The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 8

Monday, Feb. 26, 2018

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

Pardon me, but I’m really farty today! Must be all those cashews from last night. Meanwhile, today is the first DAY OFF that I’ve had since starting the Whole30. Last week was weird because the kids were on vacation for most of it, then Thursday was Big Kid’s first day back but he got dismissed at 11:30 because of an impending ice storm, and Friday they were both back to school but I had Pilates which killed the day off and turned it into a mere couple hours off.

But both of them are at school today, which means I have the freedom to try shit out without worrying about time, cleaning up poop that didn’t make it into the toilet, or breaking up fights. For breakfast I ate a banana before driving them to school, and then when I got back I tried a thing with potato noodles and bacon.

When you noodlify potatoes, they look uncannily like spaghetti. I was aware that the act of capitalizing on this resemblance was awfully close to what Melissa Hartwig calls “Sex with your pants on,” or, the using of Whole30-approved foods to simulate foods that are forbidden, but the good news is, Melissa, that potato noodles don’t taste anything like spaghetti. After the noodlification, I tried stir-frying the noodles in a skillet with olive oil, because I had found the other day that if I baked them in the oven, they stuck so hard to the tinfoil that I ended up wasting a lot of them. But when I put the perfectly spaghetti-looking strands on my plate and took a bite? It tasted like RAW POTATO. Back into the skillet they went.

Meanwhile, yesterday someone posted on Facebook that they had tried cooking bacon in the oven and that it was a “total game-changer.” Interesting! I hadn’t known you could cook bacon in the oven, and I didn’t see why it would be any better than doing it in a skillet. But this morning, with all this free time, I wanted to try it. Someone had commented on the post that she bakes hers at 350, on parchment paper, and another person said 400. I tried it at 350 first, and after 12 minutes it was barely done.

Meanwhile, my potato noodles were still way too raw-potatoey for my taste. So I turned the oven up to 400, added the noodles to the parchment paper, and had them cook along with the bacon for a few minutes. After just those few minutes, the bacon was done — really, overdone, in my opinion. Some people like their bacon extra crispy like that; I prefer mine a little chewy. So for next time I’ll know to take it out sooner. Meanwhile, the potatoes were done, and now had a nice al dente (sorry, Melissa) consistency.

As far as I could tell, cooking the bacon in the oven rather than in a skillet was better primarily because you could do other things while it was cooking, rather than standing over the skillet. Which was helpful, I guess.

It was nice to have the breathing room to experiment that way. Maybe I’ll get to precook some other stuff while the kids are in school and I can work unencumbered.

Being so gassy this morning made me wonder whether all this new healthy eating will allow me to experience the privilege of bloat. I’ve long thought the idea of “bloat” was mainly a humblebrag, wherein skinny people go “I’m sooo bloated” to draw attention to how any feeling of fullness is deeply foreign to them and unusual, and that just a tiny amount of salt or beans or whatever is enough to rock their tiny little body’s whole world and make them feel so noticeably different.

The movie “Bridesmaids” addresses this: At a Mexican restaurant, the princessy, bitchy bridesmaid humblebrags that she’s sooo bloated, and then the fat bridesmaid (Melissa McCarthy) says matter-of-factly, “I don’t bloat.” This is supposed to be funny because of COURSE she doesn’t “bloat,” because bloatedness is her default state of existence most of the time (is being fat the same thing as bloating? I’m not sure; first you have to ask, is “bloating” a real thing, or just a thing skinny women say to get attention? If it isn’t a real thing, it can be whatever you want it to be, I guess).

The joke made me feel shitty because it employed the trope of “the fat person who doesn’t know she’s fat,” a widely acknowledged form of insidious fat-hate “humor,” where a fat person is so clueless and stupid that she doesn’t even realize she isn’t normal or acceptable, so she goes around acting as if she’s an ordinary person who might experience things like bloat, rather than the FREAK she is. At my size, I have felt at risk of being “the fat person who doesn’t know she’s fat” anytime I’ve been in a conversation with thin women about being hit on by men and I’ve dared to imply that it’s ever happened to me. This is a perfect example of the reason why I’d like to lose weight.

But what I liked about the “Bridesmaids” joke was how it acknowledged the humblebragginess/privilege of “bloat.” Of who is allowed to say they are bloated. Thank you, Judd Apatow, for calling that out, even though you generally have a really offensive, cartoonish view of how beauty standards affect women in real life.

I realized early in the day that I didn’t have anything to eat for lunch, so I had to figure something out. I decided to make the Quick Turkey Sausage and Sweet Potato Soup that was going to be one of our dinners this week, eat one serving, refrigerate the rest, and have that for dinner another night this week. Tonight, I would make something else and have it again for lunch the next day.

But somehow, amid the other various activities I was engaged in during the day, this “quick” soup took me almost as long to make as I had, in the day. By the time it was ready, I had less than 10 minutes before I had to go pick up the kids from school. The soup tasted great, but I felt really disappointed. I was supposed to have a day off, and it just vanished in the blink of an eye! I didn’t really spend 6 hours cooking, or did I? I did do one errand, but I was gone for less than an hour while doing it.

Then after I picked up the kids, it took me another 45 minutes to get my shit in order to make dinner. I was going to make the pork meatballs from last week, again, that everyone liked so much. I had originally planned on making the Asian Pork Noodle Bowl with carrot noodles, but I remembered how it went over last week when I tried to serve my kids plates of ground meat sitting on top of vegetables, and figured meatballs would be a safer bet. That would involve roasting another whole spaghetti squash, and as I type this, said squash is in the oven and the timer is running. I’m also going to have to mince garlic, sage, etc.

Then dinner somehow managed to take me until my husband got home to finish cooking it. I don’t really know how; I wasn’t doing anything else. Then the cleanup was gargantuan. I only finished it at 10 pm, after putting Little Kid to bed. Sheesh. Making three meals from scratch in one day basically amounts to doing nothing but cooking and ancillary tasks all day. I mean, sure, I took my kids to school and picked them up, and read a book with Big Kid for a little while in the afternoon, but that was IT. And there were other chores that needed doing, that didn’t get done.

Tomorrow lunch and dinner are already cooked. That’ll be a nice break.

Another thing I want to talk about, that I’m sort of afraid to talk about, is this odd feeling that came over me for the first half of the day. I felt so sprightly and optimistic, like I could breathe more freely, as though there were this big wide tube from my lungs to my nose and mouth through which clean, fresh air was flowing. I also felt kind of excited and stimulated, like my heart was going pitter-patter, the way it would if I had a crush on someone. I wondered if I felt like having an orgasm, but felt really turned off by the idea because it would be (no pun intended) an anticlimax. It seemed depressing that the culminating event of this vast, expansive feeling could be one measly orgasm.

So of course the lingering question in the back of my mind was, is this because of the Whole30? Is this the Feeling So Much Better that people talk about? Did I get over the hump and make it to the other side? How long will it last? After the Whole30 is done, will I have to maintain this restrictive, unsustainable model of eating to keep having it? Is this how people who eat this way all the time feel all the time? Am I experiencing starvation, and that’s what this is? Are carbs to blame for any depression I experience? That’s depressing. I hope it’s not true.

By 4 pm I was already too tired to feel the feeling anymore, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come back tomorrow. However, it was nice and warm out today, and maybe that was what caused it. The feeling felt a lot like spring fever. Or maybe it was the jeans I’m wearing, which felt somehow perfect today. There are a million and one things other than the Whole30 that could have caused it. Just the fact that I had a day off might have been enough to trigger it.

So as you can see I’m still skeptical. But now I’ve done another day. 8 down, 22 to go.

Tomorrow: I violate the letter but not the spirit of the Whole30.