Skip Reintro phase if it's not the first?

[Char321]

Over the past 8 years, I've done GAPS, gone Paleo, done just no gluten/sugar in phases. I've been eating a very clean diet of homemade foods and very low sugar, no processed food the whole time. I'm doing Whole30 because my last pregnancy included a lot of bed rest and hard recovery, which meant people bringing us meals and us buying easier foods -- still pretty clean, but more gluten than before.

I'm halfway through the 30 days, and I just don't have it in me to do the reintro phase when I've done eliminations 4 other times and never reacted in the slightest way. Gluten and dairy make no difference in any of the ways I've given them up. 

I'm a huge "rules" person and usually can't handle not following rules. But I'm thinking I'll just ease into some tings slower than others, and stay very low gluten/sugar for good again, but not do the 10 days of going back and forth with the diet. I see that many people have done this program several times, so I wonder if that's what people do when they've carefully tested for reactions and had none. 

[ShannonM816]

What you do after Whole30 is completely up to you. We recommend doing reintros, but lots of people do skip them. If you want a sort of happy medium between the strict reintros and just diving right into life after Whole30, there's always the slow roll reintroduction, so still reintros which should be one type of food at a time, but more as foods that you'd like to have come up, rather than the strict 10 day one:  https://whole30.com/2014/09/dear-melissa-slow-reintroduction-roll/  

Whatever you do, what's most important is to pay attention and be honest with yourself about how foods make you feel, both physically and mentally. So if at the end of Whole30 you feel great, and you go along doing whatever you decide to do, and one day you look up and go, you know, I just feel foggier, or grumpier, or more tired, or I'm having some digestive issues, or I'm craving stuff I know isn't good for me -- that means it's time to clean things back up again and maybe try to figure out if it's a particular thing causing issues, or just a volume of a variety of things. 

One reason that reintros can be good to do after each Whole30 is that your body can change over time, so something that was okay for you at one point may not be as okay in a few years. Or a very mild symptom that you just roll with because you don't want to give up a food right now, you might decide later is no longer worth it for you.