Whole30 Week 5 and Recap

Daylight Saving Time is killing me this week! I was pretty set in some great healthy habits, and then the time change happened, and I can’t get out of bed in the morning at all. I go to bed at 9:30, but when 5 a.m. rolls around, my body’s like, “nope!” I really don’t think it has anything to do with reintroducing foods because when I snooze my alarm until 6 which was 5 before the change, I’m fully charged and ready to go. I think my body is just very stuck on its internal clock, and it’s going to take a while for it to switch over.

Anyway, all that said, here’s my last two days of Whole30, and my overall recap! If you want to see my previous weeks’ posts, click here for Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.

Day 29:

Breakfast: Ranch chicken salad from The Pinning Mama on Romaine, strawberries (This chicken salad is phenomenal! It’s definitely in my top 5 favorite Whole30 recipes. Something in it doesn’t work well for my stomach, so I’m going to have to play around with the recipe to get it to work for me. It’s that good!)

Lunch: Paleo Cuban pork chop from Follow the Ruels, green beans, clementine

Dinner: handful of olives, Larabar, applesauce pouch

Snack: no snack

Notes: My stomach was feeling really bloated all day today, so I wasn’t very hungry when I got home. I ate a couple things just to get something in my system, but none of the things I had prepared sounded very good to me.

 

Day 30:

Breakfast: Stuffed chicken breast from Popular Paleo, green beans, strawberries, V8 Spicy

Lunch: Carnitas from My Heart Beets on romaine, 2 clementines

Dinner: Smoothie

Snack: no snack

Notes: I felt great today. I was a little hungrier today than I had been previously. I had a really busy night not getting home until about 7:30, and by the time I got home, I really didn’t feel like eating anything in my fridge, so I made a smoothie. It was gross. I added some chard I had in my freezer, and that was all you could taste, so it was really bitter. It was also really thick and kind of warm, so I threw about half of it out.

 

Week 5 recap:

The last couple days were great! I was feeling so good that I didn’t know if I wanted to even reintroduce anything; however, during my first Whole30, I caved and got a pizza on day 31, so I didn’t figure out how different foods affected my body. I was worried that this time around I’d try and stick to Whole30 for as long as I could until one day I’d cave and have something that was off plan, so I decided to do the reintroduction and go from there. If I want to go back to relaxed Whole30 after the reintro, then I will.

I’m still playing around with ideas of what I want to do come Monday when the reintro is over, and so is my Whole30, so we’ll see what I decide to do. I did order some meal replacement shake powder to see how I like that. If you’ve noticed, I have a hard time getting myself to eat on weeknights and weekend days. I had done some research into intermittent fasting because I’ve heard great things about it, and I thought it could work well for me to just make dinner time my fasting time; however, after digging in a little more, it seems that IF isn’t good for women because it can cause hormone interruption which has a whole slew of nasty side effects including gaining weight! I ordered the shake powders to make sure I at least get a little something in my system on nights and days when I find it hard to make myself eat.

 

Whole30 Recap:

I will write up my tips and tricks for a successful Whole30 in my next post, but I just wanted to share some of my stats and my overall thoughts on how this round went.

First of all, I think this round was amazing! I definitely feel like I did things right this go around because I wasn’t tempted to cheat at all. I had a few cravings here and there, some of which were pretty intense at times, but I never once thought about caving in to them. My sugar cravings went away after the first couple weeks, and sticking to plan actually felt, dare I say it… easy… We planned everything out ahead of time and picked a variety of delicious meals, so I think that was a huge help.

The first and most noticeable benefit I gained from my 30 days were huge amounts of energy! I got pretty tired in the first week, but after that, I felt like my system normalized, my blood sugar evened out, and I could get out of bed fairly easily in the morning, and I had sustained energy throughout the day. It was fabulous!

Second, my motivation in other areas of my life skyrocketed. I am currently on a 5 week streak of working out every day, and I have kept my house clean for several weeks now. I think this benefit came about because of a mixture of the sustained energy and the discipline I’ve had to exercise with my food choices. Whatever it is, I’m loving it! I’m getting so much done, and I feel so good!

Third, my mood has pretty much stabilized. I don’t feel like a crazy person who just cries at the drop of a hat anymore. I am almost always in a good mood, and the stressors in my life don’t bother me as much as they used to. This mood stabilization even lasted during my time of the month when I normally get really irritable and weepy over everything.

And last, but not least… the physical changes have been awesome! I lost 15 lbs! I can definitely tell that I’ve lost weight because my clothes are fitting a lot more loosely than they were previously. I just took a pair of jeans out of the dryer this morning, and they were loose on me… straight from the dryer! I kept having to yank them up all day. It was great. 🙂 I lost a total of 7″ off my body. That doesn’t seem like much to me, but I can definitely feel it, so maybe I’m losing it from areas where I didn’t measure. Who knows? I feel good, and, honestly, that’s all that really matters!

I wish I had some before and afters to include in here, but I haven’t had a chance to get any afters yet with my schedule being so messed up the last week. I hope to get some tomorrow, and I’ll throw them in my next post. 🙂