First Published in the Tri Town Transcript May 19, 2017
By Esther C. Baird
Look, I’m happy to try the latest and greatest nutrition craze. I mean, if for no other reason than I want to burn all of my cookbooks and serve them, coal-like, for dinner. Enjoy that, because I’m fresh out of ideas and would rather eat a bag of mulch than spend time figuring out dinner.
So when The Whole 30 program hit the nation like a ton of non-processed, dairy free, sugar free, grain-free bricks, I was happy to try it since it answered what was for dinner.
The idea is to take 30 days and eliminate all the foods that may cause you psychological or dietary distress. The food groups to eliminate include all things otherwise known as edible. On the flip side, the list of ailments that may be related include: fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, weight gain, joint pain, digestive distress and a general inability to make one single more school lunch.
So, okay. I have all kinds of ailments that I’d like to flush out of my life. If I can do it in just 30 days, plus get some new dinner ideas, then fine, I’d take a look.
It’s only that Whole 30 has one small problem, ok two. The plan expected me to eliminate the flavored creamer for my coffee and all alcohol – – even on weekends! The idea is you can do ANYTHING for 30 days.
Sure, of course I can, but umm . . . no. Especially not with six weeks of school left before summer. Are you insane!?
From the start I was more of a Mostly 30.
Nevertheless I got the cookbook and whipped up a few of the dinners. In these recipes when they call for things like BBQ sauce, you can’t just grab the jar you already own. Instead, you must recreate it from scratch, with ingredients that are Whole 30 compliant. Mostly you cut the sugar, which I get. My Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce is chock full sugar and if I can make it with whole pitted dates that I boiled for 30 seconds (and no longer) and then pureed and then added to tomato sauce, well . . . . what’s SO complicated about that?? Don’t we all just have pitted dates ready to zip into a rolling boil as needed to sweeten our foods?
So I tried. Sort of. But ‘compliant’ is not going to make the top ten list of adjectives that describe me. It may not make the top 100. If I want to get my chicken broth at Costco instead of spending two years of my life, and no small amount of my sanity, making bone broth – which, by the way, makes your kitchen smell like a slaughter house and is quite possibly the nastiest thing to clean up, then so be it. Is that not compliant enough? Do I need to direct you to my favorite aisle in Costco where they sell the bulk boxes of, ‘I Don’t Care’??
It’s possible that compliancy triggered some of my psychological issues that I could have been eliminating like so many toxins, but instead kept pouring into my coffee each morning like liquid Twinkies.
And then Regular Readers, my Whole 30 experiment devolved. I see your Whole 30 and I raise you the Absolute 5.
What’s Absolute 5? Well, that’s when you get Salmonella from trimming raw chicken and in five days completely flush out any toxin or molecule of non-compliant anything that has ever even touched your body.
I am here to tell you that Whole 30 may be trendy, but Salmonella is fast. Weight loss? Extreme – – I lost it all in one very exciting night. Insomnia? Gone – – on Absolute 5, I could sleep for three, even four, hours at a time even in the middle of the day! Hydration? You betchya! On Absolute 5, I got to go to the ER and have them place my own personal hydration device directly into my veins. Who’s got the winning program now??
Here on the other side of things, I can see that possibly Whole 30 takes a more balanced approach than Absolute 5. But I’ve had it with new and interesting ideas for now. I bought some of the ‘I Don’t Care’ at Costco and we’re having a lot of that for dinner these days.
That, and as I type, it’s Friday. After this rather grand failed experiment one thing is for sure, we’re eating out tonight. Cosmo with dinner? Why, yes, I’m happy to comply.