Whole30 Update: One Week In

You can catch my first post about the challenge here. I forgot to post this earlier, but our starting weights were 137 for me and 265 for Matt. Matt's goal is weight loss, but mine is to lose the hideous muffin top and flabby mom stomach. 

All of the Whole30 books and blogs say this lifestyle change isn't hard, but they're liars.

When your body is used to dairy and carbs, cutting it all cold turkey sure ain't easy! Sure, most of the difficulty is just that I want what I can't have. I admit it.

BUT my pants and shorts are falling off of me. I feel skinnier. I had no idea how bloated I felt all the time until I don't feel that way anymore. TMI? Sorry.

My energy level actually feels lower than normal, but I've been assured that it'll go back up soon. I hope so.

The hardest part so far has been being around other people who aren't eating Whole30. I had some friends over for lunch and they brought food from Chick-fil-a, Sonic, and Subway. I ate apples, carrots, blueberries, and turkey lunchmeat. When we went to Gloria's with friends, they all had beautiful dishes filled with cheese, tortillas, rice, and sour cream. We ate fajita meat with salad (no dressing), guacamole and plantains.

For the sake of full disclosure, we did "cheat" a little on Sunday because there was nothing Whole30 approved (besides fruit) at the Easter breakfast at church. We got a few little sausage/egg burritos and it was too hard to separate the tortillas from the insides, so we just ate them. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn't even worth it. If I was gonna cheat for real, I would've eaten the cinnamon rolls or cheese grits. Now THAT would've been worth it.

One of the questions I've been getting a lot is, "What CAN you eat?!?" Here's what we were eating last week:

• Sweet potatoes (diced and roasted, baked, or shredded for hash browns)
• Eggs (scrambled, fried, or hard boiled)
• Fruit (strawberries, bananas, blueberries, apples)
• Veggies (spinach, carrots, onions, tomatoes, green beans, bell peppers)
• Avocado!!
• Meat (bacon, chicken)
• Trail mix (y'all, the deluxe raw trail mix at Sprouts is amazing; walnuts, cashews, almonds, pistachios, red and white grapes, and we add unsweetened coconut flakes)

This week we're adding:

• Breakfast sausage
• Olives
• Coconut milk (to be frozen and mixed with cocoa powder)
• Coconut water (EW!!)
• Almond milk (also, ew.)
• Almond butter
• Celery
• Ground turkey
• Lettuce wraps

Another question we get a lot is, "Why are you even doing this?"

Simple answer: we want to eat better. The Whole30 is a 30 day detox designed to change the way you eat. It's basically a super strict version of Paleo. We won't stay on the strict Whole30 after this is over, but it's already changing the way we view food. I'm also learning, gasp, self control. I don't need to eat cereal every night after dinner. I don't need to have dessert every day. I don't need to eat cheese on everything. I do need to be able to pronounce the ingredients for the food we're eating. I do need to feed my family more whole foods and fewer processed substitutes.

What the future of our eating will actually look like is still up in the air. We still have 20 days to figure it out. Until then, I'm trying not to think about the fact that Blue Bell is on sale at Kroger right now.