...Trigger warning: This post deals with the topic of disordered eating...
If you type "what is Whole30?" into your web browser, you will find people calling it a diet, or a challenge but while it could be called a diet in so much as one definition of "diet" is "the kinds of food that a person habitually eats" and it is certainly challenging, it is so much more than that. The Whole30 website says:
The Whole30 is designed to change your life in 30 days—but it’s not a diet, a detox, or a weight-loss program. It’s a short-term elimination diet, powered by habit research and grounded in well over a decade of clinical experience. The Whole30 helps you achieve three important goals:
Identify the food sensitivities that impact your energy, sleep, digestion, mood, cravings, pain, and other symptoms
Create new habits and techniques for successfully navigating stress, discomfort, and negative emotions
Re-establish a healthy relationship with food by reducing cravings, reconnecting with your body, and trusting your body’s signals
In short, Whole30 is 30 days of eating only whole foods, but not all whole foods.
As well as the obvious eliminations like sugar and gluten (bye bye biscuits and bread), Whole30 also eliminates grains, soy, dairy and legumes from your diet, the goal being to eliminate all foods that are known to be inflammatory in some people. After 30 days of clean eating, any systemic inflammation in your body caused by your diet will have gone and on Day 31, you can start systematically reintroducing these foods, to identify which, if any, have been responsible for your aches and pains, spikes or dips in energy, or digestive discomfort.
When I told my mum about this reintroducing stage, she asked "so if you discover you're sensitive to bread, does that mean you can never eat bread again?!" No mum, I reassured her. It means that I can then weigh up whether a slice of sourdough garlic bread with dinner is worth the discomfort or bloating I might feel the next day and choose to eat it, knowing full well how it will make me feel. (Sourdough is a bad example as it's naturally low in gluten and so is less likely to cause digestive discomfort than other breads and a slice or four of homemade sourdough garlic bread will always be worth any discomfort the next day in my opinion.)
So here I am, writing this post during my re-introductory period and if I'm being honest, Whole30 hasn't worked for me in the way that I hoped it would however, I think I know why. Whole30 would have had a much bigger impact on me if I had been making bigger changes.
That is to say, Whole30 hasn't really been that hard for me because I was already eating a mostly wholefood diet.
If I didn't already drink my tea black, removing milk and sugar from it would have been the biggest challenge and in preparation for my Whole30, I started experimenting with things like courgette noodles instead of spaghetti and bun-less burgers.
Obviously the complete removal of all chocolate and "non-compliant" snacks was not enjoyable, but 30 days without chocolate in exchange for some answers felt relatively easy compared to 40 days without chocolate for Lent.
Once we had gotten used to using homemade stock instead of stock cubes and once we knew which products and brands were Whole30 compliant, shopping and cooking Whole30 wasn't really that different to how we cooked before. So while on the one hand, my experience of Whole30 has been far easier and smoother than I imagine some people's would be, the result is that I haven't seen any distinct changes in my energy levels or unfortunately, my discomfort levels.
One thing that did change noticeably over the 30 days was my mood, and not for the better. Whole30 made me irritable, short-tempered and just not very pleasant to be around. The greatest lesson I have learned during this time has been just how important food is to me. One of the main reasons why I wanted to do a Whole30 is because I was worried about my relationship with food. I really enjoy the sensation of gorging myself on chocolate; I love that thick, sticky mouth feel that comes with a big bite of chocolate and if I buy a bag of something like Buttons or Maltesers, I won't stop at a few. I will eat the entire bag and languish in the feeling of being too full afterwards. While this kind of behaviour is acceptable once in a blue moon, I was concerned that I was using it to comfort myself on an all-too-regular occasion. I hoped that by doing a Whole30, I would reduce if not completely remove my sugar cravings and establish a healthier relationship with food in terms of comfort eating.
But what I've learned during my Whole30 is that my love of food goes much deeper than just comfort eating. My enjoyment of food is a ritual.
As I sit here, I realise that Whole30 has reduced my sugar cravings but it hasn't stopped my food cravings. I'm not sure that I've ever really been craving just sugar when I've had a hankering for a Toblerone, I think I've been craving something much more. You see for me, enjoying my favourite foods, like chocolate bars, cake and biscuits is about the whole experience of the thing. I get as much enjoyment out of looking forward to my favourite food as I do from eating it. Almost every day when I'm at work, I look forward to what is for dinner and if we've got a special dessert too, that excitement is twofold. From the moment I say to Watson "ooh, you know what we haven't made in a while..." the ritual begins. That item or recipe gets added to our shopping list and we plan when we're going to have it, first hit of joy. Then we buy it, second hit of joy, and it arrives, third hit of joy. Every time I see it in the cupboard or fridge in the days leading up to the day we eat it, I get a little boost of joy and when the day comes, I will bounce of bed and skip through my day, knowing I have something really delicious to look forward to when I get home. I get as much enjoyment out of looking forward to delicious food as I do from eating the food itself and that is something that Whole30 took away from me.
During my 30 days, not once did had that same level of enjoyment for a food as I get from chocolate. Don't get me wrong, there have been some delicious meals along the way, like this incredible concoction of chicken thigh meat, grated sweet potato, apple and walnuts that is simply heavenly, but nothing has sparked joy in the same way a really good biscuit can. And while I haven't enjoyed the dullness I've felt for the past month, I am very grateful that Whole30 has shown me how important food is to me.
Without this crash course in sugar removal, I wouldn't have seen how deeply and emotionally my connection to food runs and these 30 days have given me the opportunity to really reflect on what I'm feeling and what I've felt I've been lacking. Before doing this, I knew that I enjoyed food, but I never really stopped to think about what food was giving me, other than a dopamine hit. But it's so much more than that. For me, food represents comfort; unbeknownst to me, it has always represented a peace-offering.
Food was a cornerstone of my childhood, once my stepfather entered our lives when I was seven. At that age, my mum described me as a fussy eater and so when my stepdad first cooked for us, he was warned that I might not eat what he put in front of me. As it happens, my stepdad was an amazing cook and I never left a plate of food untouched again. He taught me how to cook too. He taught me how to bake and how to make bread and every day after school, there would be something delicious waiting for us. That's what I mean about it being a peace-offering, because while on the one hand he was a loving and generous father who taught me everything he knew, on the other, he was tyrant.
Depression and chronic pain tortured his mind and rarely a day passed that he didn't take his struggle out on us. So while my sister and I would spend our school days afraid of what we would come home to, quite often the alleged faux pars of the day before would have been forgotten by the time we got home and the four of us would sit together, drinking tea and eating his latest bake, discussing our day before he made dinner. We all got so much joy from his excellent cooking, that it remained the one good thing throughout those trying times, although at times it was used as a source of control too. My sister recalls asking repeatedly for him to remake this one dish that she loved, but he never made it again for her and we both witnessed the time he threw a plate of food over our mother. She gained a lot of weight during her relationship with him because of all the baking he did and she often wonders if he baked so much in order to keep her with him. If ever she turned down something he had made in an attempt to watch her figure, he would fly into a rage, calling her ungrateful and accusing her of wanting to slim down for another man, so it was easier for her to just keep eating. Again, peace-offering.
I hadn't considered any of this until Whole30, and it was while I was contemplating where my daily ritual of tea and biscuits after work comes from, that I made the connection. There's another layer to my love of gorging on chocolate too and that stems from my money mindset. Following their separation and the repossession of our home, my mum and I moved into a council house while my stepdad moved into sheltered accommodation. Money was tight and eating out anywhere became the ultimate treat. During that time, I developed a form of stress-induced psoriasis that required twice-weekly trips to the hospital for UVA treatment. While we waited for the special solution my foot was soaked in to work it's magic before being zapped by a heat lamp, mum would always take us to the hospital cafeteria and we would always share a cream bun. It became our thing, our ritual. On the rare occasions that we went into town on the weekend, mum would treat us to a Costa. She would have a cappuccino while I had a hot chocolate and again, we would share a chocolate twist. We used to say that it was because neither of us could manage a whole one, but we both knew the real reason was that we couldn't afford to buy two.
Fast forward ten years and my first serious boyfriend had an unfortunate propensity for wracking up credit card debt. My first years as a "proper adult" were lived in the shadow of this debt and I felt the weight of it like heavy blanket that shrouded me with shame. I still remember the visceral feeling of realising how much debt we were in and feeling like there was no way out of that situation. In those times, we were managing to do our weekly shop on £10 a week and we were eating a lot of terrible food because it was cheap. To splurge on chocolate back then was a dream, and so now it feels like abundance. To have enough money in the bank to go out and buy a bag of Buttons if I want to and be able to eat the lot in one go and not have to make them last feels like financial security, which in turn feels like safety.
These days, my relationship with my parents and money is very different but my relationship with food appears to have stayed the same. Thanks to doing a Whole30 though, I now feel like I have a much greater understanding of my relationship with food and feel as though I can make informed decisions around my comfort eating. Now I know everything that food is giving me, I feel less as though my cravings are in control of me and that I can choose to indulge in my favourite foods from a place of understanding. What's more, now that I know that none of the foods I was consuming were causing the strange sensation in my abdomen (juries still out on that one but we suspect it's a hiatus hernia), I can go back to eating what I want, with the added benefit of being a little more mindful about it.
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