The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 9
Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
I woke up without anything planned for breakfast. That’s what I hate most about the Whole30 — you either have to prepare something on the spot, or eat something you’ve already meticulously pre-prepared, anytime you eat. You can never get caught without the proper foods/ingredients, or else you can’t eat. This morning I thought I would make chia pudding, but I didn’t have any coconut milk. I had forgotten that you need coconut milk.
So I had some coffee (black, of course) before driving Big Kid to school (Little Kid doesn’t have school today) and stopped by the grocery store after drop-off. Luckily, they did have an unsweetened can of coconut milk. I also had 2 slices of bacon left, so I made them and some banana chia pudding, and was finished eating breakfast more than an hour after dropping Big Kid off at school.
Then I was going to make raspberry chia pudding with the remaining coconut milk, but found that all my raspberries are now moldy. Ew! So I’m gonna have to go out later and get more raspberries and more bacon.
Meanwhile, the house is in a shambles. Big Kid’s friend is coming over after school and I can’t have the house looking like this when he and his mom get here. Little Kid’s laundry is overdue. I still have to fold Big Kid’s laundry from last week. I can’t devote this much time to cooking. (The writing here, since I’m doing it in little bits at a time, really doesn’t take that long.)
In the morning, I took Little Kid to Little Rascals, a play session at a local rec center where they fill a gym with little bikes and a small bouncy house and slides and a trampoline and other toys, and let toddlers play there for an hour and a half. After that I wanted to go to the nice kitchen store in Beacon and buy a cast-iron or steel skillet. I had wanted one for a long time and I wouldn’t be able to pan-sear ahi tuna without one. So of course, while we were in Beacon, Little Kid wanted to have lunch at the bagel shop, because that’s what we usually do when we’re in Beacon around lunch time.
And then I cheated on the Whole30.
It was a very active act of rebellion. I was rebelling against the idea that I could not just walk into a restaurant and order food like a normal person. I just felt so shitty about not being able to do that. So I ordered food, and that’s what I had for lunch.
However, I ordered what might possibly be the closest thing on the menu to Whole30-approved. It was a salad (yes! As a meal! That was how desperate I was to eat at a restaurant!) with bacon, avocado, and tomato on top. No cheese. No croutons. The dressing was a house-made lemon dill dressing. I even went to the trouble of asking whether there was sugar in it. She went into the back and asked the cook, who said the dressing was sweetened with honey.
I said, what the hell, and ordered it anyway. The bacon was probably not Whole30-approved bacon, either. But I wanted to see what it was like to try to adhere as closely as possible to the Whole30 while eating in a restaurant.
This was the first time I had ever had a salad at the bagel shop. I always get a bagel (or a bialy). But rather than feeling deprived, I felt like I was cheating on my diet for eating a salad, because the house-made dressing had honey in it and the bacon may have had added sugar. Should I have done this? Who cares? What’s done is done. There were benefits to my having done it, but maybe those are just excuses. I don’t know. But now I know I can go to a restaurant and ALMOST stay totally faithful to the diet.
I only ate half the salad, and it was okay, as salads go, but it was mainly nice to get food at a restaurant. That was the last thing I ate before dinner, and I felt fine in the afternoon. The honey hadn’t had any apparent ill effects on me.
After Big Kid got home from school, his friend came over, and Big Kid took out a bag of Jelly Belly jellybeans from the pantry, left over from his birthday party last month. He and his friend and Little Kid started picking them out of the bag, inspecting them, trying to determine what flavor they were, and popping them in their mouth. I almost, unthinkingly, joined in, and then remembered: Oh, right. Whole30. I wanted one, but not to a painful degree.
Then dinner was the soup I had made yesterday. I happily consumed a whole bunch of it, but the boys were unthrilled and left most of their soup uneaten. However, my husband had texted earlier that he was probably going to stop at Juanita’s Kitchen for an empanada on his way home — that’s a local place that makes amazing empanadas — and should he bring some for the kids? I had told him yes, so I knew the empanadas were coming and the boys wouldn’t starve.
I was helping Big Kid with his math homework when my husband, and the empanadas, arrived. I sat there at the table with the three of them, inhaling the aroma of warm dough and salty cheese, wishing I could have one, but I was also full from dinner, which helped it to be bearable. And I was relieved that the kids had something else to eat after refusing my soup, and I wouldn’t have to make them anything.
And today I also got a good amount of laundry and cleaning done, so I’m feeling better about that than I did last night. If you’re wondering whether that exhilarated feeling came back? Well, I did feel pretty good, and the warm weather helped, but it wasn’t as intense as yesterday.
