The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 15
Monday, March 5, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
Another day off! I hope I can get a lot of good cooking done today so I have plenty of appetizing stuff in the fridge for tonight and later in the week. For breakfast I fried up some bacon in a skillet and then dumped two beaten eggs in there when the bacon was almost ready, and had a bacon/egg omelet cooked in bacon fat. It was yummy! I had been leery of eating an omelet without cheese, but if you allow the eggs to get brown and crispy in enough places, it totally works.
Man, though, I wish I could just have a fucking container of yogurt. It would be so much easier. And it isn’t as though yogurt is an unhealthy food per se. It just isn’t allowed on the Whole30 and I intend to power through this to the end. At the end of today, I’ll be half done!
I have been thinking about what I’ll do after this is over. I don’t want to just revert totally back to my old habits as though this never even happened. I am looking forward to once again enjoying forbidden foods — L brought over some homemade chocolate chip cookies that looked and smelled divine, and they’re in the freezer now, waiting for me — but I hope to incorporate what I’ve learned here into an overall healthier eating pattern.
Part of what I decide to do depends on how much weight I lose. If the weight loss is negligible — say, 6 pounds or less — I might be more cavalier and decide this method didn’t work. If the weight loss is significant, though, I’m really gonna have to think about how I’m going to keep this up to a good extent even while reintroducing grains, dairy, soy, and added sugar.
In one way, it’s easier to forbid those foods entirely than to say I can have them in limited quantities. Because if the quantities are merely limited, how do you know how much to limit them? If one cookie is okay, why not two? Or three? Or eight? That’s how it always falls apart. If the rule is “zero,” that’s the rule, period. It’s easy to know what to do, even if you don’t want to do it.
But at the same time, now I see things I can do to be healthy in situations where before I didn’t know what to do. Like, lunch has always been a difficult meal for me to plan. I’m often totally unsure of what I want for lunch, and none of the usual options really excite me too much. I also usually eat lunch “on my own” as opposed to making one thing for myself and others to share. Even on days when Little Kid is here with me for lunch, I usually don’t make the same thing for him as I do for myself, since he usually doesn’t want what I make for myself. And oftentimes I will get a big fattening sandwich just because I can’t think of anything better to eat, even though I’m not particularly excited about the sandwich.
So lunch is a prime candidate for Whole30-style eating going forward. I can make a whole batch of something, 4 servings according to the cookbook, and eat that for lunch for 4 days in a row. If it’s only for 4 days, I won’t get sick of it, and then I can move on to the next thing. I’ll only have to cook lunch a quarter of the time and the rest of the time I can just reheat, and then dinners and breakfasts and snacks can be more liberal on the carbs, cheese, etc.
Around noon, I crashed on the couch. I had been up very late the night before working on a project, and only gotten four hours of sleep, so I napped for the rest of the day before I had to go pick up the kids. And then I ended up skipping lunch. I was okay with it, somehow.
In the evening I made Indian Butter Chicken, which I thought was wonderful, but the kids didn’t agree. Gah, I really hate the idea of making these elaborate dinners for just myself and making a whole different elaborate (ish) dinner for them. Maybe I’ll just give them beans and rice or something. That’s not that elaborate, though it does use even more dishes.
And then, BAM! I was half done.
Tomorrow: The trauma of seeing pictures of yourself. Is that what I really look like?
