We started our Whole30 on March 2, just after Naomi’s birthday. It’s been an interesting first week.
For me it hasn’t been too dramatic a change. I stopped eating gluten just over a year ago, when I started violently disagreeing with it. And we decided early this year to do the Whole30, which meant that in the 6 weeks or so before we started, I began to experiment with what foods the kids would eat, and trying to figure out how much food we’d need eating this way. Because of complications with breastfeeding, I haven’t been eating much sugar or dairy, so cutting those out hasn’t been dramatic or difficult for me.
Felix doesn’t notice any difference, because he’s been eating breastmilk, meat, veggies, and fruit anyway, so nothing has changed for him.
The kids also had a fairly soft entry into it, because of my experiments. They’re annoyed about certain things: Tess wants her vitamins (added sweetener in the form of fructose means they’re not on the Whole30), Sim wanted honey in his tea, Naomi wants cheese, and Hannah has been hankering to bake. For the most part, though, they like the food they’re getting. In fact, we did some maki rolls, and they’re all very enthusiastic about those.
The kids did seem to have some effects from it, though. Naomi had a couple of meltdowns that I was pretty surprised to see – she’s been meltdown-free for years now, and these were full, weeping on the floor meltdowns. Hannah had a couple of extremely cranky days. Tess revisited her earlier phase of easily weeping. I think Sim was fairly even keel, but even he had his moments last week. I was just glad that I had eased into it, because the combination of all of us doing the crankies at the same time could have been disastrous.
Tess has been EATING. It’s pretty great. She was low weight at her 2 year checkup, and since then I’ve had to do a lot of feeding her at meals. Lately, though, she’s cleaning her plate with little or no help from me and then asking for MORE MORE MORE. She’s sometimes eating as much as Sim at a meal, which almost never happened before.
The kids are also eating breakfast soon after getting up, which is a good sign of healthy digestive hormone activity. Before I’d need to call them (particularly Hannah and Naomi) from their various other occupations to remind them to eat, but lately they’ve been getting themselves into the kitchen and figuring out breakfasts. Naomi, Sim, and Tess all like plain omelets.
Michael probably had it the hardest as far as transitions go. He packed sandwiches for lunch most days at work and ate snacks of crackers. He didn’t get the benefit of easing into it as much as the rest of us, because he kept that up until just before we started. Last week, as his body was adjusting, he went through some of the things that are listed on the Whole30 timeline.
Day 8, today, was pretty good for most of us. Daylight Savings Time, of course, STINKS, and added its problematic sleep and waking and eating patterns. We had some trouble at lunch when Sim decided he doesn’t like maki rolls after all (I told him that he could just eat the ingredients separately and not have nori, but the joy of rolling it overpowered him…then he didn’t want to eat it. I had him eat the ingredients out of the nori). However, I notice that he’s much less disturbed by difficulties that he encounters (in karate, as well as other places) when he’s eaten the Whole30 way.
Michael felt that his energy was back, his mind clear, and his body functioning normally again. That’s good news. He’s also enjoying the lunches I’ve been packing for him. ;)
The hardest part for me so far has been the amount of time I’ve needed to spend in the kitchen. There’s a lot of cooking. I usually try to cook additional things when I’m making one meal (I make Michael’s lunches for the next day when I’m making our lunch or dinner at home) so that I don’t have to make everything from scratch for every meal, but there’s still a lot of cooking – we have 7 eaters in our house! I actually really like to cook, but I realize that I’m going to need to recruit more help from the kids on certain things.
We haven’t conquered too many situations where we have to eat other people’s food yet. We opted not to go to the Lenten soup supper at our parish last Friday, which we normally would do. We could have brought our own soup, but I wasn’t feeling up to fighting the bread battle, especially with Tess, who is convinced that the point of the Whole30 is to ruin her fun, at least when I tell her she can’t have bread. Because of Spring Ahead, we went to Mass on Saturday evening. On Sunday, we took a hike as a family instead of bringing the kids to Sunday School, where they would have had snacks to navigate. (That wasn’t just to avoid the snacks – it was a truly gorgeous day and we wanted to get out there!) We won’t avoid all situations that involve others’ food, but this was somewhat the easier way for the first weekend.
Usually we’d get doughnuts after Mass, but instead I made a smoothie of coconut milk and blueberries. Whole30 discourages (but doesn’t outlaw) smoothies because drinking calories turns out to be a good way to not pay as much attention to them. Since we’re not actually in need of weight loss, I don’t think it’s a big deal to have occasional smoothies. Everyone loved it, too. (And I think we’re going to try a pineapple one next!)
Someone asked me what I miss most. Chocolate.
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