The answer is NOT restriction!

I finally realized that in order for me to fully recover my mental health I have to heal my relationship to food and admit that after a while I was suffering from Orthorexia and had seriously disordered eating and it was completely because of Whole30.

Whole 30 is perpetuating the diet cycle and making people’s relationship with food worse.

The way many people are using the program is just another excuse to yo-yo diet, binge eat, and it perpetuates the attachment of morality to food and continues the shame spiral.

A lot of whole 30 marketing states that “it’s not a diet it’s a lifestyle change” and “it’s a 30 day elimination protocol and is not supposed to be done forever.” BUT the book specifically states that you can continue longer than the 30 days if your body needs more time in the elimination phase. It’s turning into a lifestyle change that people are trying to adhere to forever, doing Whole100’s, Whole365’s, or doing a Whole30 multiple times a year. I think I completed a Whole160 one year - and I was really proud of that. 

If you get this stuck in the cycle- then Whole30 is not healing your relationship with food – it’s actually making it much much worse. Why was I so stuck? Because I had a SHITTY relationship with my body and food. 

What if instead of doing a Whole30 we just ate in a way that felt good? So no shame and guilt around “bad” foods and no more “I’ll eat the sugar and gluten at Christmas then  do a January reset!” There are no “yes” and “no” labels on foods or ingredients but just eating what you want and what feels good. After whole30 I become so entrenched in the rules and become fearful of foods that weren’t  “healthy” because I believed they were bad and would make me gain weight. I even got so scared of gaining weight that I went further and did a low carb Whole30 because bananas and sweet potatoes were now keeping me from being as thin as possible. AGAIN proof that it's just part of a diet cycle and an excuse to seek thinness. 

I guess what’s scary is the company has branded itself so strongly that a ton of companies have W30 certified items and you can literally do a round of W30 without cooking once. In 2015 when I started it was all cooking and figuring it out on your own and it was a little known program really. Now that it has become so high profile and they’ve pushed into the business market so heavily it is really just like any another weight loss diet that makes you focus on what food to avoid to not be fat. I honestly felt like the W30 certified frozen entrees at Walmart we’re like throwing me right back to lean cuisines and controlling my portions and dealing with the old weight watchers thoughts. 

All of this left me wondering “How do I get to this Whole30 food freedom they’re talking about?“

I truly believed  I’d  just restrict forever and always be on Whole30-but that’s not freedom! That’s  not fixing your relationship with food and your body that’s deciding to be on a diet forever. 

For me it became disordered eating and it made my relationship with myself even worse and it became such an obsessive behavior and it began to control my every thought. This is when I started to have severe anxiety and stress over just freaking living life because I was so stressed out over planning every detail of every waking moment around what I was going to eat and when I was going to workout. I was weighing myself about three times a day and constantly seeking further validation over how worthy I was based off how good my diet looked, how hard I had worked out, how little I weighed, and how small my pants were. 

Whole30 did help me lose 140 pounds, but it also pushed me into a very dark place mentally and I would rather put weight back on and feel a sense of happiness and peace in my mind than go back to the obsessive lists and planning and intense control I had to have over myself. 

I am so early in the journey - I have yet to truly release all of the issues around weight stigma and diet culture that have been so beaten into me. I can say now though that I am very over Whole30 compliant eating.