Day 13 Through 30 On The Whole30

We were happier, calmer with the changes we had made in our diet.  I know we cannot continue to say we are on The Whole30 when we are eating non-approved Whole30 foods, but we were happy to have stuck with most of our food changes.  We were still cooking with foods in their natural state, we thought.

On day 16, we were supposed to leave for a week+ at the Eastern Shore.  We decided to wait until the morning of day 17 before leaving, due to the amount of heavy rains and flooding that was occurring between our Washington, DC area and the Eastern Shore.  Plus, a tractor trailer accident had shut down one of the Bay Bridges on Day 16, and we did not want to be stuck in traffic on top of flooding.  We arrived at our beach house at 10:30am on day 17.

Whether I am away from home one night or one month, I have to unpack everything upon arrival.  As I was setting out our personables in the bathroom, I tripped over the scale.  Now, we are not supposed to weigh ourselves during the 30 days - only before we start and after we finish.  But I convinced myself I was already on that "slippery slope" you here politician mention so frequently, since we had added back some non-approved Whole30 foods.  Also, every scale was different and this particular scale looked like it had been bought with the house, at least 40 years ago, so there was no way it could be accurate anyway.  I stepped on and, to my surprise, it said I was down 13 pounds.  I said, "WHAAAAAAT?!" just like the minion from Despicable Me.  I dismissed it; "It's just an old, uncalibrated scale," I told myself.  I should have listened to the scale and stuck to the program the entire trip and would be better off now...  Anywho, I had alcohol twice on our 9 day vacation, Grotto Pizza twice, spinach dip (with dairy ingredients) one night, ate some potatoes and drank a soda half of the days at the beach.  Blasphemer!  ;o)

Yesterday, while doing our grocery shopping, we took our blood pressure and weight again at the pharmacy, to see if anything changed.  My blood pressure and heart rate had gone down and I had lost 6 pounds.  Is that the difference between scales, the non-approved foods I ate and drank at the beach or the fact that I did not weigh myself naked, 1st thing in the morning after peeing?  Who knows.  What I do know is that I dropped 2 clothing sizes and 2 bra sizes.  At first, I started to berated myself.  "If you'd only stuck to the plan completely and worked out more at the gym, you'd have lost so much more weight!"  But it isn't about losing more.  I lost 2 sizes!  I'm happy with that!  I know how much better we can look and feel by eating "clean" foods - whole ingredients without preservatives and chemicals.  So we are going to strive to live as clean as possible.  With the occasional homemade spinach and artichoke dip and a blood-orange martini.  ;o)