Whole30 Check In - Day 14

This diet sucks y'all. I hate it.

You can read about the progression of a person on the Whole30 here: http://whole30.com/2013/08/revised-timeline/. Day 6 was rough for me and it's basically just stayed rough.

I tried doing a Whole30 in October and quit on day 6. This time I prepared myself for about 3 weeks before starting. I cut my sugars a lot and I planned a variety of dinners and lunches so I wouldn't get bored and subject my family to endless pots of broccoli and lettuce salad with lemon juice. Can you guess what happened? I HATE EVERYTHING I HAVE TRIED. 

Last night I spent an hour making a new meatloaf recipe, french fries, and salad. The meatloaf had normal-sounding ingredients in it that I enjoy in other foods, so it's not like I was chasing a real wild card or anything. After my first bite, I just spit it out and went out to get us dinner (no, I will not tell you what we ate). After eating second dinner, there were only 20 minutes until Emily's bed time and I had not played with her at all. Luis spent the evening wrangling her and we let her unpack baskets and boxes and basically tear up the entire first floor. Once I sat down to play, she bit me and had to go into timeout. So to recap that is

• an entire wasted meal
• a cheat meal + the cost of this meal
• an evening NOT spent with my family
• an insanely messy house
• toddler time out (generally consists of me holding her into place for 60 seconds)

Great.

So I texted my cousins, who are doing this with me. Are you ready for their reactions?

These two are awesome and encouraging and I love doing this with them.

Feel free to confront me if I talk about doing this again.

Level Up Weight Loss

When I first started Weight Watchers, and for many years after, I tried to see juuuuuust how junky my diet could be while still losing weight. If I only ate a small order of fries and a cheeseburger, I could still lose. If I ate 100 calorie snack packs, I could still lose. If I slept in super late and ate a burrito bowl at 11:30 and nothing else all day,  I could still lose.

I eliminated gluten from my diet in 2010 and let me tell y'all, you can eat some serious junk food without involving gluten. 

Since I have been in my 30's, I find myself more sensitive to different foods. It's been dairy, gluten, and artificial sweeteners for years. But in the past year or so, soy has been creeping in. I love soy milk when it's involved in dessert in a cup from Starbucks. For about 4 years now, refined sugars have ebbed and flowed into my diet, first making my skin terrible, then giving me a random pain around my spleen, and lately causing  crazy level 10 stomach aches. I eat the junk and feel like crap then crave more junk.

Why do some people get iron stomachs while mine appears to be made of tissue paper? I feel like an overripe peach that will snag on a branch and peel.

I started a Whole30 on July 1st with two of my cousins. You can google that if your haven't heard of it at least a dozen times (bc it's super popular). I read and planned and prepared and shopped for this. I am on Day 3 and I feel ok so far. That hardest part has been missing sugar  in my coffee, but it's not terrible. 

I sometimes feel overwhelmed when I think about whether I will be able to reintroduce foods into my diet after this. It never occurred to me that I would need to be gluten free for life. What if I can't eat beans, drink a soy mocha, or have a GF cupcake without suffering y'all? Is that really sustainable? When I say suffer, I really mean doubled over in pain, short of breath, with tears on my cheeks. Honestly, that is not sustainable either.

I just know I need to feel better than I have been.