The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 5
Friday, Feb. 23, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
Raspberry chia pudding for breakfast. Really good, mousselike consistency, more tart than sweet. Only thing is, it didn’t sustain me for 4 hours. By 11 am I was already hungry.
I had Pilates, like I do every Friday. It didn’t feel easier. If anything, it was harder. During one exercise, the Long Stretch, I got out of breath and had to take a break and get a drink of water. I always find the Long Stretch challenging but this doesn’t usually happen. It’s an asthma-like reaction I’ve always had when I exert myself too hard, that I now recognize immediately, but when I first started to have it (around age 14) it was devastating. If I keep pushing myself beyond that point without resting, it leads to passing out or nausea and vomiting.
However, at the end of class, my Pilates teacher, who has no idea I’m doing the Whole30, said to me, “You look great.” I find moments like these to be the antithesis of when someone says “you look thinner” immediately after you’ve informed them that you just joined a gym. She didn’t say anything about thinness per se but the fact that she doesn’t know I’m doing anything differently, and apparently noticed something about the way I look to the extent that she would comment on it, suggests that something has happened.
I came home exhausted and hungry. I didn’t want to have lunch until noon, because doing it earlier would create a wide gulf between lunch and dinner, but by the time I ate, I really needed it. The leftover chili from last night was excellent, as expected. But I started having visions of pizza dancing in my head.
When a Friday is an eating day for my husband, we usually have pizza for dinner, which he picks up on his way home from the train station. Today is one such day (the only other one during my Whole30 will be Day 19), and I’m gonna have to make myself something else, and possibly also something for Little Kid, who’s been on a pizza strike lately. “I don’t like pizza,” he’s been saying lately, much to our befuddlement.
I thought about making the chicken egg drop soup for the two of us, but now I’m wondering if that’s gonna be substantial enough to satisfy, given that the pizza will be on the table and I’ll see it and smell it and remember what it feels like to eat it. Ugh. The soup contains ground turkey, which makes it heartier than ordinary Chinese egg drop soup (which I would never order as dinner, just as an appetizer) but what I would really like is some straight-up noodles. Like, a ton of them. Maybe I’ll noodlify a potato with my spiralizer and put the potato noodles in the soup. That might help. But what I’d really like to do is BITE into something and have it STRETCH the way a slice of pizza or a bagel or anything made of DOUGH would stretch. Potato noodles aren’t going to stretch.
I think that on day 31, DOUGH will be the thing I reintroduce into my diet.
So at 5:15 my husband texted me and asked if I wanted pizza, since he keeps forgetting I’m doing the Whole30. I was almost ready to throw in the towel and ditch the entire thing and say yes, because you know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of ONLY being able to eat the specific things on the menu and NOTHING ELSE. I’m tired of there being tons of food all around me all the time and me not being allowed to eat any of it. It’s not even that there’s any specific food I want to eat. It’s just HAVING THE OPTION. This is why I was never attracted to those diets like Jenny Craig and Nutri/System where all you eat is their food, and you can never eat normal food.
But then I asked the kids if they wanted pizza for dinner, and BOTH of them said no. I hate to say it but I think this turn of events was what kept me on the Whole30.
I figured the only thing to do was to make the egg drop soup (with the potato noodles), see if either kid wanted to share it with me, and then make extra food for whatever kid didn’t want to. I made the soup and it turned out Big Kid wanted to share it and Little Kid didn’t. Little Kid just wanted a PB and J.
I added potato noodles to the soup, and it turned out there was still about a pint of it left over after Big Kid and I each had a bowlful. Little Kid was satisfied with his sandwich. My husband got an eggplant pizza roll. Everyone was happy (for now).
Tomorrow: It’s okay to ask that food be emotionally satisfying.
