whole30

Holy cow! Week 2, check!

Our eating is definitely better than it ever has been but with such a big change we are really slacking on other things.

We aren’t sleeping that much. I have to cook so much. Not a complaint, just a reality. I either stay up late prepping things for the next day or I prep during the day when I would usually be doing other chores, like laundry. So I stay up late doing laundry.

Then since we’re sleeping less, we’re waking up late which throws the whole day off. Brandon hasn’t gone to workout all week. He usually goes every weekday. I’ve been missing several classes I usually attend because dinner has been taking longer to cook and I don’t make it to class on time.

That being said, I don’t think that the Whole30 is affecting us negatively, we just have to learn how to absorb this new thing added to our schedule and routine.

Breakfast:

• Egg and Sausage Casserole
• Trader Joe’s Salsa Verde
• 1/2 an Orange
• 1/2 an Apple with Almond Butter
• 1/2 an Avocado
• Spinach

Lunch: left is my lunch, right was Kraft’s.

• Leftover Ginger-Sesame Salad / Buffalo Chicken and Potato Casserole
• Carrot Sticks
• Celery Sticks with Almond Butter
• Hard-boiled Egg

Dinner:

• Pot Roast and Veggies
• Acorn Squash
• Cashew Cookie Larabar – I know, I know, we’re not supposed to use as dessert but I did. Sue me. 🙂

Prep:

• Cut 2 bunches of celery into celery sticks

How We Felt:

I think Week 2 was definitely harder than Week 1. I wasn’t as organized and a lot of non-Whole30 things fell through the cracks but I’m assuming this is just what happens when developing a new routine. I definitely want to be more organized for the upcoming week.

Week 2 Meal Roundup

Day 8:

• Breakfast: Fried Eggs, Pederson Farms (sugar-free) bacon, Green Monster Smoothie.
• Lunch: Rudy’s Brisket and Turkey, Lots of fruit
• Dinner: Tuna Salad with jalapeños and avocado, Handful of Almonds.

Day 9:

• Breakfast: Two fried eggs, 1/2 a Sweet Potato, Garlic and Herb Chicken Sausage, 1/2 Apple with Almond Butter
• Lunch: Cauliflower Fried Rice, Roasted Broccoli and Cherry Tomatoes, Carrot Sticks, 1/2 an Apple, Grapes
• Dinner: Leftover Tuna Salad, 1/2 an avocado, Handful of Blueberries

Day 10:

• Breakfast: Skillet Eggs, 1/2 an Apple and Almond Butter, 1 Breakfast Turkey Sausage Patty
• Lunch: Sweet Potato Noodle and Apple Spinach Salad
• Dinner: Hamburger Patty, 1/2 an Avocado, Salsa, Spinach, 1/2 a Baked Potato

Day 11:

• Breakfast: Fried Eggs, Spinach, Banana and Almond Butter
• Lunch: Potato and Buffalo Chicken Casserole, 1/2 an Apple with Almond Butter
• Dinner: Baked Chicken Breast with Chimichurri Sauce, 1/2 and Avocado, Spinach

Day 12:

• Breakfast: Two Fried Eggs, Spinach, Garlic Herb Chicken Sausage, Handful of Blueberries
• Lunch: Ginger-Sesame Chicken Salad, 1/2 an Apple
• Snack: Cashew Cookie Larabar and a handful of Roasted Plantain Chips.
• Dinner: Slow Cooker Turkey Legs, Kale

Day 13:

• Breakfast: Egg and Sausage Casserole, Spinach, Banana and Almond Butter
• Lunch: Leftover Ginger-Sesame Salad, Carrot Sticks, Handful of Blueberries, Pecan Pie Larabar
• Dinner: Milkcan Supper

Day 14:

• Breakfast: Egg and Sausage Casserole, Trader Joe’s Salsa Verde, 1/2 an Orange, 1/2 an Apple with Almond Butter, 1/2 an Avocado, Spinach
• Lunch: Leftover Ginger-Sesame Salad / Buffalo Chicken and Potato Casserole, Carrot Sticks, Celery Sticks with Almond Butter, Hard-boiled Egg
• Dinner: Pot Roast and Veggies, Acorn Squash, Cashew Cookie Larabar

As if overbuying greens last week wasn’t lesson enough, for whatever reason this week I completely overbought red bell peppers. And meat.

I think I bought at least 15 red bell peppers. They were crazy on sale. Like 1/3 what they usually are so I decided I was going to make stuffed peppers. For an army.

And I’m not sure why I bought so much meat. I currently have 40 chicken wings, 4 pounds of ground turkey, and a 4 pound sirloin tip. And that’s left over from the week.

Thankfully all this can go into the freezer.

Here’s how to freeze peppers if you’re curious. Don’t skip the cookie sheet step unless you want to use an ice pick every time you need a certain amount of peppers out of the bag.

After yesterday’s post with some cooking hacks I like to use, I forgot to tell you about my favorite. The Garbage Bowl. Yup. It’s the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQVVJMGWsk

Of course, you can use any bowl, like a mixing bowl or something but I have the orange one and it just makes me happy. And it’s just so darn useful. Sure, our trashcan is right next to the counter where I do all my chopping and prepping, but if I have to carry the trash across the counter then step on the pedal to open the trash, I always end up making a mess. Having that handy little bowl right there. Genius. And no Rachael Ray is not paying me. She just taught me a lot 🙂

Breakfast:

• Egg and Sausage Casserole – This isn’t bad, but I think I’m finding that I just don’t like egg casseroles.
• Spinach
• Banana and Almond Butter – I have a love affair with almond butter. I admit it.

Lunch:

• Leftover Ginger-Sesame Salad
• Carrot Sticks
• Handful of Blueberries
• Pecan Pie Larabar

Dinner:

• Milkcan Supper – I make this dish all the time. It’s great for big groups. To make it Whole30, just sub the beer for some chicken broth and make the kids eat all the corn. Just because I prefer it, I swap out brussel sprouts for the cabbage.

Prep:

• Chopped up about 4 pounds of carrot sticks

How We Felt:

No complaints today.

When Olivia (our first kiddo) was born, we lived in a condo that gave us free cable. It was awesome. So me and newborn Olivia would watch hours and hours of Food Network shows back in the day when people still, you know, cooked on the channel. I picked up a few tricks then that I’m still using today. They have made my life in the kitchen infinitely easier. Especially with all the food prep you have to do during a Whole30, I’m glad these tricks make it fast. Here are the top 3:

1. Slicing an apple: I actually picked this up from Rachael Ray even though I couldn’t find her video. There are millions of ways to cut an apple but this is by far the fastest and it gives you uniform slices, perfect for dipping:

2. Dicing an onion: This technique I learned from Alton Brown, but again I couldn’t find his video of it. First cutting the onion radially and then dicing is so much easier for me than the parallel cut.:

3. Washing lettuce/greens/herbs: On the Whole30 we eat so much salad. I would hate washing lettuce if I didn’t know this trick that makes it so speedy. Again, credit for this method goes to Rachael Ray but I couldn’t find a video of it so I’ll have to describe it to you.

Fill up a clean sink with cold water (not warm or it will wilt the lettuce). Tear apart your lettuce so that the leaves are loose and not held together at the base. Dunk the leaves in the water and swish around to loosen the dirt from the leaves. Then leave them in the water and don’t touch them for about a minute. This will allow the dirt to settle to the bottom. Then carefully scoop the lettuce out of the water, trying not to disturb the dirt that has settled. Dry the lettuce on kitchen towels or in a salad spinner.

This is what our water looked like after washing some kale today.

 

 

Breakfast:

• Two Fried Eggs
• Spinach
• Trader Joe’s Garlic Herb Chicken Sausage
• Handful of Blueberries

Lunch:

• Ginger-Sesame Chicken Salad
• 1/2 an Apple (Kraft cut up the apple which is why it’s not sliced like the above video teaches 😉 )

Snack: I couldn’t help myself today so I had a Cashew Cookie Larabar (so good, my fav so far) and a handful of Trader Joe’s Roasted Plantain Chips.

Dinner:

• Slow Cooker Turkey Legs
• Kale

This is one of the easiest recipes I make. I got it out of a cookbook from the library ages ago. I don’t even know the name of it. You put two bunches of washed kale (stems removed), in the bottom of the crockpot with 1 cup of chicken stock. I can fit 6 turkey drumsticks on top of the kale in my crockpot. You must remove the skin from the drumsticks (Shout out to Rachel for learning the trick to getting the skin off easily is to use a paper towel. Gives you a better hold.). Then rub the drumsticks with olive oil and sprinkle salt, pepper, dried parsley, and paprika. Close lid securely. I cook mine on high for 6 hours.

Prep:

• Roasted 2 sweet potatoes
• Roasted 2 acorn squash

How We Felt:

Kraft is feeling hungry for each meal which is a total revelation. Ever since I’ve know him (which is about 12 years now 😮) He has never been able to tell when his body is hungry. He would just be fine and then totally hangry before hangry was even a thing. It was like a Snickers commercial. I would tell him he needed to eat something and after he ate, he’d be like, yeah, I guess I was hungry. He just could never read what his body was feeling. But now he can. He’s getting better at being able to tell when he is full and when mealtime comes around, he knows that he is hungry. It sounds insignificant now that I’ve typed it, but it is kinda a big deal.

This might be weird, but I think I’m sweating more when I workout. Ew. I know. You click on here to see what’s going on and you don’t want to hear about me sweating. But it’s what you get today. There are a few reasons why I think it is happening. Maybe my body is better at doing what it is supposed to be doing. Or maybe I’m exercising harder. My body is performing better so I’m working out more intensely and my body has to cool off more. Just a guess but I thought it was notable 🙂

Ok, no more talk about sweat. Pinky promise.

Ok, I’ve got another confession to make. I’ve been weighing myself daily.

I know, I know. It’s a big no no.

I’m totally going to throw Kraft under the bus on this one. He has always weighed himself daily. He likes metrics. So on Day 1 I told him not to weigh himself and he did it anyway. (“Just like a man!” for all those Anne of Green Gables lovers out there.) And since he did it, I did it. #peerpressure #justsayno

You know what is so interesting? My weight has been totally stable. Before the Whole30 when I would weigh myself throughout the week (always in the morning before eating), my weight would fluctuate about 7 pounds. But since starting the Whole30, my weight is exactly the most low number of that 7 pound range everyday. It’s kind of amazing. It seems like my body is finally experiencing stability instead of my capricious treat-indulging throughout the week. I can only conclude that this is good.

But I will admit that 11 days in, I’m getting discouraged that I haven’t lost weight. So I’ll have to agree with them and say that you really, really shouldn’t weigh yourself. The last thing you need while doing a Whole30 is discouragement. Especially discouragement that is in your power to avoid. Just don’t step up on the scale.

I’m going to stop. I won’t weigh myself tomorrow or the rest of the Whole30, cross my heart. As they say, I don’t want to be a slave to that hunk of plastic. You don’t own me, scale. *sassy snap*

Breakfast:

• Fried Eggs
• Spinach
• Banana and Almond Butter

Lunch:

• Potato and Buffalo Chicken Casserole – I actually made this for this week’s post-workout meal but I didn’t have anything on hand that was quick for lunch
• 1/2 an Apple with Almond Butter

Dinner:

• Baked Chicken Breast with Chimichurri Sauce – This sauce is so amazing. I hate pesto so I was worried it was going to taste like pesto. It doesn’t. It tastes like awesome. And you can put it on anything: beef, fish, chicken. It makes everything perfect. Before you cook the meat you douse it with this stuff, then after you take it out of oven, you drizzle some more on. Bam. Ship it.
• 1/2 and Avocado
• Spinach

Prep: I actually haven’t prepped for the week which is making each day pretty hard but I did make a few things today to get a head start on tomorrow.

• Post-workout meal for the week – Potato and Buffalo Chicken Casserole (This is really good. I got so sick of that frittata I made last week. I don’t think I’m going to get sick of this.)
• Ginger-Sesame Chicken Salad – made this for the next couple days of lunch

How We Felt:

👍 for the most part. A little 😴.

 

Confession time, friends. We had our first goof up on Whole30 compliance today.

Absentmindedly, I licked a grain of rice off my finger and Kraft licked a tiny drop of yogurt off his hand (both times while serving the kiddos) earlier last week, but we haven’t made a mistake other than that.

Today I made hamburgers topped with avocado and salsa. We used Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa. 😱 It is NOT Whole30 compliant! I almost expected sirens to go off and a trap door to open and swallow up this offensive salsa. We didn’t realize it until we were done with dinner. Kraft just happened to be reading the ingredients. At most we ate 2 tablespoons of it.

And you know what? I couldn’t care less. And I am a total rule-follower. I really am. It pains me to not follow the rules.

Whole30 makes a huge deal about no cheating whatsoever. They emphasize it to the point that I was reading through a forum and a poor woman was beside herself. She thought that a certain something she had used was not compliant, but out of the entire casserole, they had only added a tablespoon of the Whole30-illegal substance. This poor scrupulous woman vowed that they had each only eaten a little piece and that it was now in the trashcan and please, please, please don’t tell her that she has to start her Whole30 over.

Ok, people, let’s all just take a deep breath for a sec and remember the big picture here. They are serious about no cheating but to me that means no giving in and having bread slathered in butter because it’s been seducing you all day. I think these tiny little honest mistakes just mean we’re human. Sure, we need to really read and research what is compliant and non-compliant and we need to work hard to make sure everything we are eating is compliant, but I don’t think one pepperoni that contains dextrose is going to make or break your Whole30. And for the love of all that is good and holy, don’t throw out an entire casserole! I’m positive some neighbor, friend, person on the corner would love some homemade food. We might be focusing on our health and our eating, but that doesn’t mean that for 30 days we turn a blind eye to the rest of humanity.

And for the record,
Trader Joe’s Salsa Verde ✅
Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Tomato Salsa❌

(And if you’re wondering, we gave the rest of the salsa to our neighbor who was only too glad to take it. Being a neighbor of someone doing the Whole30 has great benefits 🙂 )

Breakfast:

• Skillet Eggs
• 1/2 an Apple and Almond Butter
• 1 Breakfast Turkey Sausage Patty

Lunch:

• Sweet Potato Noodle and Apple Spinach Salad – This takes a while to make, especially if you’re like me and new to spiralizing but it is totally worth the time.

Kraft LOVED this salad so much (which makes 2 really huge salads, btw) that at some point during lunch, I looked over at his plate compared to mine and this is what it looked like:

Dinner:

• Hamburger Patty
• 1/2 an Avocado
• Salsa (of death)
• Spinach
• 1/2 a Baked Potato

How We Felt:

Kraft is really doing great. He is getting through the day without any problem. I am still really struggling. Come 3:30pm, I need a nap, like for realsies. Today one of my kiddos had me on the floor playing birthday party and at some point the birthday party included laying down on the ground and pretending to sleep (which I was all too happy to oblige) and I actually dozed off for a second. My head had just touched the ground and I was out. Again, not sure if it’s the bad sleep this week or diet.

I read this really interesting article about weight loss, metabolism, and the Biggest Loser. The conclusions that the study draws might make weight loss seem impossible, but that’s not actually their point. Their point is that metabolism plays a bigger role in weight loss and weight maintenance than we had previously thought and much more research needs to be done.

But what I found most interesting was this:

“We eat about 900,000 to a million calories a year, and burn them all except those annoying 3,000 to 5,000 calories that result in an average annual weight gain of about one to two pounds,” he said. “These very small differences between intake and output average out to only about 10 to 20 calories per day — less than one Starburst candy — but the cumulative consequences over time can be devastating.”

This is a big problem of mine. I’m constantly in the kitchen so I am always wanting to eat even if it’s not mealtime. Those few raisins I pop in my mouth when I’m packing lunches or those couple crackers I eat when I’m making the kiddos a snack add up.

At the beginning of this Whole30, I was really good about not snacking but this weekend I’ve relapsed into constant grazing. At least it has been Whole30 compliant food but it’s still not helping my habits. So I need to get back on the no-snacking bandwagon.

Breakfast:

• Two fried eggs (I should probably look into the exact rules about fried eggs because I eat them a lot.)
• 1/2 a Sweet Potato
• Garlic and Herb Chicken Sausage from Trader Joe’s
• 1/2 Apple with Almond Butter

Lunch: (leftover party!)

• Cauliflower Fried Rice
• Roasted Broccoli and Cherry Tomatoes
• Carrot Sticks
• 1/2 an Apple
• Grapes

Dinner:

• Leftover Tuna Salad with Whole30 Mayo
• 1/2 an avocado
• Handful of Blueberries

How We Felt:

We actually ate all the leftovers from the week. Ok, ok, we have about 1/2 a cup of the Mexican Cauliflower Rice leftover but I just can’t eat it again. But that’s it. We ate everything else. I thought I may have over prepped at the beginning of the week but it worked out really well.

Meal planning for Week 2 is definitely not as fun as last week. I’m not as excited as I was last week and having to plan some separate food for our kids is really not fun. I’ve spent the last 3 hours meal planning and making up a grocery list. But they do say that most people quit the Whole30 on Days 10 and 11 and I get why.

I feel terrible. Achy and sluggish. The babies have been pretty sick the last couple days so I haven’t been sleeping much at all so that might have something to do with it. But I’m feeling pretty crummy.