First Whole30, On the right track?

[Emily Martin]

I'm really excited to be starting today, especially as I haven't gone more than a week without a glass of wine in probably fifteen years. I've been doing a good job of keeping away from potatoes for a few months, grains, sugar and legumes since the new year. So I'm really now cutting the booze (which I definitely over-indulge in!!) and the dairy. As much as I love cheeses and drink milk in my tea, I think that going tea-total will be the toughest, and most important omission from my diet.

I'm also incorporating intermittent fasting, which I've been doing for five months, but I'm easin up on that a little during the 30 days, sticking with just reducing my 'feeding window' to about six hours a day.

If anyone has advice or experience they'd like to share, I'm all ears, as this is my first Whole 30. So far it's been easy, but that may be because I kind of built up to starting?

[Ann]

Yay! Welcome!

[missmary]

hey Emily, congrats and welcome to the whole 30!

You say you are going to "ease up" on intermittent fasting during your whole30, but I'm not sure you know that IF is actually not acceptable during the plan at all. Please don't limit yourself to a 6 hour "feeding window" but follow the plan as written. IF will be there for future experimentation once your 30 days are complete.

[1Maryann]

Missmary is right. Think of your body as a car. To run at peak efficiency, and get the most out of it, you have to keep it fueled. You can let it run totally out of gas and then try and start it up again, but it usually takes some effort to get enough in the line to make it purr along smoothly again. To make the most of your time, you need to refuel it before it runs dry. A stoked metabolism will keep chugging along so long as it doesn't see a potential famine coming. You send mixed messages to your body and brain when you try to combine two different philosophies of eating. You will have much more success following the plan as written.

[Tom Denham]

Right. You cannot do a Whole30 and practice intermittent fasting at the same time. IF is a totally different program with different goals than the Whole30. Only people with healthy hormonal rhythms, sleep practices, and a well established fat-burning metabolism can experiment with IF safely. If you are not rock solid to the point that you don't need a Whole30, practicing IF can screw up your hormonal rhythms and sleep patterns.

Many people who are attracted to IF want to change their body composition and become lean. The route to healthy leanness is not through calorie restriction. The most common mistake we see with people trying a Whole30 is not eating enough food in general or fat in particular.

I started experimenting with IF two years after adopting the Whole30 approach as my lifestyle. I fast 16 hours once or twice per week most weeks now, but do not consider it especially important to my health and fitness. And I consider IF the absolutely wrong choice for many, many people, even after they have done a number of Whole30 for reasons I will not enumerate here.

I hope you will throw yourself into a Whole30, but forget IF for this year at least.

[shoothead]

Hi Tom (+ others),

I don't remember reading in the book (which, admittedly I only skimmed through) that IF is not allowed. Re-reading through the site I don't see where IF is mentioned for the whole30 but it's a fairly large site and maybe I missed it. I did see one comment reply from Melissa where she says they don't recommend it.

Nevertheless I started my first Whole30 on Saturday and I've been doing 18-24 hour fasts twice a week for several years and do not plan on altering that during the next 28 days.

I'll also add, at least from my perspective, that there are only three minor changes to my diet on the whole 30. The sometimes fair amount of alcohol, the dairy in my coffee, and occasional dark chocolate. Typically my diet is what the whole 30 is anyway. So even though this is a first pass at it officially, I feel pretty confident that the fasting won't interfere with it.

So to me, there are rules like no grains, which pretty much means that I am not doing a w30, and recommendations like you shouldn't do IF, which is a preference (or context) but still within "the rules" of the program.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Lee

[Renee Lee]

Lee, you're correct.

IF doesn't fit in with the guidelines/suggestions for success of "3 meals a day." We REALLY discourage IF in general...because there are VERY few people that have _everything_ dialed in enough that it's even worth the effort to play with.

Additionally, women have different hormonal stuff going on, and there's some stuff out there suggesting that IF isn't effective for women, and could actually be counterproductive to your goals by trying it.

My opinion (mine, not necessarily M&D's) is that if you need to do an intervention like the W30, then you definitely aren't ready to be tinkering with IF concurrently. In addition to everything else, you really need to be able to listen to what your body's telling you. Folks that haven't already done an intervention like this, experimented with adding stuff back in, knowing what YOUR body likes to run on, it's just a bad idea.

Then again, I'm a hardass

Additionally, I'm of the opinion (and I actually think M&D share this one) that a lot of people prop up their disordered eating habits with IF by saying "oh, it's fine. I'm not starving myself. I'm IFing).

That doesn't mean that you fall into these categories, Lee...they're just the reasons why we really discourage it for first timers.

[shoothead]

Good points Renee thank you. I appreciate that.

I initially got into IF because of the human growth hormone aspect after a fairly large left knee surgery where cartilage was replaced under my patella (as my main reason). I also enjoy the detoxification feeling I get from doing it after my Monday night Bikram classes - I know fasting after Bikram sounds worse than torture. But I typically wake up from a fast and have my best workouts. I don't fast because of any issue with food or for fat loss though and never really have.

We'll see how I feel after yoga tonight. There's a Trader Joe's a few blocks from class so maybe I'll skip the fast while I research more and get more opinions.

Maybe just splitting hairs here but, if one were to eat his or her last (of 3) meal at 5:30 PM and then not eat again until 7 or so the next morning the body may very well be in a fasted state. So whether by trying or not there could be several inadvertent fasts within a whole 30.

Day 3 is going well BTW. Ginormous salad with sardines and baby clams.

Thanks,

Lee