WHOLE 30 Round Up - What I ate, How I feel, How I'll live now

Heyoooo - sorry, long time no blog! I've been cooking up some more recipes and living pretty well over here. I figured I would write a big entry to summarize how the WHOLE 30 impacted me and what my plan is as I wrap it up 2 days from now.

Since this is a blog and not a diary I will try to exercise brevity but include things that could potentially help other people. Oh and also pictures. Pictures help you read because they're pretty. I'll also embolden headings so you can skip around and such.  I'll start with an outline too in question format.  Because I've noticed a lot of you have questions about this and find it interesting.  Here goes my WHOLE 30 Round Up! All recipes will be at the very bottom!

1. What is the WHOLE30? (aka: What can't I eat?)
2. What did you eat for lunch?
3. What was really hard? What was surprisingly easy?
4. How do you feel?
5. What else did you eat?
6. HOW DID YOU DRINK YOUR COFFEE BLACK???
7. Did you lose a ton of weight? (Your Implied question is: Will I lose a ton of weight if I do this?)
8. Recipes

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1. What is the WHOLE 30? (aka: What can't I eat?)

The WHOLE 30 is a 30 day "cleanse" if you will where you only eat foods that are real and you don't eat foods that are fake, toxic, manufactured or that will contribute to bad health for your body.  At the end of the 30 days you re-introduce the foods you omitted in a step-wise, one at a time, scientific fashion and observe the way your body feels when you consume these things.

This is a controlled scientific experiment with your body. Controls means no cheating. If you cheat, you should start the 30 days over. If you by mistake sip something that was sweetened like I did at Teavana one day, ok, don't throw the last 12 days away but if you have a cheat meal or decide to have this little piece of chocolate here and then another one there - you're out and you should start over. You should read the book "It Starts with Food" before starting... but, then again, I only read parts of mine while skimming other parts. I DID go to the authors' seminar this summer, though. And I understand the nutritional aspects and the science of it. You kind of should too if you'd like to get the most of the diet. This diet is not to lose weight. If you have extra junk in the trunk, however, you probably will lose a LOT of weight. Google peoples' WHOLE 30 testimonials. People have lost in the 20s of lbs. There are thousands of people who have done a WHOLE 30. Remember, it's just 30 days.

So for the "What can't I eat?" part: No grains, no legumes, no dairy, no sugar (unless it's naturally occurring like in fruit... no honey or agave or sugar syrups that occur in nature, though and no dried fruit), no alcohol.

Well, then, "What CAN I eat?" - I'll defer to the food list: http://whole9life.com/book/ISWF-Shopping-List.pdf This list includes whole, real foods that were grown or raised well, buy organic ones when you can because they're better for you and fuel your body with things that are natural and not made in a factory to elicit a desired response from your taste buds. For fats you can use clarified grass fed butter (youtube how to clarify, it's easy - store the yield in a jar on your countertop), unrefined coconut oil and EVOO. This is what you cook things in. Well, EVOO shouldn't be used hot but if you must... You'll be cooking a bunch. I'm sorry. It's ok, though. You'll be ok...

People asked me why I was doing a diet since I have no weight to lose. Above I said it wasn't about weight loss and for me that is very true. I'm very thin and didn't want to get any leaner. But I did want to see how my body operated when I put premium fuel in the Lamborghini. The results have been great and I will continue to learn more during the re-introduction phase and I'm really happy I gave it my 30 days.

2. What did you eat for lunch?

This is a picture of what I eat for lunch on a typical day. In it is the following:

Leaves: some combo of spinach, kale and/or lettuce mix
Other green stuff: almost always a handful of broccoli slaw and an entire avocado
Lean meat: Either wild low mercury tuna mixed with dijon mustard (no sugar or wine added) or chicken breast
EVOO: That's extra virgin olive oil. Or I used a new dressing at WF made by Tessemae's (see below, lemonette is AMAZING)
Vinegar: This got fun I used black fig or black cherry balsamic (again make sure all natural ingredients and no added sugar... this is WHOLE 30 bitches not a diabetes free for all!)

That's the Whole Foods dressing that ACTUALLY doesn't contain real or fake sugar OR XANTHAM GUM! That crap's in everything.  By the way - I FAR prefer the Lemonette variety over the Zesty Ranch. It's the yummiest.

3. What was really hard? What was surprisingly easy?

Sugar. At first nixing sugar was really really hard. I'd find ways to cheat the system. I ate a lot of fruit. Or dates and figs which are the most sugary of fruits. Reading labels was really disheartening. If it doesn't have real sugar it has fake sugar. I missed chocolate. I missed dessert. I MISSED EVERYTHING.

Alcohol. I felt guilty about how hard this was. Going out and trying to be social and not fall flat without alcohol was a challenge. I admit. I didn't do well with it. I went home early. I skipped parties. I did this ALL month long on weekends. Weekdays were different because anything social was more tame and (only a little) more professional. Being sober was far easier. This month gave me a renewed appreciation for the friends I  have that live the sober life. Kudos to all of you. It's really hard when everyone around you is enjoying a cocktail and you're drinking soda water with lime. Yet some of the people I have in mind seem to enjoy life with zest and positivity and it seems like they would have thrived in these settings regardless where I sort of wallowed and left the party. Tsk tsk - this is something I need to work on. Knowing how much of a glycemic spike these drinks elicit my plan moving forward is to enjoy only 3 drinks a week. Lord knows my tolerance will be low enough now to catch a buzz from one drink.

Dairy.  Shockingly the EASIEST to give up by leaps and bounds. I LOVE dairy. Was paleo plus dairy for 9 months prior to my challenge. Cream in my coffee. Feta in my salad. I'm uncertain as to where I will go with this post challenge - we shall see during my reintroduction. I have this bed of black heads that usually resides on my chin and never goes away. Getting facials can make it go down in numbers but usually it's always there. Well, it's gone right now. Completely clear. I want to believe this has a lot to do with no dairy but it could definitely be just eating clean. More on this to come. Probably will continue to do black coffee after this ends, though, and cream and honey as a rare dessert-like treat. After a huge steak and a night of the "fuck-its."

4. How do you feel?

I feel pretty amazing on day 28 of my WHOLE 30.  I made it through a really tough month. A girl scout cookie order. Valentine's day chocolate everywhere. Meetings that people bring food to that I obviously can't eat because America adds sugar to everything.


This week, more than any other week I am noticing improvements to my mood and mental acuity that I did not notice on weeks 1, 2 or 3 of this cleanse. It could be that my body made it through the slump. It could ALSO have something to do with the increase in pureed kale I've been eating daily since Friday. On this diet I was staying away from Vitamixed fruit because that would be considered "cheatish" by condesing allowed sugar sources into an acellular sugar drink. I felt, however, that the benefits of the drink I am starting are outweighing the cost because the point is to get lots of kale into my body in a more easily digestible form. I could be like my trainer and just drink kale/water shooters but I need a banana and a handful of grapes or berries in there as well and I don't think that is harmful. What I've noticed since I started making these last Friday is that my energy levels stay peaked all day. My mental acuity and focus is on point. I think this drink has helped and I think the WHOLE 30 eating for an entire month is the platform that allows it to help so much.  Here's the shake:

My body seriously craves this thing now. I believe that craving comes from a place of satiety as opposed to satiation. It comes from my cells desiring the nutrition this shake gives them and not my mouth's desire to taste the mild sweetness I put into the shake.  Let me clarify this because you truly learn so much about your relationship with food during these 30 days:

"Satiety is your body’s response to the availability of nutrients from food that you’ve already digested and processed.
Satiation is your immediate reaction to the ingestion of food—the drive that causes you to stop eating. It is your body’s attempt to estimate future satiety via sensory input: smell, taste, texture, and stomach distention."

This is something they talk about in "It Starts with Food" and it is something you begin to understand when you've moved through a couple weeks of WHOLE 30. You then get to start listening to your body and what it REALLY wants and not your mouth and it's addictive desire for "las vegas strip" foods that light it up with salt, fat and sugar galore. These foods were engineered to work with our body's evolutionarily ingrained desire for sugar, sweet and fat. Finding foods with those qualities helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive. But we are in a time of plenty where food companies have manufactured foods to have mega-doses of these qualities or chemical imposters of these qualities that are probably worse for us then we know right now.


Put real food in the lambo. You will feel the difference. My body began to thank me on my first day of the WHOLE 30.

5. What else did you eat?

For breakfast I would tend to eat eggs with fresh salsa (aka pico de gallo) cooked in unrefined coconut oil. On lazier days I would do a banana. You are supposed to limit fruit to a couple times a day but in the first weeks of this I was certainly going over that.  I would enjoy breakfast with black coffee (which was a huge change from my honey and cream coffee). Now, every morning I have the above shake with plenty of kale. Once WHOLE 30 is over I will add grassfed whey protein to it.

For lunch I'm a one trick pony and enjoyed the above nearly every day. I advise YOU to bring in leftovers as well and eat a variety of things for lunch. Anything you eat for breakfast or dinner can be eaten at lunch too. No time of day rules for meals.

For dinner I'd get creative. I made WHOLE 30 meatballs and my amazing sauce (which is even MORE amazing without the sugar and parmesan I used to put it in. I will never revert back). I would crock pot pork with coconut and ginger: https://www.marksdailyapple.com/slow-cooked-coconut-ginger-pork/ the key to that recipe is double tripe quadruple the cumin and coriander. And a couple cloves of garlic means the entire head. In my kitchen. Some nights I was lazy. I am SO BUSY. I would microwave a sweet potato and dip it in my amazing Mama Nay sauce and then make eggs with pico de gallo. Some nights I made guacamole and sweet potato chips. Recipe is so easy (below). I made the Caribbean Jerk Shrimp a few times (it's seriously so good) Recipe not below because it is here. Sometimes I would take a half pound of grass fed beef and some veggies and saute it all up in clarified butter. I got adventurous with some recipes here but couldn't really get to all of them: http://www.thefoodee.com/tag/whole30/ There are so many. I used my vitamix and made a couple soups but the recipes aren't worth relaying. I got more chickens than I'd like to admit from Whole Foods. Thank you so much, Whole Foods. I would do chicken parm with said chicken sometimes, especially when left over. Again, just used Mama Nay sauce and the chicken. Sometimes, when super lazy "it's 9pm and I've been going since 6 I don't wanna cook, microwave or even plate this right now"  I'd just eat like this:

 I did not get bored.

6. HOW DID YOU DRINK YOUR COFFEE BLACK???

 Seriously not as hard as I thought it would be. Years and years of diets I always said "I'm not skimping on my coffee" and would allow my coffee to be SUPER sweet and thick with cream. I got used to black quickly. It's unlikely I'll switch back since it would be such an empty source of nutrition with all those calories and no nutrients to speak of.

7. Did you lose a ton of weight? (Your Implied question is: Will I lose a ton of weight if I do this?)

I lost about 3 lbs but I am thin to begin with. If you have lots of excess to lose you will probably drop a LOT more than that. I can tell I have bulked up and my abs are poking out right now like they never have before so I would have to say (observation only - I have no bf% measurements) that my lean muscle mass has increased and bf% decreased but I can't know for sure. I only know that my weight has stayed pretty flat perhaps a few lbs lower tops and that I look and, most importantly, FEEL so much better than I did in January.

8. Recipes (sorry I will update this by tonight with proper links etc)

Salad
Shake
Coconut Ginger Pork  ADD WAY MORE CUMIN AND CORIANDER & use a whole head of garlic
Paleo Meatballs
Mama Nay's Sauce
Sweet Potato Chips

Weight Loss and Leftover Chicken Breast

A lot of people have been asking if I planned on/hoped/was actually losing weight on this WHOLE 30 diet. I had not really hoped or wanted to lose any weight on it because I felt I was at a great weight at 115-120 lbs being 5 ft 3. It's now day 18 and my weight is actually on the lower side at 114 lbs. So nothing too crazy going on here weight wise. I know that my friend who is "half" doing it with me lost a couple pounds in the first week. I also know that a lot of people struggle to get all the calories they need when they really follow WHOLE 30 to a T. I think my sugar intake has been too high to do that. My body really craves sugar, though. It's really difficult not to give it what it wants, you know?

Anyway - today will be quick I would just like to share what I did with leftover roast chicken breast. Yes, this was that hot and delicious "just chicken" roast chicken I got from Whole Foods. I enjoyed the limbs and the fattiest parts first. Obviously. They taste the best. Duh.

The breast usually lingers in the fridge. It's dry. It's no one's favorite. So I shredded up the chicken and added about 3-4 tbsp chipotle salsa and a pat or 2 of grass fed clarified butter and added it to a saute pan. I then added some spices (was very tempted to add fresh garlic but was just too lazy). I ended it off with salt and pepper. I topped it off in my bowl with some fresh avocado. This added some fat and moisture and LOADS of flavor back in to some perfectly good but undesirable chicken. Boom.

I found a unicorn!!

Whole Foods sells roast chickens with one ingredient: Chicken.

In other words: Whole Foods sells unicorns.

Have you ever turned the package over that holds the roast chicken you just bought at the supermarket and read the ingredients? If so, were you really surprised to see some of them?

Xantham gum? Broth with a set of parenthesis full of unnatural ingredients?

What if we're not as much obese in America as we are inflamed?

::shudder::

Fact = In 2007 I went to Italy to visit the town my dad grew up in. We still have family there. It's kind of close to Pompeii and Amalfi - very rural. The food I ate was grown and raised really nearby. Possibly in the town I was in or an adjacent one. We ate WELL. In Italy and to Italians "Food: Love" If you don't eat the food Nonna is giving you (that she MADE): you are rejecting her love. True story: my Nonna still believes I like these gross Italian cookies she makes because  I pretended I liked them once.  Because I love her. All that being said: we ate WELL. SO well, that even though we went for a "passeggia" after every time we ate, it definitely couldn't have dented the caloric damage in the slightest. My cousin Angela and I noticed something after this trip: we both had LOST weight. About 3-5 lbs, actually. We were floored. All our lives we knew what the repercussions of an eating bender like that were. We had, after all, lived in these bodies our whole lives. And taken said bodies on many an eating bender... so, why, on this trip, were we spared? We had to believe it was the quality of the food we were eating. It wasn't labelled "organic" ... it just WAS organic. The cows ate grass and weren't pumped with hormones. The produce was grown locally and wasn't genetically modified. We resolved to buy organic at home. As all good (and costly) habits go - we've since succumbed to what's normal, convenient and, most of all, cheap in America. What stays with me about that trip's culinary leg, though, WAS the quality of the food. I remember taking a walk with my dad and climbing up the clock tower steps in the center of Candida. We pulled blackberries off of the vine that grew all around the steps of the tower. We popped them into our mouths right there on our walk. These were, hands down, the finest berries I had ever eaten in my life. They were tart and perfect and stained my hands red. They were in season and they hadn't traveled hundreds of mile to get to me. They were ripened on a vine in the sun and they also were not assaulted with harsh and unnatural chemicals.

I wish it were easy, convenient and economical to eat like that so effortlessly. Picking it off a vine. Being served it at one of the many cousins' houses in town. Buying it while out in Avellino. You can't count on all of that here in America.

This got me all nostalgic so here's some pics from that trip:

 Candida all lit up for the feast. August is official "we're on vacation now" month in Italy and it's freaking awesome.

 I think I took this from the clock tower.. but I forget.

Looking up the main street in town toward the building we stayed in (top left)

Pics that make me laugh parts 1 and 2

 Myself, Nonna, Angela 

 This, to us, looked like an S and M dungeon but it was probably for wine and cheese and stuff

 Airport exit signs made me laugh

Famiglia!

Valentine's Day Dinner For One

So I was perusing facebook this evening and could not help but notice that EVERY GIRL GOT FLOWERS. I almost got sad. Chocolate would have almost been comforting. Instead I decided to cook an EPIC WHOLE 30 dinner.

I started off by making some fresh guacamole. Every night I must make my dinner if I don't have leftovers because you can't buy ready-made stuff on WHOLE30. Nothing ready-made is ever WHOLE 30 friendly. At least not in America... There have been many nights that I've said "eff it" and just whipped up some guac and sweet potato chips and eaten THAT for dinner. Tonight was almost another one of those nights. Coming home at 8:30pm makes it very tempting.

So I turn on the oven for the sweet potato chips and decide that tonight, instead, I will *finally* use that butternut squash that has been staring at me like a ginormous foreboding dildo in my fridge... I should have drawn a face on it and captioned it with a "soon." ...anyway... I had this recipe planned since I started the WHOLE 30. Roasted garlic butternut squash. A mashed squashy thing. It was super easy and I am so glad I made it. It totally did not "go" with my dinner theme but if roasted garlic butternut squash is wrong then I don't want to be right.

Then, my cooking adrenaline pumping and the squash and garlic roasting together in the oven, I got a little frisky and pulled out some frozen jumbo shrimp.... this one I made up on the fly. I remembered that time when my family went to "Bubba Gump Shrimp" for the first time in Maui, HI.  We ordered two shrimp appetizers and both were amazing. Let's call one cajun and the other garlic because I forget. All I know is these shrimpies were sauteed in the most delicious concoction of fat and spices and the Polcaro family was loving it. I modeled my shrimp saute after this.  I used clarified butter and unrefined coconut oil for the fat and simmered up some green onion, half a white onion, a red pepper some basil and parsley, 3 cloves of garlic, salt, pepper, cilantro and some jerk spice for a few min. I threw in the thawed and peeled jumbo shrimp and sauteed away. This was really delicious. Kind of a fridge dump but an awesome one.

I made sure to plate everything all pretty for you as well. The butternut squash recipe is below...

The butternut squash all roasted up. I have a confession: I ate a couple pieces just like this. Roasted at 400 with salt pepper and EVOO. They were already delicious and no roasted garlic had even been incorporated yet... oh man... I'm sad it's already gone and in my tummy...

My little shrimpies all sauteed up.  The jerk spice and dried cilantro were a great last minute addition. I do still have some of these left. That could change in about 30 minutes....

The plated meal. One of these things is clearly not like the others. The butternut squash mash is comfort food. I sprinkled with some chopped basil in an attempt to help it fit in. It really shouldn't feel bad it was the star of the show. The shrimp was pretty damn freaking awesome as well, though.

Ok you want recipes? Here they are:

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Roasted Garlic Butternut Squash

3 lbs butternut squash, trimmed and peeled
1 head garlic
2 Tbsp EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil.... durr)
salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 F.  Scoop out the seeds of the butternut squash and cut into into 1″ pieces.   Place the squash on a parchment paper lined (or coconut oil greased) baking sheet.  Drizzle with oil and season with salt and pepper to taste.  Take whole head of garlic and slice off the top so you can see the white cloves inside.  Make a little boat/dish out of tin foil. Cover the bottom of the boat with EVOO. Put the garlic head face down in it. Make a little cover for your boat also out of tin foil. Put this contraption on your baking sheet - you're roasting the garlic with your squash. Roast for 30-40 minutes or until tender.  Allow to cool slightly.

Add the cooled squash and roasted garlic cloves (which you will remove from the pouches inside the head first, obviously...) to the bowl of a blender.  Puree until smooth.

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Guacamole

• 3 Haas avocados, halved, seeded and peeled
• 1 lime, juiced
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne
• 1/2 medium onion, diced
• 2 Roma tomatoes, seeded and diced
• 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
• 3 clove garlic, minced

In a large bowl place the scooped avocado pulp and lime juice, toss to coat. Drain, and reserve the lime juice, after all of the avocados have been coated. Using a potato masher add the salt, cumin, and cayenne and mash. Then, fold in the onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and garlic. Add 1 tablespoon of the reserved lime juice. Let sit at room temperature for 1 hour and then serve.

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Shrimp Saute

 Sorry to be lazy but copying and pasting from above ... " I used clarified butter and unrefined coconut oil for the fat and simmered up some green onion, half a white onion, a red pepper some basil and parsley, 3 cloves of garlic, salt, pepper, cilantro and some jerk spice for a few min. I threw in the thawed and peeled jumbo shrimp and sauteed away. This was really delicious. Kind of a fridge dump but an awesome one."


...I'm so ready to watch an episode of Downton Abbey and go to bed.

And, in case you were wondering, I still want a piece of freaking chocolate.

Whole 30 Day 14 - A Chocolate Free Valentines Day

I've decided to blog - hey, hi, hello. The purpose of this blog will be, at the outset, to document my WHOLE 30 experience. My blog begins on Day 14. Valentine's Day. I awoke this morning from another night of cheat dreams. Dreams about chocolate. I dreamed I got half way through a GIANT five layer piece of chocolate cake with layers of milk chocolate mousse and dark chocolate mousse and fudge. It was delicious. When suddenly I remembered I was cheating on my WHOLE 30 diet. I then put half of the cake in my freezer for March 2nd. March 2nd is day 31 when I eat ALL OF THE THINGS. In real life, right now, there are 4 boxes of girl scout cookies and a small heart shaped Dove dark chocolate in my freezer. But - back to my dream: I then go to CVS where I am shopping for dark chocolate covered goldfish... huh? These don't exist. However, they should exist. I actually don't even like goldfish. Right now they are kind of all I can think about. But they must have chocolate on them.  

I guess these craving are pretty typical. People report strong cravings that rival those of a pregnant woman. Cravings for things you DON'T EVEN LIKE (like goldfish).  I think if I had laid off the sugar in weeks 1 and 2 I may have surpassed this stage by now. I'd get cravings for sweet so then I would eat almond rolled dates. I have since cut the crap with the dates and figs but I definitely am still eating too much fruit.

Ok, so there is some good happening: 1. My PR's. It is shocking how quickly your body says "thank you" when you start eating clean. Better weight at the gym, better beast-out ability. 2. My skin. Less black heads in my problem areas 3. My energy. Seems to be more even during the day except I need, and do GET, my 8 hours.

Oh, and I'll have you know that I came in this morning to cacao roasted almonds on my desk in a valentine's day gift box. No added sugar. Kindest. Gift. Ever.