The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 18
Thursday, March 8, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
I had a bad dream that I had been eating yogurt this whole time, on the Whole30, and not realizing it. I think I had this dream because yesterday I read a Facebook post in which a yoga teacher mentioned that she doesn’t eat yogurt, and then another yoga teacher chimed in and mentioned she didn’t eat yogurt either. Their non-eating of yogurt wasn’t the main point of the post, it was actually about adding some other ingredient to yogurt and then one of them said “my son liked it, though I don’t eat yogurt” or something like that. Since the non-eating was just an aside, no one explained the rationale for not eating yogurt, so I started to wonder if being dairy-free all the time is a thing Healthy People ™ always do. Since two yoga teachers were doing it, and all.
After I read that post I started wondering if Healthy People ™ observe a Whole30 diet all the time and that’s why they’re so healthy, and if the whole experiment would be a waste if I didn’t make the plan a permanent part of the way I eat all the time. Which would mean doing this experiment, and then going off the diet, would render me just as Unhealthy as I have always been. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but when you put in all this effort, you want there to be a payoff of some kind.
For breakfast I prepared what is now becoming a staple breakfast of baked sweet potato and bacon. I think lunch will be the leftover Bolognese, and then tonight’s dinner will be something new.
Today is ANOTHER snow day, for Christ’s sake. I mean, I see why they had to close school, but damn am I getting tired of this. Yesterday we had another huge all-day storm that left us with around 20 inches of snow outside. Today Big Kid was supposed to have the first session of his after-school chemistry club, too, and now that isn’t happening. Sigh. I can’t decide whether to go outside and try to do sledding or just sit around the house all day, again, just like we did yesterday.
On that subject: People say they have more energy on the Whole30. I have to say, I’m not finding that’s true of me. I have the same amount of energy as before. I mean, I’m having to force myself to get up and cook more often, but I am still as drawn as ever to lazing around the house, and still just as tired during the day as always. I don’t think I am Doing It Wrong. Maybe I need to refill my cup of black coffee.
Anyway, I finished up the Bolognese at lunch, and then for dinner I made the Mustard-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Rosemary Baby Carrots. It was DIVINE. I think this might be my fave Whole30 recipe so far. I’m definitely going to make it again. Big Kid really liked it too and asked for more pork when he had finished what was on his plate. He also ate almost all his carrots. The only thing I would add to the recipe is…gnocchi.
Little Kid, however, had fallen asleep on the couch while I was cooking. He had awoken much earlier than usual in the morning — around 5 am — and had already been in meltdown mode for a while before falling asleep, because he had, as usual, resisted napping in the afternoon. He was already bursting into tears at the slightest thing and all that stuff, so when he said he wanted to sit quietly and watch “Toy Story” I was glad to put it on for him and prepare dinner without interruption.
I’m not sure when exactly he fell asleep, but it was close to 6:30, and his Official Bedtime is 7pm, so although I don’t like him to skip dinner and usually don’t let that happen, it seemed unlikely that he would want to get up and have dinner. He still wears a Pull-Up to bed, so I thought a good test of his sleepiness would be to try to change him into his Pull-Up and pajama pants there on the couch. He awakened when I was changing him (and the pants he had on were all wet), but as soon as I was done, he went right back to sleep.
The next test was to see what would happen if I tried to carry him upstairs to bed. He woke up when I picked him up, but didn’t object to being carried upstairs and tucked in. Once I had him snuggled in there with his blankie and stuffed duck, he was all too happy to curl up and go back to sleep. Then he slept till morning. Wow! I had a free evening! This hadn’t happened in forever.
My husband was done reading Harry Potter to Big Kid by 8:45, and putting him to bed, and I was uncharacteristically in the mood for sex on a Thursday night. Is the Whole30 making me hornier? Maybe and maybe not. It could be the Whole30; it could be the notion that I’m thinner, whether or not it’s true; it could be the fact that I’ve been working on an essay about sex when I haven’t been writing here (the impulse to do which could also have been caused by the Whole30, but who the hell knows); it could be some random other thing. In any case, we had sex after the kids went to bed, and that was the first time that’s happened on a weeknight in ages.
