The End of the Whole 30

So today should be my Whole 3 Week 3 recap of how I successfully made it into the best part of the Whole 30 and felt FANTASTIC and like I could do this forever.

Except I didn’t.

I purposefully started my whole 30 when I new I would be home for two weeks and could get the hang of cooking/eating clean.  I travel about 7-8 days a month for work in two 3-4 day stints.  I knew that this month these travel times would be in back to back weeks and that it was going to be TOUGH to travel and eat the Whole 30.  So I planned it so that I would be moving into the ‘feel good’ time of tons of energy and loving the way I feel to be while I was travelling… I figured that would give me the best leg up on actually completing this thing.

I had it all planned out how I would navigate it, and did a lot of online research on how to travel and eat clean.  I packed a cooler full of food, planned trips to the grocery store and figured out where I would be able to cook.  But here’s the thing about the Whole 30… it takes TIME. Time to shop for food, prep the dinners and lunches and time to wake up and scramble eggs for breakfast.  During one of my travel weeks it is a super high stress time at work.  I work for a construction company and that is the one week every month that we bid on work.  We have a lot of work that has to be done in a short amount of time.  It just so happened that this month we had some extremely large projects and it was going to be even longer days and more stressful.  My coworkers (one of which is my mom) were super supportive of my attempt to pull this off and even went to salad bars two days in a row to accommodate me. But by dinner time of our 3rd 16 hour+ day I had a meltdown and gave in to ordering pizza.

I’d love to say that I had tons of energy and loved the Whole 30, but I didn’t.  IT WAS HARD.

There are things that I LOVED about it:

• I didn’t feel gross/bloated after eating
• I lost 10 lbs
• most of the food is actually pretty delicious
• I loved having a meal plan and grocery shopping at the beginning of each week.

When I did give into non-whole 30 compliant foods I did it because I was having a hard time focusing on work and functioning for 16 hour days on just the Whole 30 foods I had prepared for the day.  I know that this is mostly because I didn’t adequately plan for such long days, but I’m not sure on my driving schedule/travel schedule it would be very possible without Herculean self control (which lets be honest… I CLEARLY don’t have).  I also looked at my schedule for the next few weeks and realized that I had several activities and another 3 days of travel that I didn’t want to have to focus on clean eating during.  So I decided to quit.  Although really I don’t think of it as quitting because I made it about 15 days longer than I thought I would.

I’m definitely going to be incorporating some of the things I learned into my everyday eating habits, but the Paleo life just isn’t for me.  However I definitely have a HUGE new found respect for the people who keep it up day after day.