The Skeptic’s Whole30: The Trouble With Salad
I started reading up on the Whole30, and I was like, “Wow, those recipes look delicious.”
This is the third post in a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
On the Whole30, you go for 30 days without eating dairy or grains, two staples of my usual diet. You also avoid all added sugars, soy, legumes, and various other things that are virtually impossible to avoid in ordinary modern eating. You can have meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables — including potatoes and sweet potatoes — to your heart’s content. You can use oils, herbs, and spices. All of the foods you’ll eat are “whole foods.”
Now, I really like whole foods. When you take care to make recipes from them, they taste better and are more satisfying than pre-packaged convenience foods. The idea of “clean eating” appeals to me. However, and this is a big “however,” I only occasionally want to eat salad as a meal. By “occasionally,” I mean “maybe as little as once a month.” Or even less.
Other “clean eating” plans have relied way too much on salad for me to be willing to try them. For example, Buzzfeed’s two-week Clean Eating Challenge involves no fewer than SIXTEEN meals that are essentially salad. Sure, some of them are “tacos” that are really “vegetables wrapped in a lettuce leaf,” but FFS, that’s salad. If you eat three meals a day, two weeks equals 42 meals. So more than a third of your meals are salad. And most of the breakfasts aren’t salad. So more than half of your lunches and dinners are salad.
It’s not that I hate salad. As I’ve said, I can deal with salad-as-a-meal every so often. Like when I go out to lunch with two thin friends and they both order salad. Or, there’s this Sashimi Tuna Salad at Whistling Willie’s, a local restaurant, that’s delicious and sometimes I’m legitimately in the mood for it. (But sometimes I’m in the mood for their Super Nachos with pulled pork.) The quinoa-avocado-chickpea salad at Le Pain Quotidien is another favorite of mine. But I have to really be in the mood for salad if I’m going to eat it AS a meal (as opposed to a small salad BEFORE or WITH a meal) and that mood only strikes occasionally.
My other problem with salad-as-meal is how much it dominates the narrative of proper thinness and femininity. In places where normative beauty ideals are heavily policed, such as the New York City cafeterias of national women’s magazine publishers, it feels taboo to eat ANY LUNCH THAT ISN’T SALAD. Salad is the ONLY meal that women are “allowed” to be seen eating. Anything else, even if it’s low-carb, garners passive-aggressive comments like “that smells soooo good” and “Ooh, I wish I could eat that.” (Fun fact: You can! Just open your mouth and stick it in!) On the rare occasions that women do eat a non-salad, they preface it with a hedging statement like “I’m sooo stressed, I just need comfort food today.” Make sure everyone knows you never just eat grilled cheese with short ribs because you WANT to or that you consider that normal.
Before having kids, I used to work at some of these national women’s magazines, as a copy editor. One month I was editing an article in which two women who were already thin tried to lose weight. The women in the story were staff members of the magazine, whom I knew personally. Sometimes, during Closing Week, we were at the office late into the night and ordered dinner in, and one of these women would usually order steak tacos from the burrito place around the corner, which I considered a normal, even healthy, meal. This was a nice burrito place, not Taco Bell. In the article, these very steak tacos made an appearance in the paragraph about her usual, pre-diet eating habits, as “gluttonous steak tacos.”
The word “gluttonous” probably didn’t even come out of her mouth. I was intimately aware of the editing process that these stories went through, and I would be willing to bet that “gluttonous” was put into the story by an editor at one of the many, many stages of editing that happened before the magazine went to press. That was the magazine’s voice: Any meal that’s not a salad is “gluttonous.” I can’t think of any other reason why steak tacos could be considered gluttonous, unless you eat like 8 of them, which she didn’t. The meat is red, not lean? The tortillas are carbs? The tacos constitute an actual MEAL and not some mincing, birdlike girly-food? Honestly.
But on the Whole30, you don’t have to have salad as a meal. Enough other options are available that you don’t have to. Maybe you want to once or twice, and that’s OK, but it’s also OK not to.
And it appealed to me to try to embark on a more wholesome, nutritious eating plan if it was also appetizing. Usually, I rely too heavily on foods that are convenient, and when I say “too heavily,” I mean I don’t even really enjoy them some of the time, I just eat them because I have to eat something and that’s what’s there. I often eat fattening food I’m not really interested in, just because I can’t think of anything else to eat that is immediately available.
So then I heard about the cookbook entitled “Whole30 Fast and Easy.” Now, I don’t kid myself, I was sure the recipes in the book weren’t nearly as fast and easy as the stuff I normally consider “fast and easy,” like things you just microwave for 3 minutes. I’ve come to understand, over the years, that most recipes take me about twice as long to make as a cookbook says. So if it says “30 minutes,” I need to budget an hour.
But “Fast and Easy” implied “maybe doable.” And that’s what mattered. Also, the mere existence of a cookbook changed the entire game of “no grains, no dairy.” Because if you come at a restrictive eating plan from the perspective of what you are NOT eating, it’s way too arduous to figure out what TO eat. If all that is laid out for you, in the form of complete recipes, you don’t have to worry about that.
So I said to myself, if I can find 30 recipes in this cookbook that sound appetizing to me, I will try the Whole30. I will buy the cookbook and try it. I figured, it’s just 90 meals — 30 breakfasts, 30 lunches, 30 dinners. Apparently these meals are so filling that you don’t want to snack between them. And you’re allowed to drink black coffee and seltzer whenever you want. Coffee and seltzer are already my staple beverages, and I normally take my coffee with a bit of half and half, but I can deal with black. You also have to cut out alcohol, but I figured I could handle that, since I did it for 9 months during each of my two pregnancies and am generally not a huge drinker anyway.
There were more than 30 meals in the Whole30 Fast and Easy cookbook that appealed to me, so I was off and running. I decided I would start on February 19, because on February 18 I was taking my older son to the theater in the city, and our plan was to have dim sum before the show. Between Feb. 19 and March 20, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Late winter is generally the quietest time of year for me.
These were my goals for the Whole30:
1) To see if I could really do it.
2) To see if it made me feel different or better.
3) To see if it might introduce some new habits into my cooking/eating regimen that might improve it in a more long-term way.
4) To lose weight — although I really don’t know if I’ll lose weight. We’ll see. Part of the program is to avoid weighing yourself until after it’s done. I will give it 30 days and see what happens.
