Whole 30??

I've done a couple of rounds and loved it. Warning that it is tough in the beginning but get over the inital hump and you can feel amazing. I suggest reading / listening to It Starts With Food - a great place to start. The Whole 30 cookbook is also a great resource, as well as Well Fed and Well Fed2. The website www.whole30.com has a ton of tips and templates / lists and it's all free.

I've done a Whole30 in the past and soon after became curious about the scientific research provided in the book, It Starts With Food. As I am a student studying nutritional science and currently work as a researcher, I decided to review the citations the authors provide for each chapter of the book and see if the science matched up with the claims being made.

Unfortunately, I found that a majority of the cited claims were very misleading or completely false. This book can substantially mislead people about what a proper healthy diet looks like due to this inaccurate information. You can read some of my chapter reviews of the book here:
http://nutritionasiknowit.com/whole30/

The Whole30 approach to elimination and reintroduction of foods is also not appropriately designed in a way that would allow accurate and reliable identification of food sensitivities. For a more evidence-based approach to an elimination diet, you might want to try the one set out by Precision Nutrition found here:
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/elimination-diet-infographic

I did Whole30 at the recommendation of my doctor. I stayed with it for nearly 6 months. My results: lost 36 pounds, am no longer pre-diabetic, triglicerides came down to normal and other labwork showed improved numbers.

I'm pretty much sticking with it 90% of the time now. At age 59, nothing else I tried gave me these good results.

ReaderGirl3 wrote: »

Do you think your results are because of the program, or because you started eating at a calorie deficit and lost the extra weight? Genuinely curious, because my own experience saw similar results as you had (I lost over 50lbs though), and I didn't eat any special way/eliminate foods. I just focused on eating at the correct calorie deficit for my weight loss goals.

Yes, I do think weight loss in general will improve those things for most people but I tried "calorie deficit" programs many times in the past three decades with no success so for me the difference with Whole30 did seem to be what I ate more than how much I ate. I never weighed or measured food or counted calories on Whole30 so I don't know if it was true calorie deficit or not, but I was never hungry.