Ok, so it’s still me, but you’re right there with me correct? Let’s all pause for a moment of clarity…
I am tired of being hungry and continuing to gain weight. Sure it creeps on slowly, but it just stays and stays. I am tired of not fitting into my good jeans anymore. What the Hell happened?
I don’t know….
I’m lying. I do know. It was me. I ate every ounce of whatever I wanted. I tried a smoothie diet for a couple of weeks. It worked, but yuk! I don’t want to drink my food and I don’t want to be unhealthy. Even more than that, I don’t want you to drink your food or be unhealthy either, because I care about you, my dear reader.
OK, so I decided to give up sugar on Sunday of last week. That went alright for the day, so I decided to give up wheat. Well, that proved to be even more difficult for me than sugar! But okay, I was still alive after day 2 so, I began to think, “What else is in my diet that could be problematic?”
I have had digestive issues for about three years which leaves me bloated and with a belly ache, like all the time. They said they can’t do anything about it, something about spasms, blah blah blah. I soothe this belly ache with oatmeal, bread, crackers, cheese, yogurt…Whatever I feel like my body is craving at the moment. The G.I. doc said eat less fiber and more bland food because I was not processing all the fiber in my leafy greens and whole wheat products efficiently. It didn’t really help anything, but it made me feel better for the moment. In hindsight, I knew exactly what I was doing. I am a gerontologist. I have a very good understanding of the functions of the human body and how we change as we age, psychologically as well as physically.
But when aging happens to YOU, it feels very personal and scary; even very normal aging processes like a slowing metabolism. When dietary changes are necessary and you ignore them, fat happens. Fat, fatigue, lethargy, laziness, being angry at your clothes and in a bad mood each morning as you have to decide what to wear, they all happen.
So, as I was weaning myself off of what I thought were possibly problematic foods, I searched the terms, “what to expect when giving up wheat.” I read a blog post, (I am so sorry I don’t remember where), and there was a link to the Whole30.
I thought, “nope. nope. HELLS to the NO!” I always fail at diets. They feel like punishment and let’s be realistic, NO ONE is going to tell ME what to do! I make the rules about what I eat and I am a foodie. I am NOT, I repeat NOT doing this “diet”.
Then as the week went on I became curious to see how long I could go without reintroducing wheat and sugar into my diet. I was feeling not as hungry all the time, which I thought was just a fluke because I wasn’t eating as much. Sometimes we have those days when we just aren’t that hungry, you know? I also immediately accepted the fact that the lack of blood sugar spikes and drops were because of the absence of sugar and wheat. So, I was like hey, maybe the articles I read are actually true and “Wheat-belly” exists. I am not allergic to any food (dammit), but that doesn’t mean I need to eat it. So I decided to give up dairy and legumes. You know, just to see what would happen.
Today is day 8 without those things. Except yesterday I ate two pieces of fried spam and the day before that I ate a half a package of liverwurst. They were both very delicious to me. They both have corn syrup or sugar in them. It may be a negligible amount of sugar, but it’s sugar all the same, and it’s a no no. If I say I gave something up, then I have to be truthful with myself.
Today I started the Whole30. SHUT UP! I know what I said. But I was like, “dangit….I’m already almost there anyway. Let’s see if I just tweak this thing a little more, I could start counting the days toward the Whole30. ” So, I did. I’ll keep you posted.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
Day 1 of the WHOLE30:
I gotta tell you. I am still reeling from the weekend. I hadn’t really had any cravings past the first three days. I also hadn’t really done any physical labor of any sort aside from light cleaning, cooking walking at work type things. Then Saturday morning came and I sat with my coffee, in my spot, and thought about all the delicious sweets I could be enjoying with it. DING DING DING…There you have it folks. I wanted sugar and wheat. Little Debbies to be exact. And I sat and wrestled with those emotions and talked to myself.
I gave my kid the Nature Valley Peanut Butter Granola Cups I had bought last week and asked her to take them into another room to eat them. I also warned her, “If you see me running toward you, run…” She got it. But alas, I made it through the hour, with the realization that I HAVE AN EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO FOOD! Like I really felt like I deserved a treat for making it to Saturday and I felt jipped that I didn’t get it in the form of sweet cream filled corn syrup laden wheat cake covered in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil chocolate flavored coating.
About an hour after this “episode” I realized, if I am going to continue to have my coffee on the weekends then I am going to have to look at the coffee as my reward or find some other way to reward myself. After eating my three eggs and veggies and a banana, the cravings went away. I gave myself a reward. Self-love and a little pride.
Good. I learned something.
All the cravings I had vanished and I packed my “dinner” for the trip I was about to take. I went out to play the show at the Greenbrier. Ate a healthy snack on the way. The other boiled egg I had, some peppers and raw almonds. We unloaded equipment and although I don’t do much heavy lifting these days what with four men in the band, I worked up an appetite.
Well, we missed dinner and the employee cafeteria closed. So, I ate the rest of my peppers and my guacamole, a few homemade almond meal crackers (I’ll tell you about my issues with mushy foods later) and a banana. Then the employee cafeteria opened back up before we went on and they were serving something that smelled delicious. POT ROAST!! The boys were eating the mashed potatoes and peas too…(Those mashed potatoes are why I couldn’t start the Whole30 Saturday.) I only took a teeny tiny bite of the potatoes but ooh lala they were heavenly. I counted them of course. STRIKE!! I need to be as aware of what I am putting into my mouth as what is coming out of it…Both are a challenge for me.
I ate the pot roast. It was very yummy. I didn’t eat any other unapproved foods that evening. Man was my energy level LOW by 3AM. I was like a slug. Note to self: I need to eat more leafy greens and more carbs if I am going to be dancing and singing all night.
Well, after watching some disgracefulness on the dance floor, (Alcohol knows no socioeconomic boundaries people) and after a girl got up on stage, grabbed my mic and yelled “Hey all you Mother F****” throughout the casino and hotel, (clearly she was disturbed) and after we packed up and hit the road back to VA, I was totally DONE.
The next morning, afternoon, whatever, I had a terrible headache and I smelled SPAM cooking. Yep, I ate it. I ate the SPAM. It was delicious. It also had sugar in it. So, there’s that. STIKE!!
And that’s the story of how today, Monday, became my Day 1. I had almond milk in my coffee, a banana chopped up in some cereal- type concoction of toasted coconut flakes, almonds and walnuts. I ate a can of soy-free Raincoast tuna and I am just not hungry for anything else right now. Real food that doesn’t cause my body to have an immune type response keeps me feeling full much longer. And that my friend, is why I am going to complete the Whole30 and totally change the way I look at food.
Join me if you dare.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
Day 2 of the Whole30- Well that was interesting….
So this is day two for me and so far it has gone pretty well. I realized late last night that I MUST add eggs back in because although I wasn’t hungry yesterday, I got hungry last night and had bad cravings. I ate the beef that went into the fajitas I love so much, but I didn’t like it. I always LOVE it! As it turns out, I guess what I LOVED was cheese and sour cream and the bite and rubbery tug of the tortilla as I ate it, not so much the meat….
Good, I learned something.
So, I looked in the freezer and behold, my farmer’s market chorizo was in there and dat- da-da!! It contained no sugar! This was surely good news for me because I have about four lbs of it left. It isn’t my favorite sausage by any means, but it’ll do a lot. I sauteed some random veggies and made an egg bake. Then I was like, what to do with this extra chorizo?….So I stayed up entirely too late and made mini muffin cups with potatoes, chorizo and eggs. I just sauteed a couple of potatoes in the chorizo, dumped them in the muffin pan and poured some egg over top. They were great. It was all great. I had it for breakfast so far and I feel much better today already.
I think I ate too many nuts yesterday. Had a stomach ache. But it could have been the coconut because it was the first time I had ever eaten coconut in any bulk.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
Day 3-4
So sorry but the week got away from me. In fact, it’s 11:20 and I’m just stopping by to say, it gets easier…. then hard for a few minutes a couple of times a day… then easy again. When bananas and sweet mini peppers taste like candy, I think you’ve officially reached some sort of cleanse pinnacle. They’re lovely, really. I don’t try to limit the peppers but I do only have a couple of bananas a day and I try to not snack on them. But they’re good for me in an emergency and there seems to always be one within arms length when you work at a school.
I gave up the raw nuts and toasted coconut cereal concoction I bragged about eating the other day because it definitely did not agree with me. I’ve also limited my coconut milk to a little in my one cup of coffee each morning. It’s definitely helped the tummy issues.
I can feel my body thanking me each day for doing the Whole30. Sometimes my mind has other ideas though. Things are going good. I’m going into day 5 tomorrow! Hooray! I feel accomplished and I’m not nearly ready to throw in the towel.
Day two and theee were nap days for me. Today, I was good to go for the long haul.
I’ll tell you what helped me the most. Once I realized it was the nuts that were bothering me and probably the coconut, i reintroduced eggs. I made a zucchini, spinach, onion, peppers and Rotel tomato egg bake in two big old pans. I’ve eaten it every day for the past three days and it has been yummy!! Baking the eggs makes them a little chewy which I can deal with since I don’t like mushy foods. And I get a load of sautéed veggies in each serving. I also added the farmers market chorizo to that mix and it’s a hearty filling meal.
I’m going to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
Day 5: Salad is my friend
I slept like the dead last night, which is a great thing for this old insomniac. Today I ate a Larabar with my coffee. Is that okay? I checked it out and since there was no other compliant food available, I decided just to aware that this is an emergency food for me. I have to make sure that I don’t use it to feed my sugar monster, which is always a raging beast. Done.
I am eating a ton of veggies in salad form due to my texture issues and I have to find my way around that.
Challenge accepted.
Day 10: I feel good
I have been sleeping better, feeling better and my digestive tract thanks me every day. I’ll spare you the details. However, I have this little problem. People ask me about my “crazy diet” all day long at work. When I tell them I am absolutely still doing it, they scoff. They ask me why and say they would never do that. So, I think I have decided this about them, if they had serious gut issues like I have for the past four years, where “healthy eating” was actually a present and active practice in the conventional sense, but still felt bad all the time with bloating, fatigue, pain, constipation, occasional fleeting relief only to be countered the next day by worse pain and bloating, they wouldn’t think this is “crazy” and they would actually want to do it.
Meal planning is a lot less stressful now that I am fully aware of the boundaries of this plan. The egg bake in the fridge is a great way to get extra veggies in without eating salad every meal and without mushy cooked veggies. I have found that bloating and pain have subsided if I do a few things differently and they’re not that hard! I cook a couple of pots of soup each week. I blend them in the blender and drink them up at lunch and they are so yummy. Broccoli was bothering me. I love it raw, it tasted great to me and has a nice texture. But it left me feeling gassy and bloated. I don’t like it cooked, because if I cook it enough that it doesn’t bother my gut, it’s mushy. When the water left in it squishes out in my mouth, it gags me. Who wants broccoli soup? Not me. But I’ll eat some cream of broccoli soup like crazy….I can’t have dairy so I dismissed it the first week.
Then I was like, hold the phone. I can cook it down in some chicken broth, onions and ghee. Add some almond milk or almond and coconut milk and blend it. It becomes a creamy, salty, very healthy comforting bowl of goodness and I don’t feel bad about eating it at all. In fact, I feel really good about eating it. Boom, I get more veggies in, I feel full and I don’t have to stab at a salad with a plastic fork on my lunch break. My gut thanks me. It turns out that if I cook the broccoli and blend it up with the other ingredients I love the fluffy texture and I digest it perfectly. This week, I also added spinach and carrots to the blend. It made a gorgeous green soup that my co-workers said “eww” to. That’s fine with me. I am comfortable with not having to share it. People always want some of your salad, but they don’t typically want your grass colored “whatever that is in your bowl.”
Keep eating, my friends.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
Day 14: Procrastinating wears me out
Ok so i have a confession… I procrastinate about school work, cleaning, opening mail… you name it. The only thing I do in a timely manner is eat. But guess what… today I procrastinated myself right into feeling exhausted. I was so stressed out because I waited too long to send my interview questions to a friend for a school paper of mine, I ended up emailing my professor and telling her my paper would be LATE. How embarrassing. But anyway, the reason I made this great Confession is to tell you, stress really does lead to a lot of bad things. I was feeling pretty stressed out all week because of some family stuff, then all weekend I piled on, “I’ll do it tomorrow” with my schoolwork, but still continued to think about he fact that I hadn’t done it. It’s like I couldn’t get up the nerve to turn on my laptop.
I started freaking out about my last assignment due, snapping at everyone, wishing for some peace and relaxation. Trying to genie blink myself back to Tortola… so the moral of the story is…. stop doing the same thing and expecting different results. I guess this 10% off my grade will make me HAVE to turn the other assignments in on time.
Jeremy made soup today and we both continued on our way to feeling better and being healthy. For the first time in many years I had an entire basket full of healthy food that I knew would not go to waste. I knew exactly how and when I was eating this stuff cause I’m 14 days into the Whole30 and I’m basically a pro. The salad stuff would be eaten in a few days, the veggies for soup would go today, (ok I’m throwing that cashew milk away if I can’t cook the taste out of it) the fruit would be gobbled up as breakfast a dinner sides, the eggs, EVERYTHING would be gone and into our bellies. No wasting. Why would I let it go to waste now? I wouldn’t have anything at all to eat 😦 And I am not failing at this.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
Day 18- Go to Hell donut
Ok, so today there was a training and my daughter had a long awaited specialist appointment that got moved from Friday to Thursday. I really wanted to be the one to take her. But I had to do this training. So I go, believing there would be donuts, cereal bars, juice and coffee with creamer, and there was. A new donut shop just opened up in this small town and it is ALL THE RAGE. Everyone is talking about how yummy these sourdough circular sugary wheat bullets are and I was finally faced with them in person. I resisted. I’m proud. Not because I didn’t crave them, I could smell them from the freakin elevator. But because I knew how yucky they might make me feel later and I respect my body enough not to want to do that. Also, I’m on day 18 of the Whole30 and have been compliant thus far. Donuts will still be there when I’m done. They’re still going to taste the same, should I dare to eat one. They will not fall off the face of the earth 🌏 just because I didn’t eat them yet.
Let me tell you what a donut will do to me right now. I will get a lovely sugar high, fill my belly with that sweet starchy bread and feel all warm and gooey for about five minutes. Then, I’ll still be hungry and my veggies and fruit won’t taste so good. I’ll get a headache when I come down off my sugar high. Then later and probably for a couple of days I’ll have a belly ache from whatever it is in things with wheat that sets my immune system into a tailspin. Not worth it.
I had a stressful day so I wasn’t that hungry overall, and probably didn’t eat enough calories for a girl my size. But I still don’t feel as bad as I probably would have if I had eaten the donut. That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about them all day though.
I had a bad temper this afternoon when my kids came home telling me that after they had only a half day at school and had played for seven hours at their afterschool training program, they didn’t have time to get there homework done. As they flopped down in their beds all mad at me because I wouldn’t let them stay up late and do their homework, I decided I’m a mean mom. And that’s ok.
Personal responsibility and accountability have to start when you are young and natural consequences are the best teacher. Some people would stay up late with their kids and help them do their homework and hope that next time they made a better decision. That wasn’t me today. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with the donut though.
Are you doing it? Have you done it? Do you think I am disturbed? Leave a comment and let me know 🙂
So here are my results on day 31 of the Whole30 according to Myfitnesspal, My Aria Scale and Fitstream. For all you who said, “that’s crazy” and for all you who are just curious. There’s no shame in my game.
Then. Now
165.9. – 156.9
waist 36/ 34
hips 42/ 38
neck 14/ 13
I lost an inch in every other one of my measurements except my thighs…. Lost 4 inches on each thigh at that fattest part. The part that keeps your phone from falling in the toilet. That part.
dude….. I feel fantastic about this … 9 lbs… I’ll take it. I’m 5’8″ and although I know it’s only 9 lbs, I feel like it was 30. That’s how good I feel. I am never crazy hungry now (hangry) and when I’m hungry after dinner, I don’t feel bad about having a little something because I haven’t put junk in my body throughout the day. I’m surprised at how little food it takes to satisfy me when I feel like I need a little snack. It’s actually a LITTLE snack. A couple shrimp or the rest of a salad I had earlier at dinner.
So much has changed for me in 30 days. Severe grouchiness in the morning, stomach aches all the time, headaches, sinus infections, lethargy, anxiety, depression, inattention, back aches, and insomnia, all gone! I’m still mean as Hell but that’s just me I guess…It’s not like me to gush, so take me seriously here folks. I didn’t do this for weight loss but I am stoked about it as well.
Things you will probably need to successfully complete the WHOLE30 (In my opinion)
Ghee- Serves as a cooking oil, probiotic digestive aid, mix in (think mashed potatoes with ghee and almond milk), spread on, dip in.
Whole30 Approved Buffalo Sauce- You know, for wings and dipping things in.
Whole30 Approved Dressing and Marinade (Zesty Ranch)- It is like an oil based dressing and marinade which I used for marinades, dipping and dressings.
target=”_blank”>Safe Catch soy free tuna- I am not a huge tuna fan, but you can get these in many stores and it served as a good emergency food for me.
Why have tuna when you can have Smoked Trout though? Its almost $4 a can in the stores. I included a link here but couldn’t find one with a decent price. Just go to Walmart.
Karen Bradberry, MA is the owner and sole writer for “Disturbing Clarity”, a humorous yet factual blog found at http://www.clearlyiamdisturbed.com. She began this blog in effort to try to fill in the gaps for travelers like herself, ready for adventure and avoiding disaster. As a parent, college student and full time counselor, Karen strives to bring a better understanding of the places she visits, how to get there and how much it really costs to readers who have always wanted to travel. You can reach Karen Bradberry by writing to: clearlyiamdisturbed@gmail.com
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