About a year ago I went to dinner at a friend’s house and
brought some hummus and veggies so that I would have something to eat while
everyone else was eating chips and dip.
I noticed that the hostess was not eating any hummus and I asked her
why. She said that she wasn’t eating any
legumes because of the diet she was on.
What? No legumes? What’s up with that? I asked her to tell me about her diet and she
introduced me to the Whole 30 program.
Shortly after that, I bought the book, It Starts With Food, and
read about the program. The basic
premise of the diet is that there is no net neutral food; everything you eat or
drink either makes you healthier or less healthy. If you read my blog during Phase 1 you may
recall that this is similar to the message in my favorite book, Younger Next
Year. In Younger Next Year, Dr. Lodge
explains that every day your body is either growing or decaying, but it is
never static. Dr. Lodge claims that
exercise is the factor that determines whether today will be a growth day or a
decay day. The first time I read the
book this made sense to me. It made
sense the second time I read the book, too; and the third time. That book changed my life forever. It is because of Younger Next Year that I
exercise several times a week, every week.
Exercise is now part of what I do.
So when I read, It Starts With Food, and one of the first
things they said is that there is no net neutral food, I knew I was
hooked. That just makes sense. Every time we eat or drink we are either
fueling our bodies with something it needs or poisoning it with something it doesn’t
need and therefore has to figure out how to process and filter out of our
system. (Those are my words, not
theirs.)
The Whole 30 program, therefore, is designed to remove
everything from your diet, for 30 days, that has potential to make you less
healthy in some way. For 30 days, you
only eat foods that:
- Promote a healthy psychological response (foods that are not addictive, i.e. sugar)
- Promote a healthy hormonal response (think insulin, leptin, and cortisol)
- Support a healthy gut (A healthy digestive system is key to our overall health. If you have a bloated gut your digestive system is working overtime on processing something that is not inherently good for you.)
- Support immune function and minimize inflammation (Many of the recent articles I’ve read about chronic health issues, including dementia and Alzheimer’s, point to chronic, systemic inflammation being a culprit. This diet is designed to minimize or eliminate inflammation caused by food.)
The authors identify several food groups that you completely
eliminate from your diet for 30 days.
The idea is that you conduct your own individual experiment. For 30 days you remove all foods from your
diet that are potentially addictive, can create hormonal swings, might twist up
your gut, or could cause inflammation.
Pay attention to how good you feel during those 30 days. After 30 days, if you want to add a food
group back, try it. If you feel just as
good with the food group added back in, then great! Keep it in your diet. But if you add that food back to your diet
and your stomach cramps up or your hands and feet swell or you start getting
dizzy spells, you know that you are sensitive to that food. The authors don’t claim you should stop
eating these foods forever. They
understand that there are valid social and emotional reasons for eating certain
foods that aren’t good for us. Eating
cake on a birthday has nothing to do with nutrition and has everything to do
with celebrating. That’s OK. Eat cake on birthdays. But don’t eat cake during that first 30
days. If you are “Doing the Whole 30,”
it means you are following the program to the letter for 30 Whole Days. If you go off program you start over
again. The authors want you to establish
that baseline of what it feels like to only eat On Program foods for 30
days. So what do you eat if you are on
the Whole 30 program? Let’s start with
what you don’t eat. When you are on the
Whole 30 program, you remove the following foods from your diet:
- Sugar and sugar substitutes
- This includes natural substitutes like honey and molasses and all artificial sweeteners, including Stevia and Truvia
- Dairy - except for clarified butter
- I have no idea why I didn’t start clarifying my butter a long, long time ago. It is so easy to do and it is so much easier to cook with clarified butter. Once a month I put 4 pounds of butter in a big pot and turn the burner on the lowest setting. Eventually, the butter melts and all of the milk solids fall to the bottom of the pan. Then I slowly pour off the clear gold liquid, leaving the milk solids behind. The clarified butter goes into a container which I store in the fridge. Whenever I want to sauté something in butter, I scoop some out and melt it. You can sauté with clarified butter at a much higher temperature than whole butter, because it is the milk solids in butter that burns at low temperatures.
- Grains – all grain
- This includes whole wheat, rice, quinoa, bulger, oats, etc.…
- Legumes – except green beans and snap peas
- Seed oils
- This includes corn oil, soybean oil, sesame oil, canola oil, flax oil, peanut oil, palm kernel oil, etc.…
You may be asking, well hell, what do I eat? At first, I wondered the same thing, but when
you think about it, there is a wonderful world of food out there you can eat on
the Whole 30 plan. There is a catch,
though. You are going to have to do some
cooking.
Sidebar: I have thought a lot about
grains and legumes the last few days.
Grains and dried legumes are amazing foods. They are relatively easy and inexpensive to
grow in very large quantities and they are very easy to store for long periods
of time. They can be stored in massive
quantities and they don’t need refrigeration or any special preservatives. Therefore grains and dried legumes are
inexpensive foods that can feed a tremendous number of people. The fact that we can produce huge quantities
of grains and legumes and transport them long distances and get them to all
corners of the world is a boon to alleviating the crisis of world hunger. I wish we were better at distributing these
vital food resources to the world. I am
not anti-grain or anti-legume. But I do
think it is worthwhile removing them from your diet for 30 days to see how your
body responds.
What are the foods you do eat while on the Whole 30
program? Well, that’s actually pretty
easy. Every meal should consist of a
reasonable portion of high quality protein, a large portion of vegetables, and
a small serving of fruit. High quality
fats are incorporated into your meal through cooking oils, dressings, or
nuts. I’ll get a little more specific
about each category:
- “A reasonable portion of high quality protein,” means:
- A reasonable portion is about the size of a deck of cards. This is one area where this diet differs sharply from the Paleo Diet, Akins, or any other “high protein – low carb” diet. This is not a high protein – low carb diet. This is a balanced diet. All of the macro-nutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats) are well represented in reasonable proportion to one another.
- High quality protein is beef, pork, poultry,
lamb, fish and seafood, venison, buffalo, any other game, or eggs that is pasture
raised, grass fed, wild caught, cage free, antibiotic free, growth-hormone
free, etc.… In other words, as natural
as you can get it. The Whole 30 stresses
the quality of your meat above the quality of all other food you eat. It states that if you are going to “Go
Organic” with one portion of your diet, it should be with your meat.
- “A large portion of vegetables,” means:
- A half plateful of vegetables of any kind, except peas, Lima beans (yuck! Finally I have a reason to not eat Lima beans) and other legumes, and corn – which is a seed.
- Vegetable of any kind includes: salad greens, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, root vegetables (carrots, potatoes of all kinds, beets, turnips, etc...), asparagus, and anything else your heart desires. There are no vegetables that you cannot eat. The only “veggies” that you can’t eat, aren’t really veggies, they are legumes or seeds. That is why there is no corn and no peas. Snap peas and green beans are OK, because even though they are technically legumes, you are eating the outer casing as well, and the legume or seed is a minor portion of the overall vegetable.
- Eat a large variety of vegetables. This ensures you are getting all of your
micronutrients in adequate quantities.
- “A small portion of fruit,” means:
- Any and all fruit, just not a ton of it. One apple or banana. A bowlful of berries. Enjoy an orange or a couple of small cuties.
- Fruit juices are not acceptable, with the
exception of using small amount of fresh squeezed juices for cooking.
- “Healthy fats: serving size is in parenthesis, below:
- Olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil (two thumb size)
- Clarified butter, coconut butter, and nut butters (one to two thumb size) - cashew and almond butters are Ok, peanut butter is not.
- Organic lard or tallow (one to two thumb size)
- Olives (one to two heaping handfuls
- Macadamia nuts, cashews, and hazelnuts (up to one closed handful)
- Avocado (1/2 to 1 whole)
- Coconut milk (1/4 to ½ of a 14 ounce can)
This morning’s breakfast is a typical meal. I made a scramble of homemade sausage (half
and half ground turkey and ground pork), onions, mushrooms, and spinach sautéed
in clarified butter. Here is a picture
of the ingredients for two servings.
I also made home fries which consisted of 1 small red potato
for each of us, onions, and bell peppers, sautéed in organic lard. Here is a picture of the ingredients for two
servings.
We also had a small bowl of fruit which consisted of fresh
pineapple, strawberries and blackberries.
Here is a photo of my entire breakfast.
As you can see, this diet is not about starving yourself and
it is not about removing any of the macro-nutrients (like fat or carbohydrates)
from your diet. It is about eating
reasonable portions of healthy foods that don’t make your body go haywire.
Jack and I did the Whole 30 for the first time in February
of this year. When I was about 2 weeks
into the plan I started to realize that I felt better than I have felt in a
long time. I continued to feel good the
entire time we were on the plan. It was
the first time that I had ever eliminated dairy from my diet and I couldn’t
believe how much better I felt. I had
much less bloating in my gut, among other things. I also started to have less pain in my
joints. For Jack, the biggest change that
he noticed was that his skin cleared up.
Jack has a skin condition that looks a lot like psoriasis (who knows, it
may be psoriasis). Basically he gets
patches of dry itchy skin all over.
After 30 days on the Whole 30, his skin cleared up completely. When he starts eating wheat again, they come
back. Needless to say, wheat is no
longer part of our normal diet.
In addition to feeling better, we both lost weight while on
the Whole 30. Jack lost 12 or 13 pounds
and I lost 9.
The Whole 30 has changed the way we eat, forever. After 30 days of this eating program, we
really didn’t miss any of the foods we had eliminated from our diet. Therefore, we decided that our everyday
program would consist of only Whole 30 foods and we would only go off program
for special occasions. This worked for a
while, and I continued to lose weight throughout the spring, until I got down
to about 156 pounds. After a while off
program foods started creeping back into our diet (ice cream seemed to be the
major culprit, and for me, candy) more and more often and I started gaining some weight back. I also started to feel more poorly. I blamed my lax eating standards on work,
mostly. It’s been a stressful summer.
But enough of that nonsense!
I am back On Program until surgery and beyond. On Program means Whole 30 foods all the time,
except special occasions. I don’t expect
to follow the program precisely for 3 months, but I expect to stay very close
to program 99% of the time.
In addition to food, On Program means exercising 5 to 6
times a week. Right now I am training with
some videos I found on-line on a website called the Daily Burn. I pay $12.95 per month for access to the
website. The site has several different
series of videos. I am doing one called
Black Fire. It is a very tough
workout. I like it a lot!
I’ll go into more detail in future posts on why the authors
of It Starts With Food eliminate the foods that they eliminate and talk a
little bit more about the rules. For
now, though, this post will have to do.
Have a great evening!
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