Whole 30 Prep

Ok ladies (and you know who you are!).  Here is my prep from this morning.  I started at 9:30am and ended right at 11:00am.  Most Sunday's I am up with the girls around 7am, so I do this as I feed them breakfast and am done by 9am.  I say this to point out that it is not disruptive to our day overall.  My one disclaimer is that I have been doing this for a long time, so I have a system down.  It used to take me longer, so it is reasonable to expect that it will take you longer, as well.  The silver lining is that, like anything else in life, practice makes habit.  Once it is a part of your routine then it's easier to keep in your routine.

To start, I went grocery shopping yesterday.  It is important to be intentional about the products you buy, but this doesn't mean it has to break the bank.  Truth is most meat bought conventionally in a store (this includes Whole Foods and Trader Joe's) will be sourced from a high volume farm or broker.  It's just not possible to turn out meat at that level without some compromising to the process. Keeping that in mind, it is important to consider where the meat is coming from.  Sam's* carries a number of decent meats and their company has been working to develop contracts with folks who are honestly working to better the food sourcing. *Yes, I know, they are a part of the Walmart family, but we are two social workers making this work on social worker budgets, so Sam's is our friend because it can be budget friendly.  As such, here are the things we have found at Sam's to be better than conventional meat and better on the budget than the big box whole foods places:

 Brown eggs.  Locally sourced eggs are always best, though.  The eggs at Sam's are still reasonably priced with the egg prices going up dramatically right now.

 Bagged frozen chicken is going to be the less desirable than fresh chicken, but this allows us to defrost and cook as needed.  My second choice is the Simple Truth chicken at Kroger. 

 Here is the ground beef we have been using recently.  Like the chicken, I also prefer Simple Truth Grass Fed Beef at Kroger.

 Coconut oil is good to cook and season with, especially at high heat.

Here are other products that are basics for us:

I'm not a fan of most almond milks, as most have more man made ingredients than anything, but this one is essentially almonds and water.  This is best behind home made (which is simple but not cheap).  I use this for my coffee and for cooking.

LaCroix is a lifesaver for me! For when I absolutely want something other than water or coffee.

Salsa is a lifesaver for JP.  He mostly puts it on his breakfast in the morning, but will also use it for other meals.  Make sure to read the label, though, as there are only few salsas that don't have added sweeteners.

A good substitute for soy sauce, coconut aminos are good for marinades and for seasoning.  I use a little when I saute veggies for flavor.

Cook a spaghetti squash and use some pasta sauce.  Yummy!  As with the salsa, you have to read the labels, as few do not have sweeteners in them (this brand does not have sweeteners).

Like salsa, having a good hot sauce can help you stay sane. But again, many have sugars or sweeteners in them. 

If you are anything like me, you will need to have a small arsenal of snacks to survive.  Well, this was true for me on the first go around.  I'm better now.  Good and portable go to snacks are nuts (almonds, cashews, pistachios, pecans), seeds (sunflower, pumpkin), fruits (dried or fresh), fresh veggies, nut butters (almond, cashew & sunbutter are most common) and Lara Bars.  Lara Bars are good!  There are a handful of them that are Whole30 compliant.  This is my fave:

They also have an Apple Pie and a Pecan Cookie flavor that are Whole 30 compliant.

I have mentioned already to pay attention to labels.  Whole 30 does not allow for any sweeteners. List of Sweeteners to look for.  As I mentioned, just about anything with a label has some kind of sweetener in it, so pay attention.  As listed above, the binding agent and sweetener for the lara bar is the dates, which are allowed under Whole 30.  Be cautious to check label for things that are Whole 30 compliant in general.  As an example, one of the most popular brands of Almond Butter is Maranatha:

 But as you can see from this label, it has added sweetener in it.

 Almond butter, and nut butters in general, are so easy to make.  You literally take sprouted almonds (or nuts), put them in a food processor and then let them go for 10-15 minutes.  No need for added oil.  Maybe just a little salt for flavor (sea salt or Pink Himalayan salt, of course).  If you are like me and just don't have the time to make homemade almond butter, just make sure that it only has almonds and salt on the label.

Another place sugar is hidden is in meat.  Almost ALL breakfast meats have added sugar.  Bacon is cured in sugar, sausage has added sugar, and other meats have added items to bind them like wheat.  I have yet to find a sugar free bacon or sausage in any bog box store, save for Applegate Farms.  I personally did not like the Applegate Farms version.  Along the way I discovered US Wellness Meats and their sugar free meats are amazingly good, especially their sausage.  I personally believe it's worth the money, but not everyone can or is willing to spend the money.  Here is a picture of ther bacon and sugar free franks (which I also use as a breakfast meat):

An alternative to the US Wellness Meats is to cook your own pork belly, which is the cut bacon usually comes from.  The easiest I have found is to call Ole Timey Meat Market first thing on Saturday and order it cut think for bacon.  They will cut it for you and have it ready to go.  You will need to salt it as soon as you get it home, whether you freeze it or not, because it will go bad FAST if not.  The salt will act as a preservative.  This route is not for everyone, but it works good for some.

I could write about products and tips all day, so I'll stop there and go through my prep from this morning.

I started the ground beef on the stove top:

While I was doing this I defrosted chicken, then put it in the crock pot with garlic seasoning.  Just turn it on low for 4 hours and it's done.

 Also while doing the last two things, I heated the oven to 400 degrees, cut sweet potatoes into medallions, then seasoned them with olive oil and cinnamon. Once the oven was heated I put the potatoes in for 20 minutes then added time until done (total time this morning was 24 minutes).

Once I finished prepping the sweet potatoes, I cut up lettuce.

 And went ahead and prepped my salad for lunch tomorrow.  What I use varies, but this one has lettuce, tomatoes, hearts of artichoke, almond slices, sunflower seeds and olive oil.

 To finish out the ground beef, I added a taco seasoning for flavoring.

We always label meats and cooked foods to keep up with what date it was cooked.  This helps with food waste and not eating food that could be bad.

 One advantage to cooking meat first is that you can use the oil and seasoning for other things, like I did for tomorrow's breakfast eggs and broccoli for lunch.

 Here is my prepped lunch for tomorrow.  I keep it simple and do a meat and veg, along with the salad I made earlier.  This is ground beef and broccoli.  Someone who struggles with feeling like this is too bland could add some of the pasta sauce from above.

 Here is my breakfast for tomorrow - 3 eggs, a sugar free frank, and sweet potato medallions.

Here is everything I have prepped for tomorrow:

Bottom left: breakfast

Middle left: Salad for lunch

Top left: Apple for snack

Bottom right: Broccoli and ground beef for lunch

Top right: a Larabar, cashews and a La Croix to drink.

 As I said above, I started at around 9:30.  I also cooked my own breakfast and ate it:

And got it all done by 11am.

Now for transporting.  You can buy a regular cooler....or you can go all out like we do.  Right now we are using IsoBags, but have used 6 Pack Bags in the past.  Here is JP's IsoBag:

 Here is the inside, almost empty:

 And with containers in it:

The Isobag comes with the containers that the apple and salad are in above, but we opted to get glass containers for food we would reheat so we were not reheating food in plastic (validation for you, Lauren!).  The bag itself is just shy of $100, but I have had this one for over a year now and it's as good as it was brand new (which was not the case with the 6 pack bag).  They come with containers and ice packs.  The glass containers were also an investment, but will last as long as we don't break them, making them much more cost effective in the long run.

A few more thoughts about Whole 30.  First, make sure you are clear on what you can have on Whole 30.  Whole 30 is not a diet.  It's not intended to be a weight loss plan.  It's a way of eating that is intended to break our dependence on high glycemic and hyper palatable foods.  Also, pay attention to the part about fake baking.  They call is Sex With Your Pants On for a reason.  Second, be prepared for what to expect.  You won't feel like a million bucks, maybe not until the end.  Like anything else, we want to take the easier, softer way, but the pain is a result of what we are trying to let go of, not what we are trying to embrace.   

Unlike other programs that require you to pay for their intellectual property, everything Whole 30 is free.  Sure, they have a book, a cookbook and offer consulting for a fee (who wouldn't), but any and everything you can get for any of the paid services is available for free on their website, blog and forum.  They genuinely want you to have and incorporate this information and they will give you all of the reasons why.  There is full transparency,  My favorite go-to resource that is almost all Whole 30 compliant is The Clothes Make the Girl and her 2 cookbooks, Well Fed and Well Fed 2.  Also, once you get used to what is and isn't Whole 30 compliant, you will learn to adapt recipes accordingly.

I'll post more as I have time and think of things! I have found that this works much better for me if I have accountability so I am appreciative of those of you who are willing to take part!

Well...sometimes life throws you a curve ball...

Sometimes you make plans.  Sometimes the universe laughs - and counters with different plans.

Since my last post, life has changed a lot!  I am now a mommy to a 3 year old (she will be 4 next month, though!) and a 1 year old.  About a month after my last post, I found out I was pregnant.  I came here to write a few times, but the inspiration escaped me.  Like so many people I know, life took hold and there never seemed to be time or energy to document it.  I do have to laugh, though, because life has a funny way of cycling back around.  I guess blogs do, too. :)

To catch everyone up, when I left off, I was still in a recovery period from my competition prep.  My metabolism was just a bit screwed up, so try to imagine what pregnancy looked like in that state! It is funny how time & age give you a different perspective.  I was bigger in my second pregnancy than my first, even though I was smaller in size when I started.  In the beginning my diet and exercise stayed on point, but I expanded anyway (again, screwed up metabolism).  Once that started happening, I kind of adopted a "f&*k it" attitude, especially around eating.  I worked out for a while, but it got to the point where I was big and tired, so training in the gym went by the wayside, too. Although, as a side note, it was humorous to be very obviously pregnant and still lifting heavy weights.  That was funny!

Long story short - I had a long way to come back from.  There were some major differences from last time, though.  For starters, having a second baby just changed my perspective on things.  I just did not worry or care about my size.  I was focused on taking care of the girls, which left little time or energy to get caught up in self-analysis.  Here is a picture of our family 3 weeks after Julia was born:

At that time, I was probably in a size 20/22, but had just gotten cleared to be able to go up and down stairs and drive, so my priorities were just different.  That was the largest I have ever been.  I did lose some weight naturally, settling around a size 18 without any real changes, but knew that I didn't want to stay there.

I tried to get back into the gym, but getting there was a struggle when I had to pick both of the girls up from 2 different schools after work.  We started outfitting the a gym in our garage, which I used to start with.  I would change my eating and work out for a period of time, lose a little weight, then lapse back into not working out and eating like crap, yo-yoing between a size 16 and a size 18. Having small children, along with everything else, just left me drained, so motivation to stay with changes just wasn't there.  That coupled with a sense of hopelessness about my ability to lose weight without insane amounts of time and energy led me to have a bit of a defeatist attitude about making changes.

Going back a year or two ago, someone introduced the idea of Whole 30 to me.  I researched it then and felt it was pretty extreme.  Over time I have given up a number of things that I thought would be challenging with doing a Whole 30, but by the summer of this past year, I had cut some of the more challenging things from my general diet and came back to the idea of a Whole 30.  I finally decided to give it a try.  When I was 3 weeks into my Whole 30, I sent the following in an email to a friend.  I really think it gives a good snapshot of my relationship to food and why Whole 30 was appealing to me:

"I wanted to follow up re: our across the room convo from last night (lol).  I totally get what you mean about jumping on and off board with different things and how that has been detrimental to you.  I absolutely believe this is why I struggle with being able to take off weight, as the long term consequences have wreaked havoc on my hormones.  I also know that I have been doing some variation of what I am doing now, off and on, for the last 4-5 years, and it has been progressive learning.  When I first started, I had to learn to let go of grains and pastas. Now, even when I eat off kilter, I almost never eat pasta and I am very aware of how unsatisfying bread is.  I also feel the same way about rice, quinoa and white potatoes (even though I still love some fries and chips sometimes!).  Then I let go of diet coke (and sodas in general).  Then artificial sweeteners. Then diary (save for some feta and goat cheese, but I'm not even doing these right now). And now the big thing is seeing how much sugar and sugar derivatives are in EVERYTHING (even "sugar free" items). I have even given up gum.  For example, I was eating bacon almost everyday.  When I went on Whole30, I realized that bacon has tons of sugar in it.  So I started getting pork belly cut at Old Timey Meat Market and cook it.  It's the same cut as bacon but not cured in sugar.  And it tastes better.  The "unsweetened" almond milk?  Still has sweetener? Well....basically everything processed has some form of sugar.  It's insane.  So, although I was eating Paleo/Primal, I was still eating tons of sugar by the way of "healthier" or "all natural" versions of processed foods.  Same with Paleo fake baking with Agave, honey or other "natural" sweeteners (which the Whole30 people call Sex With Your Pants On! lol).  When I fearlessly looked at the labels and did research and cut these items out, all of my cravings disappeared.  It's nuts.  I have a week left on my Whole30 and I genuinely can't think of a thing I want when I am through the 30 days.  This is truly different than any other time and I have intentionally made my focus about health - focusing on how different I feel (like having energy even when the baby keeps us up all night and not having the emotional ups and downs of sugar highs and lows), how I feel fulfilled after eating and how I rarely feel insanely hungry, even if I engage in intermittent fasting.  I also threw out my scale.  How liberating!  I know I have leaned out, but the fact that a scale isn't involved gives me the freedom to just feel good (and not mind-f^&k myself over a number that doesn't reflect my self-worth anyway)."

Looking back at this, I have to laugh.  Food IS a drug for me. My relationship with it is exactly like my relationship was with alcohol and drugs.  I am powerless, especially over sugar, flour & wheat products, and attempting to make room for them in my life creates unmanageability.  After I completed my Whole 30, I felt great!  I didn't eat off of the plan for a few days after I surpassed the 30 days.  I had read over and over again on the Whole 30 forums where people had gone out to engage in one thing that had been a no-no on their Whole 30, and in turn ended up binging. That has already been my experience, so I knew it would happen if I gave into the lie that I could just have one ______ (fill in the blank with any number of things).  But like a drink, attempts to resist continuing are futile once I have reintroduced the _______ back into my diet.  And so it went with this, too.  I had one this with no real cravings or issues, so then I had another that.  The this and that's snowballed back into full blown crappy eating.  And thus, like drinking, I found myself in a dance with food where I was either all good or all bad, but nothing in between.  Truth is between no longer exists for me with certain food items.  I am without power against it.

Knowing this still doesn't change it.  In this sense, knowledge is not power.  I can know what to do all day long, but knowledge is also not motivation.  Professionally I have been training more in Motivational Interviewing.  One thing I have come to understand through this process is that ambivalence is normal to the human condition.  (Ambivalence: the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.) So many people experience ambivalence around things that are unhealthy - and this was no exception.  I knew something needed to give - I was aware that I no longer experienced a reward for the unhealthy behavior, specifically I was very aware that I did not enjoy the foods I was eating - but in the end I could not find the power to stop.  In early November, I sat in a training doing Motivational Interviewing techniques with a partner.  The facilitator asked us to share something we have honestly been ambivalent about and we did a role play using a script.  This process somehow flipped a switch in my head and I knew at that moment that something had to give.  I came home and put a plan together and on November 10th, I again gave up sugar and wheat.  I did not go as strict as a Whole 30, but largely kept to that outline.  Within a month, I had gone from a size 18 to a size 14.  I was experiencing all of the same things I experienced during my Whole 30 - lots of clean energy, eating in moderation, no cravings.  It felt good.  I stayed on this plan through Thanksgiving and put together a plan for Christmas.  Then came the week of Christmas...or rather should I say...instead of sticking to the plan, I started looking ahead to New Year's.

New Year's week is the week of both JP and I's birthdays (12/30 for him and 12/31 for me).  Our tradition, rather than presents, has been for me to get him an ice cream cake on his birthday and he gets me a cookie cake on mine.  We have done this for the majority of the time we have been married.  In regards to my plan for Christmas, my thoughts jumped to New Year's (and ice cream and cookie cake), and the thought came to mind that I would eat on target up to then, but would indulge in those items...it is our birthdays and this is tradition, right?  This was my thought for a day or two, then the thought changed to: I might as well enjoy Christmas, then our birthdays, and I will just get back on track on the 1st of January.  And so I used that as my rational to eat pizza, then this and then that. And I am off again.

It has occurred to me that beating myself up for this is as beneficial as calling myself fat and burning with shame when I get dressed.  It only serves to keep me in the pattern of behavior that supports continuing this insanity.  So, somewhere during the week of New Year's my brain just stopped.  I just stopped, took a breath, and owned my ambivalence.  I stopped making resolutions to do it differently tomorrow.   I stopped and looked at what good, sustainable change has happened in the last 5 years since I really started focusing on what I eat.

• I have given up Diet Coke
• I have given up artificial sweeteners
• I have given up chewing gum
• I rarely eat pasta
• I rarely eat condiments like salad dressing, ketchup, etc.
• I have reduced the grains I eat to almost nothing
• I have reduced the amounts of processed dairy I eat to almost nothing
• I have reduced the amounts of processed foods I eat to almost nothing
• I have learned how to make all of the things I love without any of the above ingredients in them

I have a goal to work toward.  I understand the futility of it.  I am aware that I honestly and genuinely no longer enjoy the foods that wreak havoc on me.  I did not enjoy even one thing I ate during the weeks of Christmas and New Year's, including the cookie cake.  And the insanity of it is, even knowing this, I still ate it.  And I am over it.

So...here I am.  Putting it out there.  This is me.  This is my journey.  Not at the end, when things look pretty.  Right in the heart of it.  

And please, don't take this as sad, or me as depressed. I am far from it. I am realistic, honest with myself, willing to shine a light on it.  And I started Crossfit this week, so I am going to write about that some, too, which is exciting.  We have been following the development of Crossfit since the movie 300 - long before it became mainstream - but never could work it out to participate.  This week we just decided to do it.  And. we. love. it!  But more of that to come.

Thanks for letting me work my thoughts out with you, whoever you may be.  :)