For today’s musing, I’ve teamed up with my wife, Meagan, to write about an experience we’ve recently had. Throughout the month of February we embarked upon completing our first Whole30. While I have written about Whole30 before, let me explain it to those of you who are still unclear.

Whole30 is a 30 day eating plan. The goal is to assist in developing healthy habits, eliminate unhealthy ones, heal the body from diet based misuse, and force education in what we eat, particularly what is in what we eat. You eliminate all dairy, grains (including pseudo-grains like quinoa), soy, legumes (including peanuts), and added sugar (yes, even honey). You also eliminate look-alike/taste-alike foods like paleo chips and egg/banana pancakes. In essence, anything which physically might cause gastrointestinal distress and mentally traps you in old, unhealthy habits. After the 30 days are up, you are encouraged to slowly integrate some of the eliminated foods back to see how your body reacts. Hopefully, this can be done while still maintaining the forming healthy habits.

Now, please note: I am choosing words very carefully here. One of the things Meagan and I want to dispel in this post is two of the most common fallacies we hear about Whole30, and enlighten you as to what invaluable things we learned in the process.

Fallacy #1: Whole30 is just another fad diet/weight loss plan.

If you want to do Whole30, buy the book! So many people who believe this fallacy have not ready any of the source materials. Meagan and I could not have been successful without our own copy of the book. One of the primary reasons is that it outlines the question, “why?” If you know me, you’ll know that the question, “why?” is always of utmost importance. If we don’t know why, then how will we know we’ve succeeded or failed? How can we correct ourselves along the way, or scrap what isn’t working and start over?

Whole30 might help facilitate weight loss, but that is merely a side effect. A pleasant one, I’ll admit, but losing weight is not a primary goal of the program. Whole30 helped Meagan and I lose weight. I lost 24 lbs and am still losing, Meagan lost 16 lbs and gained substantial muscle mass. We didn’t weigh in at all during the 30 days, because doing so is considered cheating. We celebrated the night before we weighed in because we knew that even if we lost nothing, we had been completely successful in our endeavor.

Fallacy #2: To do Whole30, you have to obsess about what you eat.

In the first week or two of Whole30, there is a definite panic in thinking about planning out meals, grocery shopping, and the stress surrounding going out to eat? Yikes! But I believe this is a byproduct not of Whole30, but of how poorly we managed our food before. For Meagan and I, we rarely thought about what we ate, even on a good day. What was in our food was not really a factor until our daughter started eating solids, and even then we still ate what we wanted and hoped we could share.

Let me fast-forward, however, to the final week of Whole30 when all of the principles had sunk in and we were operating like a well oiled machine in the kitchen. Meal planning took a little time, but grocery shopping became a breeze, and we knew, no matter what, we needed so much protein, veggies, fats, and fruit in our house to be successful. Cooking dinner took little effort because we were proficient enough in front of a stove to season our meat and veg and cook them in different ways every night. Food preparation took some time, mostly due to dishes, but it took very little thought.

Whole30 teaches you how to not obsess about food. Once you learn the basics, struggling for a few weeks to understand, the program becomes second nature. You walk through a grocery store with confidence, a thesaurus of words for sugar firmly implanted in your brain. You mix and match healthy fats, incredible seasonings, your favorite cuts of meat, and a crisper full of fresh veggies in no time flat. It becomes a wonderful feeling to stop worrying about what you can’t eat and start playing around with the limitless possibilities of new found food loves.

Education Through Healthy Habits

As I said, Whole30 is about breaking the habits making you unhealthy, replacing them with new ones, and teaching you in the process. So, here are Meagan and my biggest knowledge and habit takeaways from our 30 days.

Takeaway #1: Meal Planning

Meagan and I used to suck at meal planning. Honestly, we still are far from the best at it, but Whole30 gave us some amazing mechanisms that have helped us tremendously. We realized within the first week or two that planning big recipes was going to be our downfall. We opted for 2-3 significant recipes a week, and focused most of our efforts on interchangeable meals, like sweet potatoes and pork loin or broccoli, onions, and steak. Simple meals, seasoned very well, meant that if we weren’t feeling pork one day, just grab the chicken from another. Have at least a weeks worth of food on hand, not a weeks worth of stress from overthinking.

Takeaway #2: Grocery Shop Like a Pro

Whole30 is very big on label reading, and for good reason. About 75-85% of items at any grocery store, even your favorite all natural boutique, have some form of sugar in them. Sugar can be natural, after all it comes from a plant. However, things like chicken stock, canned tomatoes, and every one’s favorite to point out, even iodized salt has sugar added. And don’t even get me started on all the stuff that has soy or legume based oils in them. You quickly learn to differentiate essentials, learn trustworthy brands, and even begin shortening your time since half the aisles become completely useless. It is a great feeling to walk out of the store without guilt, head held high, and shopping bags filled mostly with fresh ingredients.

Takeaway #3: Simple, Tasty Cooking

Meagan is not much of a cook. Not because she can’t do it, but partially a lack of confidence and partially a lack of interest. Since her baking knowledge did not come into play very often, most of our meal execution was left in my “capable” hands. That being said, there were days where I was in class or unavailable, and she couldn’t escape the stove top. Because of how we learned to plan, Meagan was never forced to go too elaborate or out of her comfort zone. She quickly discovered that searing off a steak, baking a potato, and even making a little sauce for the top was quite simple if you don’t over think it. This simple cooking allowed us to eat better, but take less time than ordering carryout. Thawing meat the night before was often the extent of our planning ahead, but through the whole program, and beyond, we’ve yet to come across one of these simple meals we have not liked.

Takeaway #4: We Can Do It!

Flash back to week 2. Meagan and Paul are sitting in bed with the baby. Paul nearly breaks down into tears, begging for pizza or burgers. Meagan, being the sympathetic soul, is ready to give in herself. It was a tense moment. Give up, or give it one more day. And guess what? We gave it that day, and then the next. Pretty soon, the temptations began to subside. I learned to distinguish cravings from hunger. Meagan found a passion for healthy fats that kept her satisfied. That turning point was huge for us, because it was the first time in all of our eating history we had been faced with a major challenge and chose to overcome instead of collapse. Whole30 helped us regain strength over our own selfish desires, whether gluttony or slothfulness.

 

So, if you want a fad diet, something you can fall out of and jump back in again, something where you’ll only feel guilty week to week, and something which makes your scale needle look like a trampoline artist, then the world is your oyster (assuming you can have those). But, if you want a short term plan, designed to help you get control over your health and your habits, then I strongly suggest you head over to Whole30.com. And do yourself a favor. If you really want to do this the right way, then go buy the book!

Pax,

-Paul Hart Cochran

P.S. We did check the baby’s label, and thankfully she was Whole30 complaint!