I know I told you that I would intermittently update you on my 2nd Whole30 but to be honest, even I didn't want to hear about my Whole30 journey this time.
Now to preface, I love Whole30. It's all clean, whole foods. By the end of the 30 days I felt amazing! Healthy, alert, confident and in control of all of my cravings. During the entire Whole30 (my first and second times) I was thinking about all of the delicious foods I was going to eat when it was over- which is totally not the point of the Whole30 but stay with me here. By the end of both of my Whole30s I was searching for healthy recipes for the transition, had completely lost all those ice cream and cupcake cravings and binging on junk was the furthest thing from my mind. It's kind of awesome how that works out and probably why you NEED to do 30 days so you can even yourself out by the end. If I had stopped half way through it would have been a completely different story.
Now for my issues with this Whole30. My motivation this Whole30 was a lot lower. The first time I was gung ho to learn new recipes and really immersed myself in the habit of cooking constantly. This Whole30 I was so busy and so unenthused with the process that I really rested on the recipes I had learned last time. This quickly left me to get burnt out on the same old meals and I lost a lot of my love for food.
The biggest problem with this is that is actually caused me to under eat many times. I had no interest in making anything because I just felt so tired of cooking that I often put off dinner and made a meal of eggs or potatoes. One weekend I ate eggs for every single meal. It was brutal.
This is totally not in the spirit of the Whole30. I should have been thoughtfully preparing each meal, making sure all the food groups were present. I was just too tired and couldn't quiet muster the strength.
I do love Whole30 and I do believe I'll do another but I want to do it right next time. I want to give it the effort and energy it deserves, otherwise I'll spend my month unhappy, under-eating and under-representing some very important food groups.
So for the next while I'm working on balance. I want to really take the spirit of the Whole30 and it's focus on nutrition and unprocessed foods and bring that into a manageable lifestyle for me.
If that's all I got from this Whole30, that's good enough for me.
From the desk of:
Taylor Brown
Whole30 Vet
