Whole30 – Day 1

My sister and I have been planning to do the Whole30 together this January for a several weeks now, and here we are, Day 1. She actually started yesterday, January 1st, but due to a family appointment with homemade paella last night, I waited until today.

And what is the Whole30? A cleanse, this one created by Melissa and Dallas Hartwig in 2009. As Hartwig herself puts it in the program rules, the idea is to ‘Eliminate the most common craving-inducing, blood sugar disrupting, gut-damaging, inflammatory food groups for a full 30 days…Push the reset button with your health, habits, and relationship with food, and the downstream physical and psychological effects of the food choices you’ve been making.” For 30 days you consume no sugar, alcohol, legumes, dairy, carrageenan, MSG or sulfites, and no grains or baked goods (no grain substitutes, coconut flour for example). Instead you eat moderate amounts of meat, seafood and eggs, lots of veggies, a bit of fruit, and plenty of natural fats. Herbs and spices are in as are vinegar and clarified butter. If you're interested in the specifices, please google The Whole30 for more details, or download the program rules.

Why am I doing the Whole30? I suspect some of the aches and pains I am currently rocking are the result of food induced inflammation. At least I hope so. If caused by food, there is something specific and focused I can do about them. If not, then they are just a regular part of garden variety aging and dealing with them becomes my new hobby. Talking about one’s health has got to be the single most effective way of boring everyone within the sound of your voice or throw of your writing, but to determine later whether the exercise was beneficial or not, we need a starting point. My current aches and pains list includes: neck, upper back, lower back, upper arms, wrists, knees and ankles. It might make sense to add some detail around some of that in a future post. For now I'll just leave it as a list, and we’ll see if anything improves over the next 30 days.

I am not recommending this program for you, just explaining why I am doing it. However, I am currently reading the Hartwig’s book It Starts with Food, and this I do recommend for anyone considering The Whole30 who wants to understand the science behind it. Interesting stuff.

Finally, why am I posting on Steemit about this? I haven’t posted much yet, but the more I do the more clarity I gain on what I want to write about. What interests me most are people and their interactions with one another and the forces in their lives. In this case, there are lots of possible interactions: with food, with my oh so fascinating aches and pains list, with my sister, with my family and household (a husband, an ex-husband (I know), a teen daughter and a twenty-something son). No one in the house plans to join me on this journey by the way, we do eat together regularly, and my kids are kind of judgey about me and what I choose to eat. So dinner time alone seems fraught with opportunities for lively interaction. The one exception to my going it alone at home is that my loving husband is showing solidarity and support by giving up alcohol along with me for a month. He is still going to eat bagels and bread and cereal and pasta, but beer is off his list until the first of February. I don't know that he and I drank more over the holidays in preparation for a January in the frigid midwest without alcohol, but we certainly didn't drink less. Anyway, it all seems full of potential for storytelling. We'll see on that front as well.

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