Is anyone else tired of winter yet? Blegh.
I think it’s safe to say that as we near the end of the Whole30 Challenge, our thoughts are definitely mixed. On one hand, we desperately needed a dietary reset and the overall results (both physical and emotional) have been pretty impressive. We needed the reset, and while we don’t want to go back to our old bad habits, we’re more than ready to resume a more happy relationship with food that doesn’t feel so tedious.
With still one week left, we have some thoughts about moving forward:
We’d like to maintain a true 80/20 balance with Paleo, not a 70/30 or 60/40. Paleo for us isn’t all that hard, but food being the institution of celebration makes it hard. Life is full of celebration and our lives are really happy. But while sacrificing fun eats feels dire in a 30-day challenge like Whole30, we feel we can do a better job of saying no and choosing our battles moving forward. Whole30 has reminded us that while not all sacrifice is necessarily worth it, some definitely is, and the feelings of missed treats are often very temporary.
While mostly-Paleo is pretty easy for us to maintain, there are still some grey areas in our diet that fall outside that we feel pretty insistent on keeping. We know we’ll never be strict Paleo, but we still want to outline some guidelines about these types of foods. Our goal is to define those boundaries clearly and maintain the priority that any additions/sidelines to our be as homemade or as minimally processed as possible.
While I don’t plan to be as strict with food-labeling, I definitely need to be paying more attention to what’s in our food. This challenge was really an eye opener. You think you’re eating a reasonably clean diet until that can of mixed nuts you love so much has about 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce.
{Above: PaleOMG’s Pizza Spaghetti Pie — definitely a get-you-over-the-hump-of-Whole30 recipe}
We’d also like to maintain the food journaling we’ve been doing on MyFitnessPal. It’s been an eye opener not only for what our overall consumption is, but how it breaks down. There’s a lot of room for tweaking and improvement moving forward as we add some foods back.
All in all, while we realize we’d be miserable trying to maintain Whole30 100% moving forward after the challenge, it’s definitely given us some habits we like and plan on keeping around. We’ve seen that even mostly healthy isn’t enough if you’re not really paying attention.
