Whole30 Timeline
Day 1 – Woo! You’ve got this!
This isn’t so bad! I can eat bacon, I can eat avocado, wait Cholula is approved too!? Well that’s a whole breakfast! Okay, so nothing in the pantry is safe, but that’s okay I still have fruit. Oh man, none of the office snacks are safe to eat. Why is there added sugar in everything? It’s okay, nuts are still good. Remember, peanuts are not nuts, they’re legumes… what exactly is a legume again?
Learnings: Day 1 is exciting and completely manageable, but the looming truth that added sugars, soy bean and peanut oil seem to be the main ingredients of so many major snacks. Dressings and sauces are your enemy and make sure to stock up on snacks – also meal prepping is key for lunch.
Breakfast (avocado, bacon, Cholula), Lunch (pot roast: steak, carrots, red potatoes, onions, chicken stock), Dinner (Burger Lounge paleo burger)
Day 2-3 – Meal Prep is Life
Meat and veggies, meat and veggies. This is still totally manageable! I got my snacks, the grill is fired up, and a big old glass of kombucha. I mean, I can’t walk through a grocery store without cursing at all of the packaging – LOW SODIUM LAYS? Oh please, that won’t be approved. No Sugar Added Heinz ketchup…. with sucralose.
Learnings: Salads made at home can be interesting, meal prepping is crucial, and you shouldn’t expect to have a big rush of energy yet, your body is starting to adjust to all of the changes and it’s not relying on carbs for energy storage. Power through!
Breakfast: (Aidell’s chicken apple sausages, eggs scrambled with cholula and jalepenos, topped with salsa), Lunch (pot roast: steak, carrots, red potatoes, onions, chicken stock), Dinner (ribeye, zucchini, roasted potatoes) (spinach salad, leftover ribeye from the night before, portobello mushrooms, chopped almonds, lemon vinaigrette)
Day 4-5 – WHY AM I SO ANGRY?!
WHO LEFT THIS DISH OUT? Did I just throw a dish into the sink? Ugh I’ll just take the edge off with a glass of…. oh wait. Oh god, I’m still so tired, what is going on? Well at least I have a rhythm going with the meal prep, snacks, sliced fruit, we’re on our way! How far are we into this thing? Oh, it’s only been 4 days. FAK! From everything I’ve read and the living testament of my friends who’ve made it through the Whole30, this too shall pass. Something weird happens around day 4-5, and it has nothing to do with your food cravings. Well it does, but it’s happening internally. Your body is adjusting to the new foods, or more like the lack of foods it’s been used to, this leads to an imbalance in your system, even if you feel like you have things under control – just know that is a lie and that is okay.
Learnings: You will make it through this, be kind to those around you, you are still at the beginning of your journey and you need them.
Breakfast (Over easy eggs, cholula, avocado, yellow nectarines), Snacks (apple and almond butter) (radishes sliced into rounds and salsa), Lunch (pot roast: steak, carrots, red potatoes, onions, chicken stock), Dinner (skewers: ribeye, shrimp, portobello mushrooms, asparagus), Dinner (Chipotle bowl: lettuce, carnitas, tomatoes, tomatillo-green chili salsa, guac)
Day 6,7 – When did I get this weak?!
This feels fine, I’m starting to like the meals I’ve been making. Should it be feeling worse? My husband’s body seems to be going through some version of the purge but I think I feel okay. Should I be working out? Seems like the healthy thing to do, but I have no energy all of a sudden. Aren’t I supposed to be feeling unbounded energy?! I moved some things in my garage around for a couple of hours and felt like I had been day drinking, in 100 degree heat, without any water. I’m not a napper but I knocked out for a couple of hours, I think so my body could recharge enough energy just to do basic tasks again.
Learnings: While your body adjusts to where it is getting it’s energy from (sugars) and learning more efficient ways of sourcing energy from proteins and fats, your energy levels will be adjusting too and you might feel weaker at first.
Day 8 – 11 – I’m not really sure if this is working?
I think I feel better… but I’m not sure. I’m definitely not losing weight. Oh god, we’re only a third of the way through. I think I’m losing creativity.
Learning: This is probably the hardest part of your journey, only being 1/3 of the way through and feeling lack of results is discouraging for sure. By this point you’ve had your favorite dishes a few times, you’ve been to the Whole30 approved restaurants, you’ve been eating LARABARs every day now for a week and a half, almonds are almost always the default snack. It almost feels like you won’t make it, but you’re almost there, from here on out it starts getting way easier! This is when most people will drop off the Whole30, don’t do it! Read on to hear how it gets better!
Day 12- 27 – I FEEL GREAT!
“So, is it working? How do you feel?” I feel like I was getting asked this a handful of times every day and thankfully at this point my response was: I feel great! I have tons of energy, I mean tons of energy, and it’s the kind that lasts throughout the entire day, no more 1-3PM slow downs, my afternoons weren’t dragging on, it felt like a superpower! I hadn’t had a stomach ache since before the Whole30 (and I had previously been getting shooting pains after eating on a pretty regular basis.) My eczema had gone away on my arm – I honestly couldn’t recall a single ailment that I had before I started.
Fruits have become a delicious mid-day snack. I am now officially addicted to apple slices and almond butter. Making unique meals has become more exciting.
Not going to lie though, food cravings never went away. I literally dreamt about a slice of cake; I was having dreams every few days about foods I couldn’t eat. It was a constant war between my conscious and my subconscious. Suddenly things that never appealed to me became all I could think about. I learned the trick to only walk the perimeter of grocery stores (fun fact: all the junk is in the middle) but even then there would be muffins near the checkout, just calling for me.
Learnings: This portion is much more manageable, food cravings still exist, but your relationship with food is starting to change. Food cravings use to result in fulfilling the craving and giving into my mid-day need for chips, but somewhere in these couple of weeks, you stop eating because you’re bored (honestly it’s too much work to plan out what you can eat or just to think about something new) or because you crave something (likely you aren’t allowed to eat it). I honestly felt like I blacked out during this portion because where the first week and a half felt like an eternity, before I knew it, we were in our remaining days of the month!
Day 28-29 – I’m literally counting down the minutes!
I spent the last remaining days counting down the hours, planning out the perfect day back into eating “normal food” and looking up forums online talking about what foods people brought back first. I wanted it to be cake, I had been dreaming about cake, no, a muffin, honestly anything that has yeast that made for that fluffy doughy texture I hadn’t been able to replicate during the last 30 days. But then I started reading into the reintroduction plan – it typically goes like this, Day 1 after your Whole30, reintroduce one food group you omitted from your diet, like dairy. You are supposed to reintroduce it throughout all of your meals for the day: latte in the morning, milk and butter in my mashed potatoes, and cheese on my In n Out double-double protein style. Then, go back to eating clean and Whole30 for 2 days.
Learnings: Remember the last 30 days of experimenting on your body? Well the truth is that it’s not over, it’s really just beginning because the 30 days wasn’t the experiment, it was to make you into the control. By giving yourself a 2 day buffer between trying new food groups, you can identify all of the aches and pains that come associated with those foods. If ever were to be a time not to cheat the system, it would be now – no point in putting the last month to waste by rushing back into old eating habits and not being able to identify the issues, we’d be right back at square one.
Day 30 – WE DID IT!
So, funny thing, we miscalculated the days and thought we were at day 30 when it was really day 29. This was the saddest day. I won’t lie, I had half the thought to not tell my husband (who hadn’t realized it at the time), but just couldn’t live with myself having thought we didn’t complete the full process. The cheese would have to wait, but it would be worth it.
Learnings: This reset was much more than a health test, a diet, or whatever else I went into thinking of it as. This was an exercise on self control and being able to take the control back. Proving to yourself that you can do it, gives you all the control you need to feel however you want to feel moving forward, and it’s totally worth it.
