></ul><h2 id="6bf6">Tips for Success</h2>My first time through this diet was rough. I spent way too much time feeling hungry and I talked about it way too much. Since then I’ve learned a thing or two. Here you go:<ul><li>Make up your mind that you aren’t going to cheat. Once you do that, it’s easy to stay on track. If you go into it thinking you might cheat just a little, you will definitely cheat. Probably a lot. That might be true of getting married too?</li><li>Don’t talk about it all the time. It’s annoying and you will quickly reach a point where it feels like the diet has taken over your life. You are still everything you were before you started the diet — a writer, a parent, a sheep shearer. Talk about those things. Then eat vegetables on the side.</li><li>Cook big meals. Whole30 meals take a lot of prep. Nothing is worse that spending a lot of time and effort to still be hungry. Double, triple, quadruple your recipes. Yes, you might eat two or even three chicken breasts.</li><li>Buy a cookbook. Yes, you can search the internet for a bajillion recipes. But they are deceptively hidden at the very bottom of a very long blog post about Patricia’s Plant Powered eating or some shit like that. Just buy a cookbook so you don’t have to scroll for five minutes just to find out that Whole30 carrots are just steamed carrots with salt and olive oil. You can make notes in it, look at the pretty pictures and rip out any recipes you think are gross.</li><li>Know that you are going to spend a lot of money on food. It sucks, but processed foods are cheap. Real, fresh, whole foods are not. Your grocery bill will be higher. For me it’s offset by not purchasing a handful of bottles of wine every week. I also think of it as an investment in myself. When you think of it like that, your grocery bills will be far less than a personal trainer, a Peloton or other ways you could spend money on yourself.</li></ul>My dad loves to talk to me about the Whole30. At the end of our conversations, he always says that he just doesn’t understand why anyone would do it.“Dad,” I tell him, “You don’t have to do it.”If you agree with my dad, then don’t try it! But if part of you is curious and tempted, you should give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? One or two nights of fairy sleep and a burger without ketchup? Trust me, Dunkin’ Donuts won’t go out of business if without your five bucks a day.Give it a shot and see how it goes!</article></body>

The Best and Worst Things About The Whole30 Diet

I’m a diehard skeptic and I love bread, so I promise, I’ll give you an accurate picture.

I’ve pretty much been sitting at my desk staring into the little black camera on my computer since the world shut down mid-March. With my mind and my body as sharp as the Crayola crayons my kids keep leaving in my chair, I decided to start the Whole30 diet on June 1.

I looked back at my calendar and realized that this marks the tenth time I have cycled through this diet. It’s not that I’m a diehard believer or that I get some kind of spiritual enlightenment from it. It’s just every time I do the diet, I feel better.

If you can relate, maybe doing the Whole30 is for you. To help you decide, I’m going to share the things that I love and hate about it. Also, as an everyday, normal, not-a-foodie-or-a-fitness-junkie person, I’ll give you some tips on how to be successful if you decide you want to try it too.

There already are tons of recipes, shopping lists, meal planners and full-blown science classes about Whole30 online, so I’ll leave those topics alone. And I promise, I won’t share any before and after selfies where I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and suck my gut in to show you how awesome I look.

My First Time

The first time I heard about the Whole30 diet, I rolled my eyes. Gag.

In case you’ve never heard of it, it’s a fad diet created by Melissa Hartwig that requires you to eat a very restrictive diet for 30 days. You can read lots more about it on her website, but it’s pretty much a diet of meat, fruit, vegetables, eggs and nuts. No dairy, no peanuts, no corn, no beans, no grains. No sugar, no alcohol, no sweeteners — even natural ones like honey and syrup.

Yikes.

But the woman who told me about it talked about how her sleep had improved, her skin was clearer, her mind was focused and sharp, her digestive bloating and cramping had decreased and she had dropped a bunch of weight.

Still, I was 100% uninterested at the time.

But then I had a kid, started a stressful new job, struggled to get to the gym and next thing you know, I found myself feeling head to toe awful. On a whim, I decided to try it out.

If you Google ‘Whole30’ you’ll see that there are thousands of blog posts about it, often accompanied by people with cut abs doing crazy Cross-fit workouts. I assure you that is not me. I did get results, but they weren’t as epic or life changing as most bloggers want you to believe.

I lost a handful of pounds and felt better overall. But the biggest gain I felt from doing the Whole30 was the sense of control I gained over my life. I loved not dipping into a bag of corn chips at 10pm. I loved saying “No Thanks” to the plate of muffins that someone brought in to work.

If that sounds twisted to you, then that’s OK. I get it, this diet isn’t for everyone.

But if it sounds kind of empowering to know that you can look down the point of a slice of caramel turtle cheesecake and walk away with no regrets — you may want to give it a shot.

Since my first time through, I’ve done the Whole30 twice a year. It’s kind of a reset button for my body and my diet. I used to dread starting it, knowing the struggles of skipping the queso dip and ordering seltzer when everyone else drinks a nice chardonnay. But the more I do it, the more I find myself looking forward to it.

Here’s What I Like About the Whole30

I feel powerful when I turn down foods that I know are unhealthy. I have said no to birthday cake, wedding cake, movie popcorn, cheese samples at the grocery store, celebratory beers after a day of skiing, slices of pizza at kids’ birthday parties and the bread that comes before the meal at restaurants. Hear me roar.
I sleep the unicorn fairy sleep of an imaginary friend who lives in a sleeping bag in the back of a warm, dark cave. I go to bed earlier, since I’m not snacking or drinking. I sleep all night and when I wake up, I am in go mode instead of stalling in coffee mode for an hour.
My heart rate drops. Yup, figures, I’m also a Fitbit nerd. When I look back at my heart rate over the course of a year, I can easily pick out the month-long dips where I did this diet. I mention this, because it proves to me what a million magazine articles and documentaries can’t: healthy food = healthy body.
My mind is clear. I can’t tell you if this is psychological or physical, but it’s 100% true. Here’s a stat to prove it. In January of 2020, I wrote eight articles on Medium and they got about 21,000 reads. I also did the Whole30 diet in January. Since then, I’ve written the same number of articles. But with the addition of cheese and bread into my diet, my reads each month have been less than 5,000!

Here’s What I Hate about the Whole30

It’s really hard. I mean physically hard. It means planning every bite of food you will take in the morning. No takeout, no snacks from the convenience store. You have to always be thinking about what you will eat next. You have to chop and slice and package and prepare almost every bite of food you eat on this diet. When I have evening meetings, I pack three full meals in a beefy tote bag. Then I have to wash them all and repeat. It’s hard.
I miss flavor. There’s a whole lot of ink out there trying to convince everyone that Whole30 cooking tastes just as good as any other foods. I’m sorry but it’s just not true. Riced cauliflower is not the same as Jasmine rice. Most sauces and dips have sugar, corn syrup or other thickeners, so they’re not allowed. There’s a lot of liars that will tell you that a fat slice of a beefsteak tomato on your burger is the same a ketchup. It’s not. Accept it and move on.
Shopping takes a long time. Especially if you’re new, you’ll have to read the label of every item you want to by. It will be disheartening to see that a lot of the staple foods you usually eat are not allowed. You’ll have to dive into new sections of the store to find enough calories to sustain you. For example, I bought frozen parsnips. Not great, but it’s good to try new things, right? Anyway, don’t try to shop in a hurry or you will leave disappointed.
I feel just a tiny bit sad all the time. This is a big topic that I’ll mostly leave alone, but I’ve realized how closely tied together foods and emotion are. Foods are an easy way to celebrate a small victory or ease the pain of a tough day. I’m sorry, but snacking on peapods at the end of the workweek just isn’t the same as a plate of nachos with friends. It’s not that peapods are bad, they just don’t evoke the same joie de vivre of melted cheese!

Tips for Success

My first time through this diet was rough. I spent way too much time feeling hungry and I talked about it way too much. Since then I’ve learned a thing or two. Here you go:

Make up your mind that you aren’t going to cheat. Once you do that, it’s easy to stay on track. If you go into it thinking you might cheat just a little, you will definitely cheat. Probably a lot. That might be true of getting married too?
Don’t talk about it all the time. It’s annoying and you will quickly reach a point where it feels like the diet has taken over your life. You are still everything you were before you started the diet — a writer, a parent, a sheep shearer. Talk about those things. Then eat vegetables on the side.
Cook big meals. Whole30 meals take a lot of prep. Nothing is worse that spending a lot of time and effort to still be hungry. Double, triple, quadruple your recipes. Yes, you might eat two or even three chicken breasts.
Buy a cookbook. Yes, you can search the internet for a bajillion recipes. But they are deceptively hidden at the very bottom of a very long blog post about Patricia’s Plant Powered eating or some shit like that. Just buy a cookbook so you don’t have to scroll for five minutes just to find out that Whole30 carrots are just steamed carrots with salt and olive oil. You can make notes in it, look at the pretty pictures and rip out any recipes you think are gross.
Know that you are going to spend a lot of money on food. It sucks, but processed foods are cheap. Real, fresh, whole foods are not. Your grocery bill will be higher. For me it’s offset by not purchasing a handful of bottles of wine every week. I also think of it as an investment in myself. When you think of it like that, your grocery bills will be far less than a personal trainer, a Peloton or other ways you could spend money on yourself.

My dad loves to talk to me about the Whole30. At the end of our conversations, he always says that he just doesn’t understand why anyone would do it.

“Dad,” I tell him, “You don’t have to do it.”

If you agree with my dad, then don’t try it! But if part of you is curious and tempted, you should give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? One or two nights of fairy sleep and a burger without ketchup? Trust me, Dunkin’ Donuts won’t go out of business if without your five bucks a day.

Give it a shot and see how it goes!