It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (28 page)

One last thing—in nature, fruit is highly seasonal, available only for short periods of time during the year. If you want to go with the seasonal flow, as Mother Nature intended, we’re good with that. If you find yourself reaching for more fruit in summer, when it’s local, fresh, and delicious, that’s OK! Enjoy nature’s deliciousness while you can. But this also means that you shouldn’t eat much in the winter, when most fruit is out of season.

• Choose one or more fat sources per meal.
  
• Add fats in the following recommended quantities, per person,
  per meal
  .
  

All oils:
(olive oil, coconut oil, etc.): one to two thumb-size portions.
^*

All butters:
(coconut butter, nut butters, clarified butter, and ghee): one to two thumb-size portions.

Olives:
one to two open (heaping) handfuls.

Coconut (meat/flakes):
one to two open (heaping) handfuls.

Nuts and seeds:
up to one closed handful.

Avocado
: half to one avocado.

Coconut milk:
between ¼ - ½ of a (14 oz.) can

This is the one area of our meal plan where people need the most comforting—or tough love. See, up until this point, you’ve probably been a little fat-phobic. (We can’t blame you, given the misinformation you’ve been getting.) And now, here come these crazy Hartwigs, encouraging you to eat an
entire avocado
in a single sitting.

We understand if that sounds a little scary … but we’ve already talked about this.

In the context of a healthy diet that doesn’t promote overconsumption or hormonal dysregulation, dietary fat isn’t going to make you fat. And remember, we need to make sure you’re eating enough fat to both cover your caloric requirements and promote satiety between meals. But it’s not like we’re saying
everyone
needs to eat an entire avocado with every meal. We’ve given you a range, because some people are big and some are little, some are very active and others less so, some people need to put on weight and some need to lose.

We’re pretty sure you know which you are.

So, if you’re little, not that active, and need to lose weight, choose fat from the lower end of our recommended quantities. If you’re Dallas (205 pounds, very active, with the metabolism of a teenage boy), you’ll probably eat more than we’re starting you off with, because your context requires the extra calories for energy.

Which reminds us to tell you that fat is probably going to be the meal-planning factor you experiment with the most, depending on your current health condition, your size, and your goals. Here is the basic rule for experimentation:

If you’re Dallas, and your body is telling you to eat more at each meal than we’ve suggested, that’s totally fine. If you’re smaller, less active, or still struggling with metabolic derangement, then stick with the quantities at the lower end of our spectrum, but do not cut your fat intake below the low end of our range,
even if you’re trying to lose weight
.

Trust me, we’ve got safe, healthy, sustainable weight loss built right into our model, because we know that is a major goal for the majority of you. So don’t try to outsmart the system in an effort to lose weight faster, as your efforts may backfire. Remember, it’s not about fat grams or calories; it’s about
hormones
. Your delicate hormone balance will be thrown off if you’re chronically underfeeding yourself—plus you’ll be hungry all the time, and your energy levels will take a dive, and you’ll be cranky because you’re tired and hungry. So stick to the lower end of our spectrum if you want, but resist the urge to cut your fat intake even more. Because as crazy as it sounds, you now know that eating less could be counterproductive to your weight-loss efforts.

Eventually, we want to hand our plan over to you to make adjustments as needed, but this probably isn’t going to happen right away. You’ve historically not been able to rely on the signals your body has been sending you, because of psychological factors and hormonal disruptions. This isn’t going to change overnight—and that’s OK. It generally takes a few weeks (or, in some cases, months) of consistently eating Good Food before this system starts to find its level.

For the first several weeks, use our meal plan as your baseline. We still want you to regularly check in with yourself, to evaluate how you think you feel: Hungry? Not hungry? Tired? Cranky? But we’ll ask you to filter the messages your body is trying to send you, because it probably won’t be telling you the truth just yet. Experience has shown us that most people with an imbalanced hunger mechanism fall into one of two camps:
hungry all the time
, or
not really hungry at all.

If you’re hungry all the time, you are either legitimately not eating enough or your brain is telling you that you’re hungry when you’re actually just
craving
. In the first instance, try making each meal a little bigger than the last and see if that quells your hunger. If it does—that’s your new baseline. If not, there’s more than just hunger going on.

Some of you will fall into the other camp—you’re simply not going to be hungry for the first few weeks. It’s partly because of the hormonal recalibration, and partly because you’re now eating meals that are sending honest-to-goodness satiety signals to your brain.

If you simply never feel like eating, common sense should tell you it’s not normal. In this case, you will have to temporarily override the signals your body is sending you, or risk further hormonal disruption because of chronic lack of nutrition. Our basic three meals a day are the minimum requirement for your caloric needs, so make sure you’re at least getting those. Consider adding some activity to your day too—a brisk walk, weight training, or an exercise class should fire up your appetite. Within a few weeks, your hormones and hunger mechanism should self-regulate, and you’ll be able to start listening to your body for real.

Generally a few weeks after changing your diet, you’ll be ready to take the wheel of your own meal plan. This is perhaps the most critical step in our entire program, so when you’re ready, start adjusting your own plate based on the signals your body is sending you.

We’ve given you the tools. It’ll be time for you to take off the training wheels. And here are three reasons that we trust you’ll do a stellar job of managing your food intake.

1. You have been developing a new relationship with food:
   spending time with your meals, chewing thoroughly, enjoying each bite, and paying attention.
   
2. You have been filling your plate with Good Food:
   food that isn’t going to mess with your mind,
   or
   your hormones.
   

   Therefore…
   

3. You will be able to trust the messages your body is sending you.
   

For perhaps the first time in your life, you can rely on your own body to tell you what it needs. Hallelujah! Because you’re making good food choices
and
engaging with your food in a new way, you know that if you feel hungry, you’re actually hungry (and not just having a craving or suffering from hypoglycemia). So what do you do? You eat something!

When you’re full, you know you’re
actually
full, because you’ve given your food enough time to send the right signal to your brain, and your hormones are working the way they’re supposed to, to regulate your appetite. So what do you do? You stop eating!

And if you’re hungry or brain-foggy between meals, your energy is flagging or your performance in the gym or playing sports is starting to slip, then you can surmise that you’re not eating enough. So what do you do? You start making each meal a little bit bigger!

See? You’re
brilliant
at this already!

So here’s how it works.

Plan your first meal using your best judgment and our guidelines. Eat slowly, chew thoroughly, relax while digesting. Then, evaluate fifteen to twenty minutes later. Are you still hungry? If you are, eat more—particularly, more protein and more fat. Then evaluate your hunger levels, energy levels, and general mood in the hours before your next meal. Are you ravenously hungry an hour before dinnertime? Did your energy fade? Were you cranky, foggy, tired? If so, then your next meal needs to be bigger right from the start.

Make small changes—you don’t have to double your portions just because you noticed you’re a little hungry between meals. Try adding more protein and more fat, and see if that helps. If it does, that’s your new personalized template. If it doesn’t, then add some more fat—the great equalizer. Continue to add fat in small quantities until you hit that sweet spot—enough food to support activity levels, energy, and appetite, but not so much that you start getting flabby or putting on weight.

Finally, your own personal template will change over time. As your activity level changes and you lose weight or put on muscle mass, your nutritional needs will change too. So it’s always important to pay attention to those signals, and not to rely on today’s “perfect” template to fuel you a year from now.

So there you have it—you are now an expert meal planner!

Congratulations.

“Before I tell you what the Whole30 is, I would like to share my thoughts on what the Whole 30 is not. The Whole30 is not a diet. It is not a twenty-two-day program with eight cheat days (weekends) built in. It is not 30 days of restriction, to be followed by 335 days of gluttony. Here is what the Whole30 is. It is life-changing. It is the path to healing your insides. It is about eating real food and learning that what you put into your body actually matters. It is a test of the level of respect you have for this one body you were given. Simply put, if you follow it the way it was written, it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t. My only regret is that I waited so long to do it.”

—
Tara O., Edwardsburg, Michigan

Up until now, you’ve been somewhat passive in this relationship. We’ve been yapping our heads off, you’ve been patiently listening, and the flow has been mostly unidirectional. You’ve absorbed information from us, sure, but you haven’t really rolled up your sleeves and jumped into the conversation.