The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 27

Saturday, March 17, 2018

This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.

The final weekend of the Whole30 is upon us! Just four more days!

Today I’ll probably have a sweet potato and bacon for breakfast, make the Mexican Chicken Soup for lunch and maybe also dinner, and then leave the ahi tuna, Southwest Bowls, and Southwest Chicken Noodle Bowl for the next three days.

I had the sweet potato and bacon, and it held me over pretty well through Big Kid’s tae kwon do class. He didn’t have a swim lesson this week, so we got to go straight home afterward. During the class I went to the health food store and got more bacon, curried cashews, and dried mango slices. Lunch ended up being cashews and mango slices, plus the remaining banana chia pudding drunk with a straw from a glass. I was too tired to cook.

That afternoon I was researching how best to cook a raw chicken breast, since the Mexican Soup entailed using shredded “cooked chicken.” I found a page that detailed how you could pound it flat with a mallet and then just put it in an oiled skillet for a while, turning it at least once. To my delight, it said you could pound it while it was in a Ziploc bag. My raw chicken was already in a Ziploc bag! This was amazing news, because the alternative (which I had tried, and did not care for) was putting it between two sheets of plastic wrap. The wrap kept sticking to itself, to such an extent that it was hard to work with, and the chicken kept sliding out of the wrap, and it was a mess.

The page also said you needed a meat thermometer, so I was like, I’m not ready to drop $100 on a ThermaPen, but maybe if I go to Target before the supermarket, I can get a less expensive but still usable one there.

So I went to Target to look for the thermometer and another few things we needed in the house, and when I walked by the book department, saw some Whole30 books and decided to check them out.

I hadn’t looked at the original Whole30 book before, the one where Melissa Hartwig and her husband detail how the Whole30 is supposed to work. I had only read the rules on the Whole30 website and the abbreviated version of them in the front of my cookbook, which had come out some time after this first book.

There was a long section on “Sex with Your Pants On,” where the authors kept on returning to the example of “pancakes” made from egg and banana, and how you weren’t allowed to have those, and why was everyone so fixated on pancakes anyway. Apparently the egg-banana “pancakes” are something of a legendary Paleo tradition. I had heard of them years ago, when someone on Facebook was doing Paleo and posted a picture of her banana egg pancakes with the statement that they tasted just like the real thing.

At that time, I tried it. I did not agree that it tasted just like the real thing. I thought it tasted like a gross banana omelet. Which is exactly what it was. Banana and egg are two great tastes that do NOT taste great together. So I kind of laughed that anyone doing the Whole30 would be clamoring to have this disgusting concoction to the point where they would have to be admonished over and over again not to.

I noticed that the Hartwigs also wrote that most people, upon completion of the Whole30, did not immediately go out and binge on all the foods that had been forbidden to them for the past 30 days. I thought back to a text message my husband had sent me during the week: “What’s the last day of your diet?” I had answered “Tuesday,” and he said, “We’ll have to party after that.” I responded with a message consisting entirely of emojis, a croissant and a stack of pancakes and a pretzel and a piece of pizza and a beer mug. Then I realized I had forgotten sweets and sent a chocolate chip cookie too.

But would I really binge? Honestly, I hadn’t been planning to. Not exactly, anyway. I had been looking forward to having those foods again, and definitely planned to have them, but not in a binge way. More in a normal way. As much as I wanted all the foods depicted in my texts, I had no desire to gorge on all of them at once, right away. But at the same time, I felt chagrined by the Hartwigs’ suggestion that after my 30 days were up I might just continue forbidding all the forbidden foods just because I was now “used to” eating that way.

The book itself said that it supposedly takes 66 days for a new habit to take hold, but I couldn’t stand the idea of doing this diet for 36 more days. Were other people really “used to” the diet to such an extent that they would prefer to cook for an hour preceding every other meal for the rest of their lives? Did other people really feel SO MUCH BETTER on this diet than they did before?

The Hartwigs certainly thought so. They outlined a timeline of how they thought you would feel, over the course of the 30 days. I’m looking online again at the timeline. Let’s see how it compares to my own.

Day 1, they say, is “So what’s the big deal?” You concoct your sumptuous meals from scratch and are all “this is a breeze!” Day 2 and 3 are “The Hangover,” with that headache (remember that?), which is explained as follows: “Your body is working its way through a whole host of junk it stored from the foods (or food-like products) you used to eat.” So that Shake Shack last meal I had with Big Kid at Grand Central? The Dim Sum for lunch? I guess.

Days 4 and 5 are “Kill ALL the things!” In other words, you’re irritable and angry. Days 6 and 7 are “I just want a nap.” The Hartwigs explain, “Isn’t eating like this supposed to increase energy levels? Now your body is learning to efficiently burn fat and protein as its fuel sources, and that takes more effort — and some time.” Day 8–9 is “My pants are tighter…What gives?” Apparently bloating (bloating!), constipation, and diarrhea are effects of your body adjusting to this new diet. Day 10 and 11, they write, are the Days You’re Most Likely to Quit.

Then Day 12–15, they say, involve craving forbidden foods, but feeling more energetic than normal. And then for days 16–27 “life is beautiful,” and “Energy is through the roof, cravings are under control, clothes are fitting better, workouts are stronger.” However, they write, on day 21 you start getting bored with the program, not at all looking forward to sitting down to yet another meaty, eggy, vegetable-y feast. Their suggestion: Find some new recipes to keep things exciting!

On Day 28, they’ll predict you’ll be tempted to lapse, based on the rationalization that 28 is just as good as 30, but they exhort you to just power through the last days, because what matters is that you committed to 30 whole days, so you need to honor the commitment you made. I agree with this and fully understand it.

Then on Day 29 and 30, they explain that it’s normal to panic a little about what the hell you’re going to eat once it’s over. Like, it’ll be awesome to eat ice cream again but will it undo all the progress I’ve made? As you know, I’ve already started to worry about this.

So let’s see how my own timeline matches up with this.

Well, my day 1 went pretty well but I can hardly say I was like “what’s the big deal?” I was trepidatious throughout, and didn’t take anything for granted. The headache was worst on day 3, right on schedule. On days 4 and 5 I was tired and hungry, but not really angry. I did report on day 5 that I was almost ready to ditch the whole thing and have pizza for dinner, and it was only my kids’ lack of interest in pizza that convinced me to stick with it. I talked about how I just wished I could HAVE SOMETHING, like a cookie, and it wasn’t even the cookie I wanted so much as just the ability to have it.

I did mention exhaustion once during days 6–7, but overall the tone was more of a day 4–5 “fuck you” mixed with the cravings of day 10 and 11. Day 6 was the day I wrote that I might be able to finish the 30 days “if I can do it kicking and screaming.”

And then day 8! My entry for that day begins, “Pardon me, but I’m really farty today!” I blamed it on the cashews I had eaten the previous evening, but apparently it’s just the entire Whole30 doing its job. That was the day I wrote my meditation on bloat, “Bridesmaids,” and bragging. Does this mean I have bragging rights? That I can gloat about bloat? Is being farty the same thing as being bloated? Is bloat for women who hold in their farts? I’m not thrilled with that idea. Nor am I thrilled with the notion that farting is for fat women and bloating is for thin women. That had BETTER not be the underlying concept to this whole thing. I look to the comedian Sarah Silverman for guidance, since part of her whole shtick is how thin she is, and she’s also unapologetic about farting.

Day 9 was the day I “cheated,” sort of, by eating the restaurant salad made with probably-not-compliant bacon and the salad dressing that included honey. I was super frustrated by not being able to go to a restaurant, to the point where I would actually choose a salad at the bagel shop just to be able to eat at a restaurant — something I had never eaten at the bagel shop before. So I put “cheated” in quotes because (1) Although the salad contained two marginally forbidden ingredients, I chose it because it was the menu item that adhered most closely to the Whole30 of everything at the bagel shop, so in that way, it was absolutely in the spirit of the Whole 30; and (2) I remember feeling that the salad tasted oddly sweet, which I think means that I was now unused to the sweetness of the honey, and the added sugar that was probably in the bacon. So that was an instructive moment, and I think worthwhile to the journey as a whole.

Day 8 was also the first time I experienced that high, exhilarated feeling.

Days 10 and 11 were not so bad, in fact. I was less ready to quit on those days than I had been on the few days that preceded them, and I was learning new things about myself and experiencing new sensations. Day 12–15 were not really filled with cravings, so much, and I even had a good time when our friends came over for dinner and everyone else ate baked ziti and BREAD and I had to wait an extra 25 minutes for my spaghetti squash Bolognese. Day 13 was the second time I experienced that high, followed by exhaustion.

On days 16 and on, I did report feeling less crave-y overall and doing the program “more on autopilot,” like I had grown accustomed to the routine. My moods were up and down, and I didn’t always feel more energetic or noticeably better than usual. On day 23 I wrote about being “so sick of this diet,” in the exact way they say you will be on day 21. So I guess it’s good I took an extra two days to express this feeling?

So I guess my experiences conformed, mainly, to what the Hartwigs said would happen, but not on the exact days they said it would, and my levels of energy and happiness were really not as extreme as they said they would be.

Another thing they said, which I hadn’t realized, is that anytime you lapse, you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN. So did that mean I needed to count the day after the last time I lapsed as day 1? I’m sorry, not gonna do that.

My lapses, throughout the diet, were as follows:

1) The sip of passion-fruit juice

2) The cashews that had been cooked in peanut oil

3) the salad that contained probably-not-compliant bacon and dressing with honey

4) the snacks that “may” have contained tiny bits of rice flour

5) one noodle that I tasted while preparing mac and cheese for the kids, purely to test it for doneness. Seriously, I was like, “I wonder if these noodles are ready, but I’m on this diet and can’t eat one. Oh for Christ’s sake. That’s ridiculous,” and ate one. It may not even have been a whole noodle.

Later, when I retold these transgressions to my husband, he rolled his eyes at the suggestion that these constituted lapses. He said I had been extremely diligent and that if these were my biggest lapses, by all accounts I should be considered to have adhered strictly to the diet the whole time.

And true, it’s not like “just having one beer,” which was one of the examples they gave of cheating. As I noted earlier, these transgressions violated the letter but not the spirit of the plan.

The last interesting tidbit I got from the book was this: Most people lose between 6 and 15 pounds on the Whole30. This estimate completely jibed with my prior thoughts about weight loss: I would be very disappointed if I had lost less than 6 pounds, pleased but not surprised if the loss was between 6 and 12, and thrilled if it was more than 12. Twelve pounds would mean, basically, three pounds a week, which would be amazing.

Well, I guess on Wednesday, we’ll see.

I got home from the supermarket and it was almost 9pm and I still hadn’t made dinner. Fortunately, Little Kid hadn’t had a nap all day, so my husband got him to bed easily while I made and ate the Mexican chicken soup, preparing the chicken the way I had read about. I didn’t eat until 10 but I was okay.

Tomorrow: Planning how I’ll use what I’ve learned from this experience after it’s over.