I Did The Whole30 Food Challenge And Lived To Tell The Tale
And you can too, PROBABLY!
Hi and hello! My name is Lara, and although I generally try to eat pretty healthy, I definitely have a weakness for chocolate, Trader Joe's burritos, and Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Lara Parker
Like many of you with a Facebook account, I’ve been seeing my friends participate in this #Whole30 lifestyle-change-thing for MONTHS now, and have always thought about what it would be like to do it on my own.
@slssantos / Via instagram.com
In case you don't know all about it, Whole30 is kind of like the biggest elimination diet short of just eating lettuce every day. The idea is that your body will stop craving the "bad" stuff like sugar, etc. It will change your taste entirely, and could change your relationship to food altogether. The rules of Whole30 are as follows:
- No dairy.
- No alcohol!!! (Not even for cooking you sneaky humans.)
- No grains.
- No legumes aka beans, and definitely not any peanuts.
- No carrageenan, MSG, or sulfites. (I didn't know either, but basically start learning to read your labels.)
- NO added sugar of any kind (besides like, fruit lol)
- No re-creating guilty pleasures, like cupcakes, etc. Sorry. I was pissed about this, too. But I didn't make these rules.
- And absolutely no stepping on the scale!
There's a book you can buy that can help you with all of this, which I did buy, but have yet to open TBQFH because the internet exists.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / Via amazon.com
Because I suffer from chronic pain, I was really curious whether completely changing my diet to this extreme for a full 30 days would actually help me feel better.
Or should I just continue to eat chocolate and bread 4ever because I've already suffered enough? Plus, god knows I've been through enough elimination diets.
Lara Parker