My Whole30 Experience: Realizing That I Deserve to be

We just finished our first Whole30 and the subsequent reintroduction period and found the whole experience to be rather fascinating. From noticing our sugar and emotional cravings, to watching them disappear, to our renewed outlook on health… this experience was a much needed life refresher for us.

A lot of self-reflection naturally came along with giving our body a break (from crap, from sugar, from processed food, from alcohol, from preservatives). This lead to our taking a lot of notes and photos, which resulted in this blog post. All of the photos here are the foods that we ate during this program, and there are a few before/after shots as well. 🙂

To be honest, we wasn’t expecting to notice that many changes from doing the Whole30. We have always enjoyed eating lighter and having lighter habits, and we always tend to yo-yo between five to ten pounds.

But through the Whole30, we realized that there is a difference between “wanting to be lighter”, “needing to be lighter”, and “deserving to be lighter”. We always fell into the “want” or “need” category, but we now understand that we DESERVE to be lighter.

We deserve to feel great because of food, to choose our favorite foods for our body, and to treat our body right. This mindset has been a game changer for us.

What is the Whole30?

Basically you eat whole foods for 30 days. This involves cutting out grains, legumes, sugar, natural sweeteners, alcohol, legumes, dairy, processed foods, and any baked goods or junk food (whether these foods are Paleo or not).

We're not going to lie, it was hard at times.

But if you focus on what you can have, instead of what you can’t, you realize how much satisfying, nutritious foods you can actually eat. And how powerful a positive mindset can be. You CAN eat all sorts of meat, seafood, eggs, fruit, veggies, nuts, seeds, and oils. This includes both regular potatoes and sweet potatoes, FYI.

If you are curious to read more on exactly what is and isn’t allowed on a Whole30, take a look at these two articles from the Whole30 website: Whole30 Step Two and The Official Can we Have Guide To The Whole30.

One more thing! You are not allowed to weigh or measure yourself during the Whole30. This really resonated with us because being lighter is way more than a number on a scale. We mean, if you lift weights or naturally have more muscle, you are going to weigh more anyways, even if you look slim. This is something that we learned a loooong time ago. And is the reason that we haven’t weighed myself in years.

WHY we decided to do a Whole30 in the first place:

There are two reasons why we decided to do a Whole30.

1) we wanted to get back on track with eating right. Ever since our wedding about 8 months ago, we have kind of been slacking… and we lost our drive to maintain lighter habits. Our husband and we used to be strictly 80/20 Paleo… and around the holidays that went down to 60/40. And then we took off two weeks completely over Christmas. We were sick for the WHOLE month of December and felt like crap.

2) we wanted to see how our body reacts to different foods. We started eating Paleo because of our husband’s health issues, (we love it and that is why we continue to eat this way), but we have never done an elimination diet that involved reintroducing foods to see how our body responded to them. And we wanted a chance to do so.

Whole30 starter tips:

1) Grocery shopping isn’t that much more expensive than normal. Our husband and we spent about $200-$220 a week on groceries. And since going out to eat and alcohol is cut out of the equation, you end up saving money. AND on the plus side, it’s actually easier to grocery shop than usual because you can skip half the store!

2) Check your labels! That “all natural bacon”, probably has added sugar in it. It’s actually remarkably hard to find bacon without added sugar in it.

Pederson’s Natural Farms and Wellshire Farms were our go-to for bacon during this Whole30
US Wellness Meats also has a ton of Whole30 meats to choose from

3) Buy fruits and veggies in bulk. These will be your go-to snacks. (Also, try dates and almond butter, yum!)

4) Prepping is key. We found that Sunday prep wasn’t our thing here. We preferred to double our dinners every night, and to eat those leftovers for lunch the next day.

5) Spices are so important! The more flavor, the more satisfied we feel… so gather up your cinnamon, fennel seeds, paprika, chili powder, and pepper… it will make your Whole30 way more interesting. 🙂

Adding dried minced garlic and parsley to your scrambled eggs is AMAZING… this has been our best egg discovery!

6) Breakfast is tough. Maybe it’s just us, but eating eggs almost everyday isn’t our favorite. And we don’t like eating a lunch/dinner type meal in the morning. Adding fruit, bacon or sausage to your plate helps.

Baking sweet potatoes and topping them with almond butter and chia seeds is SO surprisingly creamy.
Also, Texanerin’s From-scratch Paleo Breakfast Sausage is BOMB.

7) Look up fun recipes and try new foods. You certainly do not feel like you are limiting yourself when you have a list of fun recipes ready and waiting to be made.

We forgot we were even following the Whole30 when we were eating this Whole30 Shepherd’s Pie or this Paleo 7 Layer Dip.
We discovered that you can bake prosciutto to turn it into bacon bits! It’s so yummy sprinkled on top of eggs.

What we realized about food and our habits during the Whole30:

1) we don’t like cooking with coconut oil… and neither does our husband, he said it bothered him, and we felt the same way. Olive oil it is!

2) we have a lot more cravings than we thought we did. And all of them involve late night cravings for sweets/ chocolate. Week 1 was the hardest, but the cravings did eventually go away.

3) You can’t and shouldn’t always get what you want… re: cravings. This really sunk in for us around week 3. We realized that if you either take the time to sit and really make a conscious decision, or if you eat some fruit, you may not even want what you were craving anymore. For example, after eating half a grapefruit, we didn’t want chocolate anymore.

4) we were not incorporating fruits and veggies into our life nearly as much as we should have been.

5) we can’t digest ground pork. AT ALL. And neither can our husband.

How our body changed on the Whole30:

1) we didn’t plan on sharing before/after photos and am a bit embarrassed to show them BUT we found it really interesting. From the front, we don’t really look that different. But from the back! Wowzers, this Whole30 really changed our shape.

We don’t know how much weight we lost because we don’t have a scale. Maybe 5 pounds. Our husband lost 10 pounds; he weighed himself at the gym. However, the most important changes to our body were with how we felt.

2) we were so hydrated–and it felt great! We noticed this almost immediately.

3) we had WAY more energy… more energy to workout, more energy all day. It’s the same feeling that we had when we first went Paleo. When you realize how good you can feel, you start to wonder why you haven’t always eaten this way.

4) we were less “hungry” in general. Or at least our body didn’t express hunger in the same way. There was no desperate urge to eat, we just knew that our body needed energy.

Note: Not feeing hungry can be dangerous. There were three days in a row during week 2 where we got light headed and nauseous, and then realized it had been 5 hours since we had eaten…

5) During week 2 we were VERY EMOTIONAL (has this happened to anyone else?!). There were 4 days where we felt like we could cry with the drop of a pin. We wasn’t even sad, we just wanted to cry. And this was not because we were PMSing. We have a theory that eating so clean affected our hormones. We have hormone issues as is, so we're very curious as to what happened.

6) our skin was SO much softer than usual. We noticed this around day 10. We've always been jealous of how soft our mom and our sister’s skin is. It’s not that ours isn’t, it’s just not AS SOFT as theirs. We have spent so much money on lotions and sacylic acid lotions to try to make our skin softer and smoother. When really, the key is in our diet!

Also, by the 4th week, our face was was ridiculously soft, in a way that lotion or money can’t buy!

7) Around week 2, we noticed that we had almost no plaque on our teeth! This is crazy to us because every time we go to the dentist (every 6 months), the dental hygienist asks “do you floss?”. It drives us nuts because we do and they never believe us. It’s great and it’s proof of how our diet has been affecting us.

8) By week 3, all the excess weight and inflammation melted off of our husband. He has an autoimmune disease and gets inflamed very easily with food. This whole “melting” off phenomenon didn’t really happen for us, but we noticed the most visual changes to our body around week 4.

9) we felt AMAZING. So good that we didn’t even realize that we were sick. We mentioned before that we were sick the WHOLE month of December. We had a head cold, a stomach bug, and then a cough and chest pain. But in January (while doing the Whole30), we felt fantastic! We still had chest pain, though, so we saw a doctor and he asked if we had a fever or any other symptoms and we said, “no, we feel great!” It turns out, that we had a fever, a red throat, swollen glands, and tracheobronchitis… and had NO idea bc we were feeling so good.

How our mindset changed during the Whole30:

1) By the third week, we stopped seeing the Whole30 as a guide to follow. We started to feel like this Whole30 was a gift that we were giving myself. It’s beautiful to think that you are worthy of such a gift… that your body deserves to be treated right and to be lighter. Everyone deserves that.

2) Realizing we deserve to be lighter, made us see working out in the same light.

We wasn’t going to the gym because “we have to” or because we made it a goal to go 3 times a week. We were now going because our body deserves to be fit.
We went to yoga for the first time in months. We listened to our breathing, connected to our body and spirit. And we're not saying that in a cheesy way. We actually feel connected to myself for the first time in a long time.

3) we started seeing food as a way to show our body love and respect. Our cravings no longer took over our thinking. And we found myself thinking how it’s not a loving gesture to be so careless with what food you put into your body. (Although balance is still important!)

The Hardest Part of Whole30:

1) Whole30 weekends are rough and a bit isolating. We just wanted a glass of red wine on a Friday night or to go to dinner with friends or to try the new local bakery. Heck, we even wanted to make some Paleo Banana bread with our left over bananas. We really appreciated and understood the meaning of balance through this program.

2) Breakfast is rough. Eggs just aren’t our favorite. But when you view meals as fuel to start your day, it isn’t so bad. And when you realize how long certain foods keep you fueled, you actually start to like it.

3) we missed baking, especially Paleo baking. To us, it is relaxing, almost like meditation to mix, stir, measure, pour. But we realized that we were doing it a bit too much before. Though a lot of it is for blogging purposes… cough… sure that’s it. 🙂

Whole30 Reintroduction:

The reintroduction surprised us. We always thought that we were totally fine with certain foods and that we were cutting them out because our husband had to cut them out. We wrong.

Our husband and we did one day of reintroduction and one or two days of Whole30 before the next reintroduction, in the following order:

1) Gluten-Free Grains

GF Oats– we personally felt fine with oats. Our husband, on the other hand, acted like a kid that was just given a donut. He had SO much energy and then he crashed. And we didn’t put any sweetener in our oats.

White Rice– we felt like we got hit by a ton of bricks. Not only did we get uncomfortably full, but we felt tired immediately after eating it. So much so that we couldn’t get off the coach for 2 hours… During this time, we craved sweets. And then after 2 hours, boom, we were back to normal. Surprisingly enough, our husband felt no difference after eating rice.

2) Legumes

Chickpeas- Our husband and we felt absolutely no difference after eating hummus. This surprised us because we expected chickpeas to be an issue for at least one of us.

Beans- Our husband and we both were very bloated and had slight discomfort in our stomachs after eating kidney beans and black beans. This discomfort went away quickly, but the bloating did not go away quickly. Our husband and we kind of felt like we had fevers.

Fast side note: by this point in the reintroduction, our the skin on our body was no longer as soft as it had been. 🙁

3) Goat and Sheep Dairy

Goat Cheese– we didn’t feel any different from eating goat’s cheese, in fact we got a boost of energy after eating it. Our husband, on the other hand, had a “red face” from eating goat cheese. Which happens every time his body can’t handle certain foods, which is typical for him with his auto-immune disease.

Although, we accidentally bought a honey goat cheese that had extra ingredients that we suspect were the true culprits of our husbands reaction.

Sheep’s Cheese– we had a slight stomach ache from sheep’s cheese, but we didn’t notice any other physical changes. Our husband thinks his body is able to tolerate it.

Note: over the next day or two, we did notice that we had cramps, and we think we may have some sort of malabsorption issue with dairy. Our husband said the same thing.

4) Gluten Grains– we were expecting this to be the worst of the reintroductions.

Wheat Flour– Neither our husband or we felt any different after eating this. We were very hungry, very quickly after though.

Bread- We ate bread made of wheat, barley, millet, and spelt. We felt a bit uncomfortable, in a “we feel very full way”, even though we didn’t eat very much of it.

Beer- We didn’t notice any change in particular.

Note: As a whole, eating gluten made us feel more hungry than usual. We also felt blah. Not tired, just not as energetic as we were used to on the Whole30. Our husband and we had a harder time falling asleep, and our sleep quality wasn’t as good. Our husband was also bloated for about 2 days.

Fast note: at this point in the reintroduction, our under-eye circles were dark, our face was no longer soft at all, and the skin on our body was EVEN less soft.

5) Cow’s Dairy

Cheddar, Mozzarella, and Cream– our husband and we surprisingly didn’t really feel any physical pains or changes immediately after eating these foods. But we did feel an overall feeling of discomfort for two days. We did both notice that our digestion was affected.

Note: we wonder if we were more sensitive at the beginning of the reintroduction then at the end. For example, we wonder if we did the order backwards would we have the same reaction? The reactions were less and less with each reintroduction.

Final Takeaway:

We can confidently say that we would 100% do the Whole30 again. We will do sporadic week long intervals of it because we genuinely believe our body enjoyed eating this way and would benefit from regular breaks.

As a whole, we are more in control of our cravings and our sweet tooth. Wohoo!

Lastly, the most important thing that we have learned from the Whole30 is knowing that we deserve to be lighter. Having this mindset when it comes to food, working out, and habits has resulted in a much more realistic and loving approach to our health, which we have found to be incredibly motivating.

We'd be happy to compare notes, swap stories, or to help answer anyone’s questions regarding what the whole process was like. Comment, email, or message us on social media!