The Whole 30 Experience

The whole 30 is a diet that lasts 30 days, restricts your meals to very basic degrees, and ultimately leaves you with a better knowledge of how your body responds to certain things.  Being a chef, I have earned the right to critique how meals should be prepared, but will admit I know very little about how people’s bodies respond to things changing in their diets, so I can only offer my personal experience.  

The purpose of the diet was to learn about my body and how it was affected by the foods I consumed.  My perspective underwent a huge transformation. Imagine back when you were a child, and perhaps your father has always had a beard, then one day he shaves it, and you realize that his face looks completely different.  Another metaphor could be that you calculated the amount of your first paycheck, but your check arrives and you learn the hard truth about how taxes work.  This is a representation of how my mind processed the eye opening experience and results of doing the whole 30 diet.

 During the first week I experienced constant headaches.  This was the sugar slowly leaving my system.  My bowel movements were erratic.  This was likely the carb and starchy buildups in my bowels being flushed away, no pun intended.  Finally, I was constantly cooking AND having to think ahead about my meals, because not only was I always hungry from the lack of my usual gluten enriched carbs, but my wife was also doing the diet with me and I wanted her and I to still eat the usual excellent meals we are used to.  

Food is not meant to be a reward, it is meant to be the daily fuel our bodies require. 

After the diet was over I had lost 27 lbs.  I had energy, my bowel movements were easy and swift, I slept great and my body looked excellent, in MY biased opinion.  I did not set out to lose weight.  It simply occurred.  I learned that gluten and alcohol were in fact the perpetrators to my usual fatigue and weight gaining.  Sugar was a villainous luxury that I did not realize to be negatively affecting my health.  My perspective on food was so radically changed that I felt overwhelmingly grateful that a new manner of thinking could be introduced to my mind.  What I said after the 1^st week, that I would “never being doing this again!” has become “lets do it again in august, because I loved the way I felt.”  

Food is not meant to be a reward, it is meant to be the daily fuel our bodies require.  This diet is for people who wish to become more aware about how foods are affecting them.  It helps us become conscientious and to realize that things we once thought were outside of our control are in fact well within our power to manage.  Again, this is how only my body changed through this process, but you owe it to yourself to challenge with way you think.  Our lives are too short to believe that our habitual ways of living, consuming, and thinking are without improvement.