day 12
I must endure the next several days to get through to the third week. In many ways this is the hardest part of any change or program. Enduring the middle and seeing it through. The novelty has worn off. The newness of the program is over, I'm still tired, and I really want to stuff my face with sweets. But giving up now would mean that nothing has changed. I knew it was going to be hard when I started. It is going to take a lot of determination. I am no freer now from the pull of sweets and processed/refined carbs than I was when I started the program 12 days ago. I think to myself that I'm getting nowhere and that I am not any thinner now than when I started. While 12 days may seem like a lifetime, 12 days does not undo a lifetime of disordered eating. If nothing else, eating this was is doing one thing (and you probably know what that one thing is because I've been ranting about it for the past 12 days). At the very least I am no longer hungry all the time. I can eat lunch and make it all the way to dinner without having to eat in between. Without feeling like I'm starving. I'm still pretty tired although my energy levels are higher this week than last week. (Last week I was still recovering from being sick. I still have a little cough but it's mostly gone thank goodness). Over the past several days my energy has been a roller coaster, peaking and crashing several times throughout the day. Today I am just tired. Probably because of my high activity levels yesterday with a hard run and then more running in the evening. I'm finding myself discouraged today, but I committed to 30 days and 30 days I am determined to make it. Right now besides not being hungry, the physical benefits are about the same as any other time I've tightened up my eating, started counting calories and gotten back on track. There must be something about the two week point for me (or week and a half) or maybe I was just so focused on getting past days 10 and 11 I forgot that I still have 2/3 of the way to go. Or maybe I'm just tired today. Either way, today is about enduring, and so will be tomorrow and the next day and so on and so forth until what they call the "magic" happens and I really notice my energy levels shoot up, and my body change. You are not allowed to weigh yourself during your 30 days so I don't know how my weight is responding thus far, but then again... It has only been 12 days and that is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.
After the afternoon I felt much better. From 5- when I went to bed I wasn't quite as tired and didn't have the desire to eat all the things. I had a snack today of a little bit of ground beef (leftover from hamburgers probably the equivalent of 1/4 hamburger) and some guacamole with some sugar snap peas. That helped a lot to get me through the afternoon. We ate late as Lily had dance class and dinner was an interesting casserole with tons of veggies and sweet potatoes on top. I really liked it. It was a tex mex paleo casserole, here is a picture.
Today-Day 13, I went down to my grandparents house because I had some family in town. I packed food for my kids and myself so I wouldn't be caught unawares. While we were there my grandma was making spaghetti sauce to go with dinner and she randomly went over to her pot of boiling sauce and dunked a spoon in it and brought it over for me to taste. Now, strictly speaking I was supposed to say no or find some way out of tasting it because the sauce I know was made from a jar of spaghetti sauce, and I later looked at the jar and sure enough there was sugar added into the sauce. I figured licking a spoon was not a good reason to get hurt feelings over, and I also figured that licking the spoon wouldn't cause much of an upset in my Whole 30 plans. So to eat or not to eat that taste. Technically it was off plan, but also technically that tiny taste isn't going to do much to my goals of healthy eating and losing weight and making healthy habits. So of course I tasted it, and I told her how yummy it was. I knew I made the right choice because my grandma beamed with pride and said "boy do I know how to make a good spaghetti sauce!" (she puts the jar in the pot and then doctors it up with spices and meatballs and lets it simmer for a few hours for flavors to blend. It was pretty yummy). Some things in life are just necessary. If I had said no then I would have had to go into explaining the whole 30 diet on of group of less interested individuals, and then people would have ended up with hurt feelings, or feelings of embarrassment. Taking a small taste made her happy, and to me that is more important than sticking to the nitty gritty details of the program. Everything else is still perfectly on plan, it isn't upsetting the rest of the day, or spiraling me off into the abyss of food consumption, or derailing my progress, or triggering a binge. I'm not using it as an excuse to drop the whole thing because I don't want to drop it, I really want to change the way I eat and I desperately want to lose the weight I gained last winter.
I suppose technically I'm supposed to start back over at day 1 tomorrow because I chose to "eat" (or in my case lick) an off plan food, but I'm not going to do that. I figure if I am allowed to eat the sacrament bread at church on Sunday, then this is not going to make that big of a difference either. (The only off plan food it contained was sugar). Besides that, I'm not planning on quitting at 30 days, but I want to continue doing this for as long as I can. Maybe 60 days. I do want to do the re introductory period to check on any food sensitivities I might have, and to be allowed a little more freedom when eating out but mostly I just want to eat Whole 30 for a while, so I can fix my food problems, lose weight and learn how to live healthy and happy.
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