Whole27: Recap

So we didn't quite make it 30 days. On Thursday, we looked at the prospect of a dry Memorial Day weekend (and the Friday leading up to it) and made the decision to enjoy ourselves instead.

Enjoy ourselves we have. Nothing too crazy (well, not for me, anyway; Austin jumped back into drinking head first, with a day drinking binge with coworkers), but it was nice to go out to dinner at a restaurant (no dishes to do!) and order wine and not eat meat. Friday I went completely vegetarian (and had cheese on my salad!) and it was nice. We went to a late night grunion party at the Venice Breakwater (no, I'm not making that up) and mostly used it as an excuse to drink beers on the beach at night, which I recommend. Saturday I walked the length of Palisades Park in Santa Monica, which was a three and a half mile walk altogether, before having a shrimp cobb salad (compliant except for the blue cheese YAAAAAS I MISSED YOU BLUE CHEESE) and a glass of rose, then had more quality beach time with the same friends who'd invited us to the grunion thing. By quality beach time, I mean we just sat on the beach in the afternoon sun and drank wine out of red cups. Then we invited them back to our apartment and made dinner together: fresh pasta with bolognese sauce. And Sunday we went to a barbecue at a friend's place in Hollywood, and it turns out HE has just begun Whole30, so most of what we had there was compliant too. (Except the wine, obviously, and the cheese and crackers he put out for us.)

And now I'm sipping a cold beer as a I write this. I have no regrets about ending Whole30 early: it's been a lovely weekend.

So what happens now? Did we lose weight? Would we do this again? What about the tiger blood and the non-scale victories?

First, the tiger blood: it never really showed up. My life did not feel completely transformed by this new diet, so my takeaways from this are 1. I already felt pretty good (which is great to know!), 2. excluding whole categories of food from my diet doesn't result in major changes in how I feel, which means I'm not allergic to anything and can pretty much eat whatever I want, but need to focus on moderation in the face of that knowledge. This diet gave me a running start at that, so I don't want to waste that.

And that brings us non-scale victories and what happens now: I did feel pretty good most of the time on this. The headaches early on were no fun, but they went away, and I never felt bloated or all that physically uncomfortable. I also never really felt hungry: we were eating whatever we wanted within the bounds of compliance, and eating quite well. Aside from the large, large specter of missing beer, wine, and cheese (specifically on salad), I never felt all that deprived: there were lots of good, nay, luxurious meals that we could eat, and it was fun coming up with breakfasts and dinners that were truly delicious that were completely compliant. We will eat a lot of these meals again in the future. (Those decadent breakfasts meant I was rarely hungry at lunch, so it was easy to just order a salad and be happy with it.) So the way I want to keep eating is doing what we were doing, but add back the things I was really losing my mind about. And maybe eat more vegetarian meals. And check and see how I feel in another week or two. Am I still feeling good? Am I still losing weight? Or do I not have the discipline to be that freeform and need to fall back on something like Weight Watchers?

(One problem with this approach is that, now that we're not doing this anymore, we feel like we can make plans again, and so I have completely packed this coming week with both lunch and evening plans.)

With respect to weight loss, yes, we each lost 7 or 8 pounds. Pretty good for 27 days and all the bacon.

Would we do this again? Ehhhhh never say never, but I feel like I have the answers to the questions that drove my interest in this in the first place, so it's unlikely. Since I don't believe I have issues with these groups of foods, I don't think much of the draconian rules about compliance (like not being able to have the garlic vinaigrette at Tender Greens because they snuck a teeny bit of sugar in there for whatever reason: the amount is unlikely to cause a spike in blood sugar and I definitely don't want it because it's sweet). I understand why they have them, and I know that different people take those to different extremes, but I'm not on the extreme end and find this to be useful as guidelines alone.

Some of my favorite things that we ate:

• camarosa strawberries: I really am obsessed, and I think the season is over now, too; I can rest knowing I took full advantage of it
• avocado with olive oil for breakfast: this is SO gd good, thank you California living! We've actually started planning by buying avocados that are unripe and storing them in a paper bag dedicated to that purpose, so now we always have ripe avocados around
• that potato italian sausage and spinach hash: I made it three times in three weeks because we love it that much. Every time I try to make as much as possible, hoping there will be a full meal of it left over. There never is.
• Sous vide salmon: I didn't blog about this because we had it on Day 26, but it turns out that sous vide salmon is PHENOMENAL. We're having it again tonight.
• Those chicken zucchini meatballs with curry sauce were pretty good
• I love the salt and pepper chicken at Tender Greens far more than must be normal, and will continue eating quite a bit of that; the Rad Thai salad at Sweetgreen, too.

Overall, I'm glad we did this. I am also glad we ended it when we did. (: 

Cheers!