Whole30: Shop-a-thon

Yesterday was the binge and purge of all the food in our kitchen. Well, not entirely, our boys still have to eat. But for the most part, our kitchen has been cleansed of all the starchy, creamy, stuff we can’t eat over the next 30 days. And boy did it send me on a tizzy.

It's the size of my head!!
It’s the size of my head!!

The day started off with a tip to the Marietta City Farmer’s Market, where I loaded us up on some fresh veggies. There’s nothing quite as good as local produce. Its crazy the difference home grown/organic makes. I mean, check out this friggin’ sweet potato! It’s the size of my head! It was a good haul of sweet potatoes, avocados, okra, green beans, peaches, tomatoes, kale, red and green peppers, some sausage, and almond butter. We will definitely be going back here for future produce purchases.

We knew we needed a lot more stuff so a trip to our local grocery store was up for the afternoon. As this Whole30 thing continues, I find it both easier and more difficult to shop at places like Publix and Kroger. The Kroger near us has a fairly good “natural” food section and some decent produce, but I really just dislike the store in general. It feels dirty and the service there is awful. I don’t shop there often enough to know where everything is and I don’t like the layout. The deli counter is meh at best, and the seafood was something I’d rather not see. Publix on the other hand is like a magical wonderland full of helpful employees, samples, fresher looking produce, free cookies for the kids, and occasional free samples for the adults! We can walk around in our racecar shopping carts, up and down the aisles loading up our cart with all the tasty treats we’ve come to enjoy and love! Wait… not any more we can’t.

That’s the thing. We once were able to make a list, go to the store, and 30 mins later be out the door with a full cart, cookies for the baby, and we’d be stocked up for the week. Now we have to stop and read the labels. Every. Single. Label. Granted if we stayed to the outside perimeter of the store and only went into the innards of the store for stuff like coconut milk and frozen items, we should be fine. But even then, its not that easy. Want some bacon? Nope, its sugar cured. Forget about the dairy section. Almond/Coconut milk, nah, sugar or some other added chemicals for “flavor”. The label checking is hard enough, but throw 2 kids in the mix and difficulty increases tenfold.

I was having a mini anxiety attack after leaving the store, but despite a grocery store that was lackluster in what we REALLY needed we still managed to load up with all manner of things that we can eat over the next 30 days. The label looking will get easier and we’ll soon know what’s on/off limits. I have a few butchers I need to visit so we can find some more choice meat, and I’m gonna look online for some other items to stock up on.

Fruits and veggies galore!

Next level salad!

4 meat salad
Four meat salad!

We are constantly looking for ways to eat cleaner and stick to our Whole30 Challenge. Well last night we went out for some BBQ and I ordered the 4 meat + 2 side combo (Sausage, Brisket, Chicken, Turkey + Salad and Collards). There was no way I was going to be able to eat all of it so I brought the meats home with me. Today rather than have a simple pile of meat on a plate I made an epic salad. What made it doubly epic wasn’t just the fact that it had 4 different animals on it, but I got creative and “hard boiled” an egg in the break room microwave! For dressing I had simple oil, vinegar, and seasonings. It ’twas a yummy salad to say the least. I felt satisfied and good after!

Typically I would have had some sort of bread or starch with this meat pile. I would have also had a soda or something with it. Then a few hour later I would have most likely went into a slump at work and wanted to just fall asleep. That would have made going to the gym tonight even more difficult. Instead I felt pretty good and decided to take a walk and enjoy the afternoon weather that’s finally cooperating in Georgia. The rest of my afternoon I’ve felt productive and can’t wait to go to the gym and crush some PRs!

All this from a “simple” salad! Who knew that eating clean had so many benefits. I can’t wait to see what deliciousness I bring for tomorrow’s lunch.

Microwaved poached/hard boiled egg
– Add roughly 1/3 cup water to a coffee cup, or other microwave safe container.
– Crack the egg and add the yolk and whites to the water
– Microwave for 40-60 secs on 80% power
– Check your egg for doneness
– Enjoy
I’ve found that if I use the hot water from the coffee maker I can poach the egg leaving a velvety center in roughly 40 seconds. If I cook the egg for 60 seconds the egg comes out closer to hard boiled.

 

PaleO Snap!

So over the weekend Jess and I started our adventure into this Whole30/Paleo deal. I think we were a bit confused. Now I think I’ve got it sorted out. The Whole30 is essentially a 30 day cleanse/challenge which is a more strict and streamlined version of Paleo. Paleo itself is already pretty rigid in terms of what you should/shouldn’t eat, but the Whole30 is on another level.

From what we can ascertain we went Paleo. We didn’t contract “polio” as Chase would have everyone believe, instead we began a journey into a cleaner and healthier way of eating. So far it’s been a bit taxing, but not impossible. Heck, I’ve lost like 3lbs since Saturday so we must be doing something right! But today, one of the owners of our gym posted that on August 19th they would be starting the Whole30 challenge. At first I was VERY intimidated by the challenge, but then the more I got to chatting with the gym folks the more I became intimidated by them for me to NOT do the challenge. And so I inadvertently signed Jess and I up for this thing. The good news, we will have had like a 6 day head start to get our bodies adjusted to the change.

I posted the other day about this whole change, but since then some new information has come out and I’d like to make some updates. For starters, I will be giving up sugar of all forms. Yes, this means my morning coffee(s). I’ve gone over it a thousand times in my brain on how to accomplish this no sugar thing and still have my coffee, but I just can’t drink straight black coffee. It doesn’t work for me. What I can drink, and really enjoy is unsweet tea. That is something I can live with. Other things that I’ll be giving up are all forms of grains, which means pastas, breads, oatmeal, etc. Also, there will be no beans of any type. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to be living off water and grass for the next 30 days. I have a whole list of vegetables, fruits, fats, and meats that I can load our kitchen with. Jess and I are like Mr. Wizard and a female version of Bill Nye in the kitchen when it comes to making delicious meals, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

What IS a problem is the shock that my body is currently going through. Like I said I’ve lost anywhere between 3 and 5 pounds since Saturday, and it’s only Tuesday! Right now I am laying in bed feeling hollow and hungry. I feel like I’m just empty and need to eat something. But a) there’s nothing here to eat that meets the criteria or our new diet and b) I refuse to gorge myself of food at 11 at night. I know this is temporary, but it still sucks. I just don’t think we were initially prepared so we didn’t stock out kitchen with enough proper foods to sustain us for the week. Yeah we got through the first few days, but now we’re scrambling and everything feels like we’re giving something up and not like we are making a smart choice. I don’t think I’m replacing the stuff I’ve given up with anything that’s providing me with the fullness I had before. Again, this will take some time to adjust, but tonight… It sucks. I’m restless and want a damn plate of nachos.

So that’s my rant. I figured if I can’t have any food, I can at least make a post about it. This feels like a good outlet. I feel better about the choice we’ve made and hope to keep up with the rigor. Stay tuned for more updates and progress reports!

Oh, the cover photo for this post is my sausage, spinach, and egg frittata. It wa amazeballs. I plan on having a lot of that over the next 30+ days.

The Whole30, or at least the Half30… or maybe Half15

Over the past few months Jess and I have been doing fantastic at going to the gym. We’ve also done really well with our eating. That’s not to say that there’s no room for improvement, but in general we’re doing pretty good. On the flip side however we’ve kinda stalled out.

This happens with virtually any fitness/health routine. You do great the first week, maybe a month, but eventually you hit a wall or plateau and just come to a halt. Your body becomes use to the way things are, the level of effort required to do your WODs and most of the toxins have been sweated out in the gym. Slowly but surely, things slow down. Something has to change. With Jess and I its our diet. Like I said, we’re not making bacon cheeseburger pizzas for dinner or loading up on double decker tacos, but we are making choices that could be improved upon. That’s where the Whole30 comes in. Most of the people we talk to at the gym are on Paleo or some form. The owners have touted about Whole30 for quite a while now so we decided to tip-toe into the arena.

The Paleo Diet

We did our research, looked over the can/can’t have lists and decided it was going to be a lot tougher than we anticipated. With 2 kids (11 and 19 months), it was going to be even tougher. So we decided to do a modified version. I’m deeming it the Half15! Mainly because we’re still consuming SOME of what we did before, and we’re going to start off with 15 days rather than the full 30.

So here’s the rundown. Our biggest hurdle is alcohol. We’ve decided to not have any alcohol, with the exception of a wedding we’re going to in 2 weeks, for 30 days. This is pretty big for us. We added it up and on any given week, we would go through a 12 pack for beer or 1-2 bottles of wine. I know, we might as well join AA… but not really. This seems like a small amount, but over the course of a month it adds up, both in calories and on the wallet. We don’t NEED that beer while cooking dinner then another with our dinner, so we might as well cut it out of our diet. And yes, wine does pair nicely with red meat or fish (or tacos, or burgers, or hummus, etc). But again, we don’t need it. So why not eliminate it completely from our diet. Only good can come of that, right? We’ve already established that we will most likely be grumpy at each other or pout about not having our whiskey drink while watching TV, but we’re gonna stay strong and stick to it.

The next part of our plan is to eliminate as many grains, starches, sugars, and such as we can from our diet. This is a big part of Paleo and the Whole30. Much of the breads, pastas, rice, flour, etc that we eat on a daily basis is so processed that it has virtually no nutritional value, and what value is there actually does more harm than good. I’m not going to preach about what other’s should/shouldn’t eat, I’m just going to know what we’re doing. Now there will be some exceptions and I’m not going to rush out and buy a tiny bag of almond flour for $12, but for the most part we’re cutting things out. Another big change is the fats which we use to cook our foods in. We don’t go Paula Deen style and use a stick of butter when scrambling an egg, but watching what you cook your food in, is just as important as the food that’s being cooked. So we’ll look for coconut oil and what ever other approved fats we can.

There are things however, that we will not be giving up just yet. For example our morning coffee is something that is needed. We probably won’t die if we don’t have it, but other’s around us might. We will continue to use the Truvia and fat free creamer. After all, most of the “paleo creamers” have coconut milk and raw eggs. Nope. That’s not gonna happen. In addition, there will be some occasions when we’ll have some bread or peanut butter. We have to stay realistic. If we go cold turkey and eliminate all these things off the bat then we’ll be setting ourselves up for failure. This is something we’re going to have to ease into. Over time we may find it easier to eliminate these types of things, but for now, we’ll just do our best.

As I mentioned before, we have 2 kids. One is a picky eater and the other is a pickier eater (I’ll let you decide which is which). They live off things that are processed and laden with sugars. I’m not going to make my kids go through the change with us. I mean, Chase started middle school last week and I’m fairly confident they don’t have a Whole30/Paleo option on the lunch menu. And when he gets home in the afternoon, its been a good 5+ hours since he’s eaten, so if he goes for a bag of chips or Pop-tart, I’m ok with that. We can certainly cut out some of the bad options that we provide in the house. Sugary drinks will be replaced with less sugary drinks, we’ll have more fruits and vegetables available on the off chance that he goes for some carrots instead of Funions.

Its going to be a process. It won’t simply happen over night, and we will stumble along the way. But we will also be there to help each other along. We will do our best to chronicle this adventure and see how things progress over the next 30 days (or 15 for now).