Doing Whole 30: Week One

I enjoy cooking. I really do. But boy have I ever done a lot of cooking since Alex and I decided to do the Whole 30 challenge. The basic run down is that you cut out foods that are known to be inflammatory for 30 whole days and then reintroduce them at the end of 30 days to see how they affect you (if at all) and to help you have more insight into how your body reacts to certain foods.

 It also helps you quit nasty habits and retrain yourself to have a healthy relationship with food. For example no longer using food as a reward/stress relief/catch all for your emotions. If you are interested in learning more you can read about it more here.

Alex and I decided to do this challenge for a variety of reasons. Well, if we're being honest I wanted to do it and Alex agreed because I'm the one that feeds him! We realized that despite us telling each other we wanted to eat "healthy" we didn't really have any kind of plan in mind and weren't really following through. We had also realized that we defaulted to pasta A LOT instead of exploring different foods and recipes. This really has forced me to get creative in what we eat! 

Changes we've experience so far...

The Whole 30 requires that you eat 3 meals a day. Not skip breakfast, eat a bag of M&M's and chips for lunch, and then sit down to dinner like we had been doing. Because of this we decided to wake up earlier and eat breakfast together every morning. It's been really great to get a jump start on our day by getting up an hour earlier than before. I also like getting the chance to talk and share a meal before we start our work days. 

While our grocery bill has gone up we are no longer eating out or buying gas station snacks so in total this has been great on our wallets. The occasional (okay, almost everyday) gas station snack really adds up in a week.

We do sooooo many dishes!!

We've both been feeling pretty good the whole time. I had one rough day on day 7 that was not fun. But overall eating whole foods for every meal has been good to us.

What we've been eating....

Definitely the most difficult part of this challenge is being prepared with meals for every turn. It's easy to say no to fast food when you already have delicious meals waiting for you at home. Not so easy when the fridge is empty and you have no idea what to make!

I have been meal planning a week at a time and grocery shopping once a week. We also hit up the farmers market to get a lot of our produce. Because we are going through so many veggies it's crazy!

This is what we ate the first week!

Closing thoughts....

While I don't usually buy into fad diet type things I think their is some merit to this program. We are not killing ourselves over what type of oil our burger was cooked in at the restaurant or if we accidentally ate one of Haven's craisin's that has added sugar. But anything that encourages us to eat more whole foods and home cooked meals can't be all that bad. We don't expect to be magically cured of every aliment ever (as some of the Facebook groups make it appear) but we are happy with forming better healthier habits that will hopefully carry on after the 30 days are over!