Whole30-ish

The most important part of being and feeling healthy is diet. My girlfriend and I had been feeling a bit fat and knew we could make some huge strides by changing up my diet. As part of my yearly goals I wanted to track my calories, and I thought that would be enough to keep my diet more or less in line but alas it did not. So we decided we would step things up a notch and try out the Whole30 diet.

What is Whole30?
Whole30 is part diet, part cleanse, and part habit breaker. For 30 days you eat nothing but meat, veggies, fruit, and some seeds and nuts. You are not allowed dairy, sugar (or any form of sweetener), any grains (rice, wheat, even quinoa), legumes (including soy), and no alcohol. I found it easier to think about what you can eat instead of what you can't; build your meals from the bottom up, start with meat, veggies and seasoning and see what you can create.

So what did we eat?
Salads, quiche, turkey burgers, chicken sausages (without sugar and soy which is in almost everything processed),  fish, steak, plenty of eggs, soup, casseroles, vegetable bolognese, we grilled a lot of marinated chicken, and ate plenty of veggies but we should have had even more. We actually ate really well on the diet, we worried only about the types of food we ate and not the amount or calorie content of the food so we never went hungry and the food we made was delicious. The biggest difference between this and our normal diet is that we did could not use and preprocessed components so we always had to start from scratch, that includes things like dressings, ketchup, barbeque sauce, mayo, etc.

How did it go?
Well it started out awful. The problem with eating almost entirely from scratch is that you need to spend a lot of time cooking and we have a very tight daily schedule so making food after work was not a possibility. Well we started of our first week of the diet without cooking and really struggled to come up with meals each day. To make matters worse you are throwing your body into a tailspin by suddenly changing up your diet and getting rid of all the fast energy from carbs and sugar. This leaves you tired and cranky. We spent the first 10 days or so of the diet in a foul mood and with a lack of energy. But it was a very sudden shift on day 10 when we looked at each other and said "I'm not grumpy today" and finally had enough energy to complete a workout.

We held to the diet pretty well but we had some lapses. The biggest being we did not give up drinking entirely, we still drank socially. Eating out was always difficult because there was only so much butchering of the menu you can do to comply so we probably had plenty of hidden violations when we dined out.

In the end the diet worked. I lost 10 pounds in 30 days, approximately 5% of my body weight. But to be fair I was 5 lbs over my normal weight so I'd say only lost 5 lbs of new weight. The struggle will be keeping it off.

What's next?
We have been off the diet for less and I can feel the results slipping away as my diet has swung from fantastic to atrocious. I'm thinking we might go back on the diet but maybe be a little less strict when in comes to eating out so we can stress less.

What about you? Would you try Whole30?

You can find out more about Whole30 here.

Photo credit: http://whole30.com/