Yeah, I know, you totally called it.  We only lasted 20 days.  The thing is, we wanted to enjoy pizza with our co-workers and support our new church building at a spaghetti fundraiser dinner, so it was a choice to give it up early.  But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an awesome, insane, and educational experience.  Here are some life-changing things I learned.

When you throw your grocery budget out the window, and have extremely limited options for ingredients, cooking isn’t actually that bad.  More and more as I grow up, I am learning that I do.not.like cooking.  It’s in the same line as cleaning for me.  Necessary, but how necessary is it?  I can live in my own filth just about as long as I can survive on cheap fast food and pizza-it’s quite an impressive threshold.  But I actually enjoyed cooking on the Whole30, because I didn’t have to think about following recipes or even meal planning.  I didn’t really have to think about grocery shopping either because there were so few things I could actually buy, that I just bought everything we could eat.  We completely killed our grocery budget (we seriously spent almost twice as much as we normally do, sick!) but that was okay, too, because we planned on that.  So I would shop and buy whatever I knew we could eat, without worrying about money and then every evening I would look in my fridge and cupboards and make whatever I came up with.  I like cooking that way, and in some ways, I’ve adopted that into my daily routine.  Buy things that sound good and are natural and healthy and then make something up.

Food has a lot of crap in it.  We’re blessed to not have food allergies/intolerance so I’ve never really cared what was in the things I was buying.   But the Whole30 definitely opened my eyes to all the weird ingredients that companies put in food.  I’m learning to read the label and trying not to buy things that have ingredients I can’t pronounce.

Dairy makes me smelly.  It just does.  So I’ve sadly stopped drinking milk regularly and cook with a lot less cheese.  It’s not as hard as I thought it would be.  I’m not super strict about it, and I will not give up milk with cookies or a splash in my cereal.  But the new moderation definitely helps my gassy-ness.

Overall, we’ve changed.  The other day, I made a batch of cookies, and only made 8 cookies.  We could have eaten the whole batch ourselves, easily.  But I wrapped up the rest of the cookie dough and put in in the fridge for later.  WHAT?!  I barely even recognized myself.  Bryan was hilariously irritated when I told him he would be only be getting 4 cookies, but even he admitted that 4 was the perfect amount for one evening.

So, no, we didn’t make all 30 days.  And no, I don’t plan on eating paleo the rest of my life, by any means.  But my entire goal was to kick off a healthier lifestyle for us, and I would definitely say we succeeded in that regard.

Oh yeah, it’s also notable that Bryan lost at least 15 pounds in 20 days, and my muffin top was significantly reduced-so that was kind of fun too!