Whole30 Meal Plan

My spouse is starting this plan very soon and I want to support her while she does it.  I've looked at the plan and admit that it will be easy for her, but rather challenging for me.  Giving up bread, cereal, cookies, 1% milk, chocolate, cheeses, and a host of other stuff I crave seems really daunting.  However, my next door neighbor did it and he lost 16 pounds, which, has been a goal of mine (I really want to drop 15 pounds) I want to try this 'diet'.  Has anybody made it through this plan even though craving the same stuff I do?  I've been frustrated with lack of progress shedding some weight.

My neighbors  stated that they have much more energy, many less aches/ joint issues after completing this plan.

Comments, advice, results, your experiences, please.

my girlfriend has done it twice, with success in losing weight. but as an outsider looking in, it was very difficult to find food combos that would sustain long term energy. for me personally as a climber it would be damn near impossible to live without carbs. Good luck and let us know how it goes, its only a month!

Dieting doesn't work. The only way to loose weight is to change the way you live your life.

tape. worm.  

I’m on it in a none strict way, and I lost about 20 pounds, which was kinda surprising. I have to make sure I’m eating enough—it’s easy to not get enough calories in if all you eat is meat, veggies, and nuts. I find I have to supplement the diet with rice in order to mantain weight.

Note that during the losing weight phase. you’ll go to bed a little hungry every night. That’s how weight loss works. Whole30 is just a tasty way to remove high calorie foods that also tend to cause bloating.

PS the no sugar thing is hard to keep up. Consider a cheat day every week with the sugar.

I did it for two months. After I had shoulder surgery, I knew I was going to be a lot less active for couple months, and probably miserable, and my supportive husband would probably get extra ice cream and cheesecakes to cheer me up...

I didn’t want to gain weight while recovering from surgery, so I preemptively declared whole 30, as a way to curb the sweets. And if it was “anti inflammatory” to boot, well, that’s not a bad thing after surgery, surely?

I had no problem following this diet at all, the only trouble was with finding appropriate foods to eat when going out... but I also hadn’t seen any significant effect from it. I lost maybe 2lb, but I’m not sure it wasn’t just the muscle mass loss. My husband joined me for the second month. He has seen some minor digestive changes, and lost 5 lb. But it was not a sustainable way long term way to eat for either of us, and we stoped at the end of the 2nd month.

Temporarily changing your diet is going to yield temporary results. I think these limited-time plans are counterproductive, because they give you a temporary feeling of success when you've actually failed because you just gain the weight back in the following months. In fact, a survey of studies by the APA showed that over two thirds of people who complete short-term diets weigh more two years later than they did before they started to diet.

A 30 day plan is pretty much the worst example of this. It might make sense to follow a plan like this to deal with some temporary condition (like Lena Chita's recovery from surgery) but if your goal is long-term weight loss, you need to change your diet long-term. The best diet is the one you actually stick to for the rest of your life. You might lose some weight with this diet, but then you'll need to switch to a more sustainable diet or you'll just gain the weight again. So why not start on the more sustainable diet immediately and not waste your time learning to deal with a diet that won't actually work long-term?

For me, it took a lot of experimentation to find stuff I could stick to. For example, I eat a lot more spicy food now because spice tastes good but doesn't have calories like other tasty things (fat/carbs). I could count on my fingers how many sodas I've had in the last 5 years. So the sooner you start this experimentation, the sooner you can lose weight and keep it off.

If you insist that you don't care about sustainability, just fast for 30 days (check with a doctor first). That's totally doable and you'll lose way more weight that way than with the Whole30 diet.

From my discussion with my neighbors who went on this plan, they ended up not eating several types of food because those foods no longer appealed to them, so it's not like its 30 days and you just stop the meal plan.  It seems more like a way to alter one's diet over the long haul.  The idea is to re-introduce one formerly absent food at a time and then see how the body reacts to that addition.  The body will let you know if it's something to continue consuming.  I used to be able to eat just about anything with little weight gain, but at my age that just doesn't work.  The old metabolism isn't what it used to be.  At least on this plan, I can eat uncured BACON!!! 

This sounds fucking miserable. Why not decrease/moderate your intake while increasing your activity? Honest question to the OP 

mediocre wrote: This sounds fucking miserable. Why not decrease/moderate your intake while increasing your activity? Honest question to the OP 

I'm doing that now.  

ViperScale . wrote: Dieting doesn't work. The only way to loose weight is to change the way you live your life.

100 percent. Small lifestyle changes lead to long terms 

I never had a sweet tooth until after whole30. Be warned.

caughtinside wrote:

This should be restated for the crowd who thinks that whole 30 is just a month long weight loss diet.  It's more of an experiment to clean house, and introduce certain things back in one at a time to see how they effect you.  I got a lot out of it personally, and I wasn't really looking to lose weight, but was looking for ways to feel better and have more energy.  Turns out dairy doesn't affect me negatively, but other things do. 

Yes, I agree. For a lot of people 30 day thing is just a way to break the habit of eating the junk they had been eating. And to pinpoint any food sensitivities/reactions they might have. 

But you can’t blame people for misinterpretation. The whole 30 book focuses a lot on what to do (or not do) in the diet phase, and very lightly barely touches on reintroduction of foods after 30 days, and the long term. 
And long term gluten free diet for people who don’t have celiac is actually not only not beneficial, it might be somewhat detrimental. 
BMJ article summary

caughtinside wrote:

This should be restated for the crowd who thinks that whole 30 is just a month long weight loss diet.  It's more of an experiment to clean house, and introduce certain things back in one at a time to see how they effect you. 

Nearly every short-term claims they're just to kickstart longer-term changes, so this isn't unique to Whole30 and doesn't make it any less of a short-term diet. This isn't a difference between this and the diets studied by the APA and there's no reason to believe it will be any less counterproductive.

I got a lot out of it personally, and I wasn't really looking to lose weight, but was looking for ways to feel better and have more energy.

More to the point the Whole30 creators claim that "Weight loss is not a focus of Whole30." Which would make the OP's goal of losing weight with this program a bit misguided even according to the creators.

Seriously, just spend 5 minutes and read the Wikipedia article on this diet. There's nothing good to be said about it:

No studies that specifically look into the health impacts of the Whole30 have been conducted.[2]  While dietitians generally agree with the program's emphasis on proteins, vegetables and unprocessed foods and the avoidance of added sugars and alcohol, they also view the diet as too extreme.[3][6]

The diet ranked last among 38 popular diets evaluated by U.S. News & World Report in its 2016 Best Diets Rankings; one of the raters, dietitian Meridan Zerner said: "We want behavioral changes and dietary changes that are slow and progressive and meaningful."[3]  David L. Katz said of the diet: "The grouping [of banned foods] is both random, and rather bizarre from a nutrition perspective. If the idea is good nutrition, cutting out whole grains and legumes is at odds with a boatload of evidence."[1] It was selected as one of the worst health trends for 2013 by Health Magazine.[8]

If your regular diet is crap, Whole30 may get you out of some bad (and into some good) habits with regards to shopping, recipes, and meal prep.  It may also help with starting to permanently associate certain foods with being less healthy (simple sugars, refined flour, beverage calories).  However, if your diet is already pretty good, something like time-restricted eating is something that you can easily do to some degree for the rest of your life.  Also, caloric/dietary restriction has been the only mechanism proven to extend life, so it's got that going for it too.  

My diet has pretty much sucked.  My spouse has been the best influence on me.  This is why I want to proceed, to get a better handle on what is best for me. I really have very little self-control over various foods, except when I don't have the stuff in the house.  I need to break out of my food trap.

Tradster wrote: ....except when I don't have the stuff in the house. 

This is pretty much how I strategize when I want to drop a few pounds. I can't drink the beer if it isn't in the fridge. Same for chips and other junk. If all i have is carrots and almond butter, well I guess I didn't really want a snack anyway...time for bed.