Why We Want To Do A Whole 30 Challenge

As I mentioned in my Weekly Goals post, we are planning on doing a Whole 30 Challenge for the month of March.  (If you don't know what that is, head here).  But why?

Jesse and I are tired of being overweight and tired.  We do reasonably well with eating mostly real food for our meals.  Snacks are a completely different story, and we tend to splurge on extra food more often than we need to.  By doing a challenge like this with very strict rules, we're hoping to reset some of those habits.

I haven't had so much success with less strict options.  I've been tracking my calorie intake on the My Fitness Pal app for almost 2 years.  I also gained about 20 pounds last year (below is a part of that).  It's really easy to fudge the numbers, or to know that you're making bad choices and make them anyways, because it's "just a little bit" or "I deserve it".

This is my weight tracker from My Fitness Pal.  Ignore the big dip in the middle - our scale went wonky for a day as the batteries died.  But you can see the steady upward trend over the past 6 months.

I use food as a reward all the time.  That's a mindset I'm really fighting against.  When I have to do one of those adult things I hate, like make phone calls or clean the toilets, I tend to make myself feel better by rationalizing that I can have a treat when I'm done.  When I'm stressed, or sad, or bored, I turn to food at those times too.

So why now?  When I'm right in the middle of working on my gluten-free muffins cookbook, which contains many ingredients I can't have during the challenge.  When we have a child's birthday that we still haven't figured out how to work around, other than making cake for the kids and just not eating it.  When I'm not completely sure we can afford to buy the food we need, or the time to make it, or find recipes that the kids can eat too, or...

There are lots of reasons why this isn't a good month.  But really, any month is going to have challenges.  There are going to be things like birthdays, or projects, or picky eaters.  So we may as well jump in and do it.

We tried eating a modified paleo diet at one point.  We still included oats, rice, and beans, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting.  Jesse and I both really liked it, and we developed some good habits then.  I'm hopeful we can do that again.

If you're still reading my rambling, gold star for you!  I'll be sharing more of our meal plans, thoughts, and results as we go through this process.