My Whole30 Review (Part 1 - The Good Stuff)

Finally! For those of you who have been patiently waiting for this review, I'm sorry it has taken so long. This book was actually quite long, and there was so much I wanted to share. I've only gotten this part done so far, but I couldn't wait any longer to share with you guys.

Since there's just a dense amount of information I want to share, I'll try to break things down and make it easier to read and not super long. That being said, I'm not sure how many parts it will be broken into yet.

Part 1 and part 2 are anticipated to be all the in depth knowledge of how things work and the reasons why diets aren't working. Parts later on will be more of how your diet should be changed, what it should comprise of; things that I find hard to grasp and agree with, but you'll have to wait to read it to see for yourself!

Feel free to share your thoughts below or email me!

"It Starts with Food" by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig

Chapter 1: Food Should Make You Healthy 

• The food you eat makes you more healthy or less healthy. Those are the options. 
• The Whole30 is designed to help you recognize what are the good foods, and what are the bads. They also break things down even further to tell you why the goods are good, and why the bads are bad (if it isn’t obvious enough already). 

Chapter 2: The National Framework 

• Our ancestors were born to eat for survival, but our brain has been hardwired to do something different than that. 
• Our body has primal urges designed to keep us safe, healthy, and hydrated. But today, our brain is powerful enough, and capable of overriding these signals. 

Chapter 3: What Is Food? 

• They believe in choosing their foods based on their “Good Food Standards”. 

Good Food Standards: The foods we eat should 

1. Promote a healthy psychological response
2. Promote a healthy hormonal response
3. Support a healthy gut 
4. Support immune function and minimize inflammation 

It all sounds pretty good, right? That’s what I thought too. Once I read more and got more in depth, the things they were revealing starting to really wow me, and the things they were advising one to do when following their Whole30 diet seemed a little unreasonable. Keep reading if you want to know what I mean. 

Facts: 

• Micronutrient: essential compound needed only in relatively small amounts; serves important biological functions, and is critical for long term health. 
• Macronutrient: CARBS, FATS, and PROTEINS; chemical compounds consumed in large amounts, necessary for normal growth, metabolism, and other bodily functions. Supplies energy, broken down and used for structural components. 
• Carbs: several types of sugars, starches, and dietary fibre. All broken down to a simple glucose molecule. 
• Carbs can be manufactured from certain amino acids. 
• Proteins: broken down to amino acid building blocks; helps build, maintain, and repair muscles 
• Fats: either in free form (free fatty acids) or complexes in our body. Dietary fats are building blocks for many things like tissue and fibers, hormones, and membranes. 
• Three types of families for fats: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. 
• Fats help you absorb fat-soluble vitamins from food, and makes a great slow-burning energy source. 

The creators of the Whole30 Plan believe that: 

• foods you eat exert a powerful psychological influence; they can influence your hormones, silently directing your metabolism, affect your digestive tract, and impact your immune system. 
• things usually start off with overconsumption of nutrient-poor foods because of the reliance on the psychological effect it has on us. Leads to hormonal, gut, and immune-system disruption, and symptoms like diseases and conditions may follow. 

Chapter 4: Your Brain On Food 

• Diet’s don’t work because people can’t sustain their new dietary habits, and vast majority end up gaining back the weight. 
• Simply dieting doesn’t change one’s food cravings. These cravings must be changed in order to permanently keep off the weight that was lost. 
• Creating healthy dietary habits isn’t just about restricting or eliminating certain foods. 
• It’s not your fault when you get certain cravings, it’s the way our brain has been re-wired and programmed from consuming these “bad” foods. 
• Unhealthy foods have an unfair advantage. They are designed to mess with your brain. They are built for you to crave them, making them hard for you to give up. 
• Food craving: an intense desire to consume a particular food that is difficult to resist. 
• Cravings aren’t only about your behavior related to food, but is also about one’s emotional behavior and habitat. Known to be more related to moods and frustration than hunger
• Due to nature and our biology, our brains had been hardwired to appreciate 3 basic tastes: sweet (safe source of energy), fatty (dense source of calories), and salty (means of conserving fluid). 

• Food scientists use this fact to modify our whole foods. They suck out all the good stuff, fill it all back with crap, all with the intentions of inducing cravings, overconsumption, and bigger profits for their manufacturers. 
• Modified foods light up our pleasure and reward center not because of nutrition, but because it is scientifically designed to stimulate our taste buds and make us crave more. 
• Sugar: came from fruits before, now comes from artificial sweeteners, refine sugars, and high fructose corn syrup. 
• Fat: came from meats before, now comes from a deep fryer or a tub of spread. 
• Sodium: came from sea life before, now comes from the salt shaker on the table. 
• Problem with these foods are supernormally stimulating in the absence of nutrition and satiety. 
• Overall: modern technology has stripped the nutrition from our foods, replacing it with empty calories and synthetic chemicals that FOOL our bodies into giving us the same biological signal to keep eating these foods; empty calories with less nutrition. 

Pleasure, Reward, Emotion, and Habit 

• Satiety: occurs in the digestive tract, specifically in the intestines. Hormones signal your brain when you’ve digested enough calories and nutrients, which decreases your desire for more food. 
• dependent on the nutrition of your food 
• may take several hours to relay the message 
• Satiation: regulated by the brain, more timely motivation to stop eating; the perception of fullness. 
• different from satiety because it’s one’s own perception and not a relayed message to the brain 

The differences: eating a healthy, balanced meal with all the food groups will give us a satiety feeling, because our brain knows we are well nourished. Eating a dozen oreos will only give us a satiation feeling not because we’re full, but because we’re getting sick/had enough of that taste. 

• Chronic consumption of these affect our taste buds, our perception, and our waistlines. Over time, it rewires our brain. 
• The bad foods we eat - supernormally stimulate without adequate nutrition - telling the brain to release dopamine, causing a rush of excitement that we associate with that kind of food over time. 
• The brain releases opioids - endorphins; body’s feel good compounds - causing a rewarding effect, bringing pleasure, emotional relief, releasing stress and making you feel good in general. *Over time, with continued reinforcement, it’s impossible for you to resist those cravings. The want has turned into a need. 

Stress Effect 

• Chronic stress causes us to biologically overeat, making it even harder to resist our cravings. 
• Under stress, the urge to pleasure eat is strong, making it easier to overeat. Stress changes the types of food you eat; highly palatable foods that are sweet, salty, and high in fat. 
• During stress, the strong opioid and dopamine responses promote encoding these not so great habits of ours, causing us to always turn to comfort food when we’re stressed, upset, or angry. 
• Stressed brain expresses a strong drive to eat AND an impaired capacity to inhibit eating.