Ways to Stay on Track While Doing Whole30

Staying on track with any diet takes effort.

The Whole30 seems intimidating until you finish your grocery shopping and get into the recipes, you will see that 30 days isn’t hard.

Since so many of us are trapped at home, now is a better time than usual to do it, it’s only 30 days with a couple weeks reintroducing the foods.

I had myself ready to go through the severe sugar addiction symptoms Melissa warned against, but actually didn’t deal with any bad side effects from quitting sugar.

Buy the journal, or check it out from the library, check out the Whole30 cookbooks as well as “It Starts With Food.”

Read “It Starts With Food” before you start and go to the Whole30 website- sign up for the newsletter as well as the beginner kit.

Find 1-2 weeks of recipes, mark down the ingredients and do your grocery shopping the day before you start.

Try to grocery shop 2 times, and shop for 2 weeks at a time.

Keep an eye on how long you have left, how you feel and keep a log.

If you keep a blog, keep tabs for accountability on your blog. You don’t have to do a post every day but it can help with gaining support. There are also several Whole30 groups on Facebook. Support is extremely helpful in getting through this month.

Try to avoid going out to eat, but there are options if you do- just be careful. I ate steamed kale and it ended my first attempt at 22 days- it was sauteed in butter.

Keep the end results in mind

Don’t weigh yourself, it’s tempting but it’s not a weightloss diet- it’s to try to help discover problematic foods. A lot of people do lose weight, but one of the rules is to not weigh yourself until after you’re done.

Try to not obsess over food.

Don’t snack unless you need to.

Prepare a wide variety of foods. It can get boring eating the same things over and over so make sure you get a lot of healthy fats and proteins- they fill you up longer. Use this time to try new produce and meats.

Those are the things that got me through the month. I may have failed, but it did help me see how bad dairy does effect me and I found I have some issues with sugar. By the time I was just a couple days through the diet, I could taste how much sweeter normal foods were and when I went back to a normal gluten free/low dairy diet, sweetened foods were almost overwhelming.

Have you done Whole30? Did you make it through the whole month? What tips would you give someone just starting out?

Gluten and dairy free pumpkin brownies

This is a recipe I created.I had some pumpkin and was wanting to make something other than pie but didn’t feel like searching online.

For this you’ll need

1 1/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup of veggie oil
2 eggs
1/4 cup of cocoa
2 cups of flour (I use Walmart’s gluten free All-purpose baking flour)
2 cups pumpkin puree
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla

Optional:
Walnuts
Chocolate chips

I added the sugar and cocoa to taste

Mix the sugar and vegetable oil until smooth, add in the cocoa, eggs, flour, baking powder and vanilla. Mix in the pumpkin puree until smooth then fold in chocolate chips or walnuts.

Pour into a greased pan and bake at 350 until a toothpick or knife comes out clean.

How to Hard Boil Eggs

This is going to be very short and easy. I was playing around on Google and saw that “how to boil eggs” is one of the top searches.

My mom taught me a long time ago and following strict has resulted in perfect hard boiled eggs every time.

All you have to do is put the eggs in a pot, fill the pot above the eggs, set it on high heat on the stove and time it for 20 minutes- from the time you turn on the stove, not the time it starts to boil.

Taken them off, drain and wait a few minutes to peel.

For best results, use cold water with the eggs being straight out of the fridge. If you try to boil the water and put the eggs in, it can cause them to crack.