Whole30 Week One

I decided that I want to blog about my Whole30 experience while I'm doing it. When I did my cleanse last year, I figured that I would blog about it after the fact. But come to find out, when I was done with it, I was OVER it. I didn't want to talk about it anymore after living and breathing it for 3 weeks. Ha! But I think it's fun to have these kinds of things documented, so I'm going to blog as I go this time.

First of all, I should start by saying that I haven't decided if I'm going to do this hardcore for the full 30 days. The reason for that is that I have a fairly "clean" diet anyway, and I don't have any intentions of eating Paleo forever. I'm viewing the Whole30 basically as hitting the "reset" button on clean eating. Over the summer, I got into a bad habit of eating way too much sugar. I knew that in order to break that, I was going to need to eliminate sugar entirely for a while in order to fully get it out of my system. I also think that doing something like this just makes you SUPER aware of what you're eating, and you pretty much have to analyze everything that you put into your mouth. I just think that's a good mindset - not over-analyzing to the point where you can't enjoy life and just EAT, but also not eating mindlessly. At this point though, I don't feel like it's bad for me to eat whole grains and good, organic dairy in moderation, so that's why I don't plan to maintain this type of diet long-term. I might do the Whole30 for 30 days, and just allow myself a few "cheats" when I'm further into it. Or I might do it hardcore the whole time. We'll just see how it goes :)

So, week one wasn't bad. My biggest complaint was that I was usually hungry not long after meals. I've just noticed that I need to snack more to stay full. I've been eating a lot of raw almonds and cherries between meals. I did crave sugar a good bit. I was DYING for some sweet tea all week. That's abated a bit, and I'm not craving sweets as much anymore. Here's a little run-down of what I ate last week:

(I didn't include snacks because, honestly, I can't remember all of that. But I had snacks everyday. They usually consisted of cherries and/or almonds. A few times I had a bowl of unsweetened applesauce with cinnamon. I also made some unsweet tea that I drank when I felt like munching but knew I wasn't really hungry. I don't love it at all, but it's tasting better and better the more I drink it.)

 

Monday: I started off the day with coffee with coconut milk (canned coconut milk because the stuff in the carton has carrageenan which isn't allowed on Whole30). Yuck! It was seriously disgusting to me. I couldn't even finish it. I usually have coffee with a little bit of maple syrup and half and half, and I was definitely missing it that morning. I'm not a big breakfast eater, so I didn't eat anything. For lunch I ate an avocado and tomato salad with olive oil and balsamic and some leftover chicken. Dinner that night was good. We grilled chicken breasts, roasted broccoli, and mashed sweet potatoes.

Good dinner even whether you're doing Whole30 or not!

Tuesday: So, I tried my coffee black this day. It was gross. But better than the day before with the coconut milk. Hands down. I had a salad with leftover grilled chicken for lunch. That night for dinner, I baked some fish and ate it with a salad with avocado and blueberries.

Wednesday: Black coffee again. It got a little better each day. I finished the whole cup and didn't hate every sip ;) I knew I'd probably be eating lunch late that day, so I ate a banana for breakfast. Lunch was salad again. We had small group that night, so I ate a lovely dinner of leftover sweet potatoes and hard boiled eggs beforehand. This meal was kind of a bummer, to be honest.

I also noticed that when I eat a lot of eggs, I don't feel my best afterwards, so I'm kind of laying off the eggs a bit.

Thursday: More of the same. Black coffee for breakfast. For lunch, I had a salad with bacon. It was nice to add the bacon, but I realized after the fact that the bacon had sugar. It was uncured bacon, so I thought it was ok and didn't check the ingredients (dumb) until after I ate it. (By the way, the next time I was at Whole Foods, I looked at EVERY brand of bacon they had, and it ALL had sugar. Boo! Another reminder that it's so important to check ingredients. Sugar is in SO much of the food we eat.) We ate out that night for my dad's birthday. I did the best I could at the restaurant. I ate a steak, steamed broccoli, and salad with oil and vinegar. I did forget to order the salad without cheese and croutons, so I had to pick all of that off. I resisted the delicious smelling bread, though!

Friday: Black coffee again that morning. We were running pretty low on food for lunch, so I got a pound of ground beef out of the freezer and cooked that. I also roasted some beets with olive oil and salt and pepper. Pretty tasty! We ate dinner at Jason's Deli that night. I ordered a salmon salad and had to get basically everything taken off. Literally, when they brought it to our table, it was a plate of lettuce with a piece of salmon on top along with a couple of beets. I requested some tomatoes to go with it. Ha! I had oil and vinegar for the dressing.

Saturday: I had a meeting at Aubrey's school and knew I'd be eating lunch late, so I made myself a smoothie that morning out of frozen pineapple, a banana, and coconut water. It was good! I had to grab a quick lunch out, so I got a salad at Beagle Bagel. Come to find out, they don't have oil and vinegar, so I had to get their balsamic vinaigrette. Chances are VERY high that a premade vinaigrette like that had sugar and other undesirable ingredients in it. I did the best I could under the circumstances, and I tried to use it sparingly. That night, we went over to my grandmother's for dinner, and I packed my own food. (Everyone else was eating pizza.) I had a chicken and apple sausage link (it was a Whole30 approved brand) and I made some pico de gallo that I ate with it. I also had cherries on the side. It was a pretty good meal. It wasn't pizza, though ;)

Sunday: I made myself a delicious breakfast that morning of sweet potato and onion hash with a fried egg on top cooked in ghee.

Seriously, it was SO GOOD. For lunch, I cooked nachos for my family (corn chips with taco meat, cheddar, green onions, olives, and avocado.) For myself, I did the same thing, only instead of corn chips, I used bell peppers as the base and I left off the cheese. I also added pico to the top of mine. Instead of using a taco seasoning packet, I just used chili powder, cumin, salt, garlic, and a little oregano. That's how I always make our taco meat now. I just sprinkle the seasonings in until it tastes like a taco! That night, we ate dinner at Whole Foods. This was probably my hardest meal on the Whole30 so far. I got another salad with oil and vinegar, and I was just SICK of that meal by Sunday night. I really do enjoy salad, but when you eat salads ALL week with basically the same vegetables and the same dressing, it just gets monotonous. I was watching Aubrey eat a quesadilla with homemade tortilla chips, and my mouth was literally watering. It was weird becasause I was starving, but I didn't even finish my salad because I just could not force down one more mouthful of lettuce at that point. That was kind of a low, but thankfully the next day turned out to be much better. You'll just have to stay tuned for that.... ;) Ha!