Whole30: Day 1 in the life of a bread addict

I took off work beginning the Friday after Christmas and only just returned yesterday. If Mondays are rough, Mondays after being off for 10 days are hell.

As if returning to the daily grind of work wasn’t enough, I came up with the bright idea of doing The Whole30 Challenge starting yesterday. I read about it last year and immediately dismissed it when I got to the part about giving up bread and beans.

Um. Yeah. This female right here eats toast for breakfast. Two slices of Nature's Own Honey Wheat. With a schmear of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light fake processed crap on top. Lunch is usually a bean burrito. Half the time we have ranch style or black beans with dinner, too. And if we don’t, we usually have some sort of potato or rice instead. My husband requires rice with his fish. If you make fish, that man is seriously confused if no rice arrives at the table. It’s not a question of whether or not there is rice. He’s just trying to locate it because obviously the rice is somewhere. It took me roughly 6 years of marriage to master that.

On the list of things you can’t have on the Whole30 are grains, legumes (a fancy word for beans), potatoes, dairy, peanuts and sugar. You’d be amazed what that eliminates from your life. Bread, beans, peanut butter, corn, alcohol, rice, pasta, french fries, baked potatoes and anything with sugar in it which is pretty much everything that tastes yummy and calls my name. No worries though. You get all the veggies you want until you're full. And doesn’t that make up for all the Kit Kat bars and bread you’ll be missing out on? Of course it does!

The gist is that you eat a protein the size of the palm of your hand (organic, grass fed, cage free, no chemicals kind), a fat equivalent to half an avocado and the rest of your plate is veggies and you eat until you’re full. That’s each meal. 3 meals a day. Even breakfast. That’s a hell of a lot of veggies.  Including having them at breakfast no less. I’m also supposed to have 1 serving of fruit per day but it’s not required and is actually optional. This female right here loves her some fruit. I normally eat way more fruit than veggies.  Ugh.

The beans and the bread will be the 2 hardest for me though. Not eating an entire bowl of grapes while watching crappy reality television won’t be fun either. Much like my Friday night margarita with dinner will be missed. But it's the bread and beans that are my soulmates.  Seriously. They were go to foods that left me feeling full on my health kick. Never underestimate the power of a food you like that leaves you feeling full. You go to that well over and over and over again to stay the course when the going gets rough.

So at first glance, Whole30 seemed completely out of the question for me. Just inconceivable. Then I finished reading all the books I had while we were traveling over New Years so then I downloaded the Kindle app for my phone. And then I decided to read something a little educational-ish on it since it felt strange reading on my phone and the words seemed so small and I just didn’t think I could get into a novel on it. Plus we were traveling and I was exhausted and preparing to get up the next morning at the crack of dawn to do more traveling and get more exhausted and knew with the traveling I’d be stopping and starting with the book a lot and in my head that works better for educational-ish type books.

Lately all my educational-ish reading has been running related. This female right here has been eating anything and everything the further I get in my marathon training. Seriously. Don’t plan to lose weight while marathon training. You will be a hungry wench and need to eat. Then I traveled and I’m physically incapable of not inhaling everything I see when I’m traveling. Two hours after we leave the house I convince myself I’m so exhausted from the stress of travel that I require a Dr. Pepper. My jeans are a little snugger to show for it, too. So my eating habits could use some work.

I figured I was overdue for some food related learning and dare I hope food related improvement. I was also due for doing something that felt hard and took me out of my comfort zone.  Whole30 popped into my head. My husband said he’d do it with me. I downloaded It Starts with Food.  And that was that.

For all I know the Italian Stallion probably thought it would take me 3 months to finish the book. Little did he know I’d finish it the next day.

And if you’re going to announce you’re starting Whole30, you should definitely compound your poor food choices by living it up.  So we did Cane's fried chicken strips for dinner with a vat of Dr. Pepper, donuts for breakfast the next morning and a Kit Kat while grocery shopping for your Whole30 supplies. King size Kit Kat I might add. Naturally. I could pretend I shared it with my daughter but I only gave her 1 bar. Nice.

So me and my Jelly Belly are ready for some changes to my eating habits is what I’m saying. It’s overdue. Dramatic and intimidating. But overdue and most likely helpful to my pants size.

Once my husband realized all the off limits foods, he tried backing out the night before we started. Some nonsense about needing carbs. I pretended we were running together and I was him ready to sprint off into the distance while I’m lagging behind panting and dying. Suck it up, buttercup.

I will seriously kill him if he quits and leaves me alone in the carb free hell.

Less than 8 hours after we started, I was ready to cut someone for some bread. A stranger preferably. But give it some time. I’m sure I’ll be ready to cut an acquaintance soon.

I had a headache by the end of day 1 and I really, really, really want to have a snack. But I’m concerned that’s because of the headache. Because it’s a scientifically proven fact that snacking makes 73% of my ailments better on any given day. But Whole30 says I shouldn’t need to snack between meals. This blows my “eating every 2 hours” mind. But I’m trying to follow the rules so I resisted with all my might.

Everything is hard when you first start. That's what I kept telling myself.  When I fall down the Dr. Pepper well and start drinking it consistently again, it always requires serious will power to quit again. Like headaches and thinking about it all the time hard. During the headache and jonesing for snacks and carbs yesterday, I tried hard to remind myself it will get easier. It has to. I just need to acclimate. Hopefully. Please say it will be so. Please.

I also didn’t do the world’s best job prepping to start yesterday. Nothing like having a super vague plan and not doing any food prepping for the week! But I did scrape together a shopping list. I also bookmarked some simple recipes. And then I went for a mega long run, was beyond exhausted and barely managed to convince myself to get up and go to the store an hour before bedtime. Genius. But I made it through Day 1.  So there's that.  29 days to go!

10 Things I've learned in the first 24 hours of Whole30:

1. I really like bread and there is such thing as bread withdrawal.

2. I was initially worried about giving up butter because this girl likes her some butter. Then I realized without bread, my need for butter significantly went down. It all comes back to the bread, baby.

3. My regular grocery store doesn’t stock all the fancy schmancy ingredients the Whole30 websites recommend and list in recipes.

4. The fancy schmancy ingredients the Whole30 websites recommend and uses in recipes are way more expensive than the cheap crap we normally buy. Sunday night, I paid $6.99 for a pound of grass fed no hormone beef. No really. $6.99. Holy crap that’s some gold plated meat. Then I headed over to the egg aisle and paid $2.99 for a dozen. And I bought 3 dozen and almost hurled. I also carried them to the car more protectively than any other grocery item I’ve ever bought. I also protected them from falling green bean cans on the way home as if they were 200 year old fine china. Because the only thing worse than paying $2.99 for a dozen eggs would be breaking them on the way home. Because then I really would have to hurl. I found the grocery shopping experience stressful. I don’t know that I’m built for that much stress in the Kroger egg aisle. I'm trying to comfort myself by thinking about all the money I'll be saving not buying pasta and rice except they are cheap as hell so it's not working.

5. It takes a long time to eat that much meat and veggies and each meal. I had the equivalent of a taco salad for lunch along with some green beans and my jaw was seriously getting tired of chewing all the lettuce. That’s after having three million raw carrots with my breakfast. My meals have gone from 10 minutes of actual eating to like 30 just based on the volume of veggies and all the chewing. That’s wacky.

6. Raw carrots with breakfast wasn’t half bad though. I ate them in the car on the way to work. They’re easy to eat one handed while driving and you do so much chewing it’s hard not to feel full when you’re done. Before that I also had eggs and force fed myself half an avocado in my continuing quest to convince myself I like them.

7. My husband is a magician with asparagus, a giant fry pan and some olive oil. Dinner was great. We also inhaled salmon and salad with the asparagus. So glad he’s in this with me because I’m above average inept in the kitchen.

8. Apparently I’m going to need to learn to like eating avocados. I’ve never been a big avocado girl but I’m supposed to have some fat at each meal and if one more website tells me to have ½ an avocado raw I’m going to scream. I successful got one down. I’m trying to remind myself about feeding babies new foods and how you have to introduce something a lot before they might decide they like it.

9. I don’t know how to successfully cut up an avocado without jacking it up. Gonna need to Google that. Will also be googling how to cook them in case I might like cooked avocado better.

10. My kids are convinced all the talk about healthy eating going on in our house will mean less Pop Tarts, Oreos and potato chips for them.  Poor things. They have no idea what they’re in for.

I've eaten turkey 4 times already and it's not even Thanksgiving yet

I attended not one but two Thanksgiving parties today. I dined with the sticky fingered preschool set first and then jogged across the school to eat more turkey with my favorite first grader.

Earlier this week my passive aggressive colleagues and I dined on upgraded turkey at my office Thanksgiving spread. I then served office Thanksgiving spread leftovers to my family for dinner. Free leftovers being the only perk of being in charge of organizing an office Thanksgiving spread. The downsides being annoying stuffing versus dressing debates and people asking the day afterward when the Christmas spread will be. Nothing sparks more discussion in my office than food. Hold a shindig with no cake and you'll never hear the end of it. My team won a free pizza party recently and the discussion about when it would be and where to order the pizza from took 10 minutes. It included a sidebar about the correct toppings to order. I'm not joking. It's a miracle we manage to get any work done.

But I digress.

So I brought home the leftovers from the passive aggressive upgraded Thanksgiving lunch spread. Not so much because it was free but because I felt bad letting it go to waste. I've been serving cheese and cracker appetizers to the kids every night since while I make dinner. I also try to serve leftover stuffing with everything. You'd be surprised what a tough sell it is when you're serving spaghetti for dinner.

For anyone keeping score at home, that's 4 times I've eaten turkey and the fixings with Thanksgiving still six days away. That has significantly reduced the chances of anyone sitting down to a turkey dinner at our funky mismatched table this year.

In fact, just thinking about turkey makes me feel full. That makes me wish the smell of turkey could be spritzed on like perfume and worn all day to keep the munchies at bay. Just imagine how many crumpled one dollar bills I'd save if I didn't feel the need to trek to the vending machine in the break room to see if they have animal crackers. Imagine the bowls full of Kit Kats I'd be able to walk past without grazing on. I might smell like turkey but I'd be richer and thinner. It's an idea.

Pepto pink exploded all over our house

My baby girl turned 4 years old this week. In honor of such an auspicious occasion I flung a little Pepto pink around the house:

Those are the letters I cut out several weeks ago. Instead of just taping them to the wall I taped them to a piece of blue poster board. I'll be taking a job at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia next week based on those superior design skills. And the large pink mushroom in the middle of the table is actually the cake:

It's supposed to be a giant cupcake. It somehow ended up looking more like a house for Smurfette. I made it using the giant Wilton cupcake pan. I think the pan itself is exceptionally cute but I couldn't find anywhere on the packaging about how much cake mix to use or what temperature to bake it at. So my cake was pretty much screwed from the get go. And I was up sick the night before. Like laying on the bathroom floor waiting to throw up sick. So I was mostly just happy to get myself vertical long enough to move the mixer around in the bowl for 90 seconds. Oh, and we didn't have any flour. Martha Stewart has explained to me several times the importance of greasing and then lightly flouring the pan so your cake will fall right out. Mine was more of a pry job. So maybe flour would have helped too.

Once the cake was out of the pan, I started mixing shades of pink. For reasons that are unclear to me now I decided I needed 4 shades of pink. Seriously. Stab my eyes out next time I decide 4 shades of pink sounds right. They all started blurring together in one horrific Pepto nightmare.

An hour later I actually had some icing bags loaded and ready to go and started making pink squiggles on top of the cake. I was going for a paisley-ish design. Things quickly spun out of control and I ended up with more of Jackson Pollock gone wrong feel. My husband claims he loves it. So does the newest 4 year old. Although she likes anything pink so whatever.

Besides the cake and Pepto explosion, we also hit the zoo. Here's my husband giving us a nice visual of how he feels about paying $2 for a bottle of water.

The $2 water must have robbed him of his senses because then he went and threw a half eaten chicken nugget to the tigers despite all the don't feed the animals signs posted everywhere. It literally bounced off the tiger's paw. And then he took a picture of his handiwork to prove it:

I'm not sure what they serve the tigers for dinner around there, but it's apparently better than cold half eaten chicken nuggets. That tiger couldn't even be bothered to sniff the nugget let alone eat it. Having said that, please don't feed the animals at the zoo. Because that's bad for the animals. And they'll take away your zoo membership or something if they catch you. But my husband's a nut job so he doesn't care. Just look what I'm up against:

The newest 4 year old also received more crap to clutter up our house some presents for her birthday. Books, play jewelry, some crap that takes batteries, and half a doll:

We call her "Torso Doll." So does the newest 4 year old. Because she heard her idiot parents calling it that. Torso Doll came with some glitter nail polish. I think it's actually glitter water but I'm not sure. I'm hoping it wasn't made in China because she's been polishing my entire body with the stuff for the last three days.

And now she's four. And she even looks four. That stupid new haircut made sure of that. I'd like to tell you she's still my little baby. But she's not. And I miss that baby she was. But now it's the little girl I'd be lost without. She is the light of my life. I feel lucky to have spent the last 4 years with her. And lucky to be the mother stirring the 4 shades of pink icing to make her birthday the best it could it be. Because it was was the best. Just like her.

If life were a donut, mine would have extra sprinkles

My husband brought home Krispy Kreme donuts last night. A whole assorted yummy box. They weren't "Hot Now" but I managed to get passed that and eat two of them anyway. One of them even had sprinkles. My husband understands my sprinkle needs in a way no one else does. I'm very pro-sprinkles. I really don't care that they add nothing as far as flavor. It's really the festive properties of sprinkles that I enjoy. Especially for holidays. Although, quite frankly, you toss some sprinkles on top of my donut and suddenly any day is a holiday as far as I'm concerned.

I'm also in favor of balloons. And funnel cake. And sparklers. All of those are very, very fun. And lots of birthday candles on your cake. When my daughter turned 3 she had like 12 candles on the cake. Certain members of my family thought that was odd. Ask me if I care. Candles are fun. The more the merrier. I also let her wear her Christmas dress to feed the ducks in the middle of August. That's just how I roll.

This weekend I'm going to mentally gear myself up for more planning for the soon to be 4 year old's Pepto pink celebration. Last weekend I bought the scrapbook paper to make decorations with. This weekend I need to summon up the courage to pull out some scissors and tape and actually make something happen with it. I fear allowing my three year old to be in the same room with scissors and cute paper. She will make short work of it. And by short work I mean hundreds and hundreds of tiny pieces of cute paper on my dining room floor. And don't try to give her some plain paper and tell her to sit next to you while you work with the cute stuff. Because my baby knows cute paper when she sees it and that plain white paper you tried to pawn off on her is not cute and totally sucks so hand over the cute paper, evil hag.

I'll let you know how it goes.

There’s no chance in hell you’d confuse Baked Doritos with the real thing but they’re still really yummy

Scott bought us a bag of Baked Doritos over the weekend to go with the Subway sandwiches we picked up. He actually insisted on stopping at the grocery store to run in for them on the way to the Subway. I’m gonna let that cheapskate move slide without comment since the Baked Doritos turned out to be really good. I’m not saying you’ll forget how good the real deal is. But by baked chip standards, nice job Doritos. What I’m going to do is go ahead and inhale the entire bag thereby negating any health benefits I got from eating baked. Kind of like when I'd eat SnackWell’s mini chocolate chip cookies straight from the box like Goldfish crackers because healthy translates to calorie free inside my head. Only nothing is calorie free when you eat the entire box.

The guy that suggested putting marshmallows in Fruit Loops is a genius

Fruit Loops with marshmallows are yummy. Eat em out of the box dry with no milk yummy. After dinner bowl for desert yummy. Why do they even bother to sell them without marshmallows anymore? I mean, yeah, they’re still tasty without the marshmallows. But what’s the point in tasty when full-on yummy is next to it on the shelf calling to you. I’m not even a big sugary cereal eater. I limit my Fruit Loop intake due to concerns about how quickly I tend to inhale it. Once a year, I break down and buy myself a box. For me, it’s the equivalent of breaking down and buying a box of Twinkies. The rest of the time I mostly eat Kix and Corn Flakes and Cheerios. Sometimes when I’m feeling wild I buy Honeycombs. But Honeycombs recently changed their recipe and now it totally sucks. The texture is different and it’s not quite as sweet and it’s the cereal equivalent of New Coke. I’ve sworn it off until Post publicly swears my box won’t ever contain that crap again. I also once bought a box of Corn Pops. They're okay. Most of the other cereals don’t impress me much. Frosted Flakes seem like Corn Flakes with a bunch of sugar on it. I could do that myself at home. Cocoa Puffs seem too chocolatey and Trix is the ugly stepsister of Fruit Loops. Cookie Crisp intrigues me sometimes. I mean, I like chocolate chip cookies. A lot actually. But the cookie aisle is only like two aisles away so if you get me in the mood for a cookie I start thinking maybe I should just head over there and buy some real ones. I recently bought my annual box of Marshmallow Fruit Loops and let my three year old daughter have a taste. She’s been referring to it as “candy” ever since. If that doesn't say yummy I don't know what does.