Weight Loss Fads: Whole30 (Part 1)
February 9, 2023 Ashley 0 Comments
“Hey, girl! Wanna grab some wine and catch up?” I asked my friend, Micah, a few months ago.
“Ughhh… I SO do – but I’m doing Whole 30. I can’t. (*insert tear streaked emoji*)”
“Whole what?” I asked, matching her tearful emojis with my own.
Normally I’d eyeroll about another dumb dietary fad.
However, being a writer on wellness and fitness, I was also intrigued. This intrigue only increased as I saw more and more posts from friends (and the kinda people who aren’t actually friends but you don’t have the heart to delete) on social media. Okay, so what was this thing? Why was anyone willing to try it? Simply put, Whole30 is a diet you follow for 30 days. Why? Because, the claim is that, once completed, you’ll realize a host of benefits. Better sleep, high energy, improved mood, and (yes) weight loss all await you… according to the designers of this challenge. Sounds pretty promising, right? But what do we have to do to reap all these awesome benefits?
The rules go as follows:
For 30 days, you can’t eat dairy (like yogurt, cheese, or any milk products). You also can’t have beans and legumes (not even lentils, black beans, peanuts, or chickpease). Grains aren’t allowed. (And that’s not just the refined ones – whole grains aren’t permitted either). Also, sweeteners are contraband. (That’s not just refined sugar either). Soy of any kind and most processed foods aren’t allowed. Then, of course, you can’t have alcohol. (Sorry, Micah.)
But I didn’t have to miss Micah and our wine bistro nights for too long.
Why? Well, (as you may have guessed it), this diet doesn’t last forever.
As the name implies, Whole30 lasts for 30 days.
However, the design of it is intended to keep you on it indefinitely because you have to do this every day for 30 days. The secondary rule is: if you quit, you have to start all over again – at day one. The point, presumably, is to create a new lifestyle pattern. This happens one of two ways: the first is because it’s hard to quit all your addictions at once, so you inevitably cave. That means you have to keep starting over (meaning that you’re mostly on this diet and only falling off only occasionally) and over. And over. It inadvertently becomes a lifestyle change because the inevitable failure becomes your “cheat day” amongst a 90/10 or 95/5 lifestyle. The other way it can happen is that you genuinely do stick with it for the full 30 days, after which you realize how awesome you feel and then keep carrying on with it (like I’m doing with my non-latte challenge) long after the challenge is over. The modification to this is that you realize you feel really good when you don’t consume these foods, and learn how to moderate better – intentionally introducing just one cheat day for all these vice foods.
While the latter way is fine for those who can do it, the former can be a setup for failure. If you consume all or even most of those items regularly and genuinely enjoy them, quitting just one for a month is tough. We already mentioned how trying to do all at once makes it even easier to falter. This also creates a psychologically negative mindset around diet. Feelings of guilt about caving to cravings may make people fall off altogether – or develop a host of mental health disorders. In addition, it could perpetuate self sabotage where normally there’d be none. For days you do eat some ice cream or pizza, you might think, “Well, I might as well call the whole day a loss and make it count if I have to start over”, then really binge eat all the other bad stuff too, and skip the gym you were planning on going to as well.
So how do we fix this?
Keep reading to find out a better way to win at a diet like Whole30…