Resetting Your Food Habits With Whole30 – Day 1

By Marcia Simon January 8, 2018 

I finally started the Whole30 food program. Don’t call it a diet because it’s not about losing weight, although most people find that they’ve shed some pounds at the end of 30-days.

Whole30 about resetting your relationship with food, and I’ve been stuck. Stuck with the habit of an extra glass of wine, stuck with the feeling that my meal needs a carb, and definitely stuck with more than a few stubborn pounds that just won’t go away.

It’s more than that, though. For me, it’s about getting rid of that spaced out feeling known as brain fog. From all I’ve read I thought it could be triggered by a food sensitivity. Lack of sleep may be part of it – or maybe there’s a different reason my body isn’t well rested. I want to regain that sparky, vibrant feeling I used to have all day.

I believe in theory that if you eat crap, you feel like crap. If you eat well, you feel well. It’s food as medicine. It’s clean eating by getting rid of the additives and chemicals in packaged foods and eliminating the most common triggers of inflammation and other irritations that may affect digestion, complexion, energy, libido and/or mood.

By eliminating these triggers for 30 days, you give your body a chance to recalculate. Then it’s time to reintroduce foods gradually and read your body to identify which foods make you feel bad. If you have a glass of wine on Day 31 and you feel good about it – great. It stays. If you have a tuna sandwich a few days later and start to feel bloated, you may have just discovered that gluten doesn’t agree with you.

So … what’s in?

scrambled eggs with fresh green pepper, chunky salsa and mandarin orange

Protein from eggs, fish, chicken, pork and beef. Lots of vegetables, fresh fruits, lots of nuts – except peanuts because those are legumes, which can be a common trigger, and may block the uptake of certain nutrients according to some reports.

What’s out? Legumes – all beans including soy beans, soy sauce and tofu, and chickpeas, and dairy so no milk, yogurt, kefir or butter – and no grains so forget bread, chips, even corn tortillas, no quinoa, bulgur, barley, oatmeal. It sounds very limiting, but it’s not bad … at least after Day 1. (String beans, snow peas and sugar snaps are in because you eat the pod.)

DAY 1 – The hardest thing? Drinking black coffee. No dairy. Almond and cashew milks are fine, but those also taste pretty bad in coffee. And none of the nondairy creamers because we‘re also eliminating unnecessary chemicals, and added sugar of any kind including stevia, honey, agave. Fruit juice as a sweetener is fine for meals, but is pretty gross in coffee.

Some people swear that the Whole30 has changed their life and after just a week or two they feel satisfied and full of the energy that had been so elusive. Others debunk the Whole30 because other than the claims from its creators there doesn’t seem to be any hard science-based evidence as to how it works. The authors keep pushing their book to find the science of the program but it seems as if they’re really trying to sell another book. Regardless, most people lose weight and come away from this 30-day food adventure with a newly found discipline and mindful approach to eating. And that, for me, is enough to give it a try.