In my bucket list post I had two food related items. I made it a goal to figure out planning lunches and snacks to get a better handle on my less-supervised eating. And then I wanted to complete a Whole30 diet.
I can't say I've had huge success in the lunch department. Of course we did just come off of our Whole30 and lunches were the hardest part of that too. I'm still great at dinners, comparatively. At this point I'm getting used to the idea of letting lunches be a little more repetitive where dinners can be more varied. Lunch is now a sandwich or leftovers.
As for snacking, the easy answer I learned during our Whole30 was don't. Simply put, I think our Whole30 was as effective as it was this time around because of cutting out snacking entirely. Or if we do get hungry between meals it's better not to turn to the easy, processed, snack foods. It's better to see a "snack" more as a mini meal so that you can make better food choices and be more satisfied with what you eat rather than just turning into a mind-less grazer. That is one lesson that really stuck with me from my nutrition classes in college: avoid mind-less eating where it's more about going through a motion rather than eating with intent to actually focus on enjoying what you put in your mouth. You end of eating less this way, but you are more satisfied.
Now, I failed to take any Before and After pictures of us for this round of Whole30-ness, but we wrote down our starting and ending weights and I also have my body composition numbers thanks to our smart scale.
I am pleased to announce that Charles lost 20 lbs and I lost about 13 lbs. But that's not all! Charles says that the only other change he noticed was that he just felt tired and hungry all the time. I didn't ever really get into a good "Tiger Blood" phase myself (more on that later) but my body composition numbers all settled into the healthy ranges where they hadn't really been before. Towards the end, my muscle mass actually squeaked into the High range. That is probably because of my exercise program. That right there is probably why they stress so hard the rule of not using the scale during the month; because there are other changes at work besides straight weight-loss. (Weight-loss isn't even a main focus of the Whole30 program at all; it's simply a pleasant side effect of the body healing itself.)
Confession: in truth I think we really only should get credit for half of a Whole30. We did a pure Whole18 before we "took a break" when we went out of town for a weekend to spend time with family. When we got back it was rather difficult to get back in the saddle. Part of it was because I was sick when we got home. After eating just about everything on the "no" list, it really isn't surprising to me. I'm just a little jealous that Charles' system is less sensitive than mine so he didn't get sick at all from our lapse. But that is why we didn't get any "Tiger Blood", because we didn't stay faithful to the program for the full amount of time so we did not reap the full benefits.
But we still lost weight, my face did finally clear up, and I'm very happy with my body composition numbers. So it was still worth it.
It seems that every time we do this diet, we get a little better at it. Last time we cheated on the snacking rule but stayed "true" for the whole time. This time we did lots better about not snacking but we cheated on the scale rule. It was fun to see the weight slough off, especially at the beginning. I was surprised how fast the weight came off at the beginning. So we actually exceeded my expectations in that regard. Next time I can hope we shall continue to improve.
No comments:
Post a Comment