Several years ago, I tried the Whole 30 program. If you’re not familiar with this program, it is basically a 30-day elimination diet where you remove foods that are common causes of inflammation in the body.
The program has changed since I tried it, and I’m not up-to-date on the latest version, but at the time that I did it we had to remove all added sugar (including fake sweeteners), all grains, all legumes, all dairy, all alcohol, and watch for a couple of nasty ingredients in your food labels.
The little gotcha on the program is if you slip up, you have to start over. Why? Because your goal with the program is to remove all potential inflammatory foods, and after 30 days, reintroduce these foods in a specific sequence to see what YOU are actually sensitive to. Most elimination diets work this same way.
I started out OK.
I had a couple of hard-cooked eggs in the morning with a small avocado for breakfast, and a small handful of lightly salted almonds for a snack at work. At lunch I’d have a couple of handfuls of mixed greens topped with some shredded chicken, a chopped apple, some avocado, and the Primal Kitchen Greek Vinaigrette, which I love. Sometimes I sprinkled this with raw sunflower seeds. My favorite dinner was to cook up some ground beef and pair it with a sweet potato topped with a little ghee and some ground cinnamon.
That’s pretty much what I did, with some variants. The key to starting any program is to keep it simple and manageable.
I made it 11 days. That’s it. 11 out of 30.
Something happened at work that triggered my stress levels and I needed to get out of the office that day when lunch came around. No worries. There was a brunch place around the corner that served fairly healthy food. I had an egg white omelet which had mushrooms, tomatoes and green chilis in it, with a side of fresh fruit and a side of sliced avocado. I skipped the toast they served with it because it wasn’t part of the program.
Went back to work feeling fresh and made it through the evening.
But I forgot one critical thing - the deeply ingrained habits I had at the time.
It was “habit” for me at the time to go eat at another place the day after the brunch place. That other place serves no healthy food at all and my go-to meal there was chili cheese nachos, which is not Whole 30-compliant in any way.
Work was still stressful and I didn’t really have any other coping mechanisms for that at the time - I dealt with it by going out to lunch! And following that deeply ingrained habit, I ended up at the non-healthy place with the chili cheese nachos, beating myself up even more.
I thought I could get back on the program the next day but I couldn’t. Tried again the next week but nope. It’s been years now and I still can’t make myself go restart that program.
But the program taught me some very important things that I took with me and incorporate to this day:
I read the food labels of every packaged food I buy, looking for added fake sugar and the other nasty ingredients that I learned to watch out for. (I do allow natural added sugar in my food.)
I learned that the constant joint pain that I had was absolutely caused by what I was eating. While I don’t technically know the official source since I didn’t do a proper reintroduction, I would bet that it was from the fake ingredients that I no longer consume. I have very little joint pain these days.
I learned that weighing and measuring your food and counting calories and macros are absolutely not actually needed for weight loss.
How did I learn that last one? The Whole 30 program plainly states that it’s not a weight loss program.
But if you are overweight like I was, and you stop eating the crap and start eating primarily nutrient-dense whole foods, weight loss is a natural result.
In that 11 days, I absolutely lost weight. I don’t know how much because I wasn’t on the scale. But I could tell in my clothing - particularly with the hooks in my bra strap.
Over the years I tried different programs with varying rules about counting and weighing your food, but in the back of my mind I knew this wasn’t actually needed to lose weight.
And I really, really dislike weighing my food.
One day I got curious about how it was that I could lose weight with the Whole 30, when I was eating so many fat grams every day - egg yolks, a couple of small avocados, handfuls of nuts, oil-based salad dressing, and the fat in my ground beef.
So I popped that typical day into My Fitness Pal just to see and learned that with all that food, I was only eating about 1800 calories a day.
No wonder I lost weight. I need about 2500 calories a day to maintain my weight when I’m not working out.
That was the day I decided to stop counting calories.
If I just eat normal healthy food in normal portions, I don’t need to count a thing.