Whole30 to the Hill14

By
Meredith H
-
2

August 1st my family and I embarked on the Whole30 challenge.  Never heard of Whole30? Whole30 is “Whole9’s original program designed to change your life in 30 days.  Think of it as a short-term nutritional reset, designed to help you restore a healthy metabolism, heal your digestive tract, calm systemic inflammation and put an end to unhealthy cravings, habits, and relationships with food.”

Sound like a winner?  I couldn’t wait to start!  I strive to make healthy choices for my family, but we have really fallen off the wagon recently.  Summer can do that to you and I knew we needed something pretty extreme to get us back on track.  My motivation wasn’t to lose weight or tone up, though many enjoy this benefit to the program.  We aren’t huge veggie eaters so this was going to be challenging for us.  My husband was on board (which really surprised me due to his love of a drive-thru and Mexican food), and we even got a few other family members to join us.

Whole30 approved eating consists of meat, seafood, eggs, veggies, fruit (in small amounts), nuts (also in small amounts) and healthy fats and oils.

Implementing the Plan:

– I started out with a 10 day meal plan, hoping it would give us a great foundation to build off of for the rest of the 30 days.

– I focused on simple meals – familiar recipes using foods we already knew we liked.

– I made sure our house was full of the right foods – a grocery run to get tons of fresh items and good-for-you proteins, an order placed for chicken with Farm to Fork Foods (a supplier of natural raised and local meat) and salmon already in the freezer from a previous F2F order.

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So, how did we do?

 

We didn’t make it 30 days WHOMP WHOMP….we lasted 14.  I’m equally shocked by how long we lasted and that we didn’t make it all the way through.  Our “support group” and fellow “clean eaters” all gave up around Day 7, which made quitting very tempting, but we didn’t cheat, not  once during those 2 weeks.  So now you ask, why did we quit?  It was a REALLY  hard 14 days.  I have never washed so many dishes or cut up that many fruit and vegetables in my life.  Eating Whole30 is a LOT of work.  I got tired of having to plan every meal and research what we could eat.  I felt like we were eating the same things over and over, even if we weren’t.  It was a long 14 days that taught us some lessons.  We learned about the foods we eat and the kind of hold food has on you.  I wish we would have made it the whole 30 days, but that just wasn’t going to happen for us right now.  Sometimes you have to go wading in the baby pool before you learn to dive into the deep.  We are looking for a good balance we can maintain and plan to implement Whole30 rules into our meals (on a more reasonable scale for us).
Now hand me my margarita and those tortilla chips – we’re going to celebrate the Hill14!
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 Have you ever heard of Whole30?  Have you completed a Whole30?  How does your family strive to eat better?

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2 COMMENTS

  2. That’s amazing that you made it that long with 2 kiddos! A feat for sure! I’m clicking over to check out Farm to Fork now!

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