Last night I read through the advice on the Whole 30 website for reintroducing foods back into your diet and it solidified my need for a solid plan here. Last January when we wrapped up our program we celebrated with dinner out at Cucina Paradiso. There was no talk of slowly reintroducing anything, though I did plan to pay attention and vowed to cut out any foods that caused digestive upset. Well, there is simply no way around a slow reintroduction if your ultimate goal is identifying problem foods in your diet. There is a whole page of the Whole 30 website devoted to reintroduction, and I urge you to read through it if you have been following along on this journey. As the saying goes, failure to plan is planning to fail.
So I spent the evening tonight coming up with my plan, and though it is different from what is recommended on the Whole 30 website, it is the one that will work for me. A key part of any plan should be making it realistic, and waiting until the end to introduce dairy and wheat will not work for me. Dairy is second only to a glass of wine on the list of things I miss, so as you can see from my calendar above it is the second food group I will reintroduce. I am also lumping wine into a more general sugar category, which until I can try a cookie with flour in it really just includes wine and a splash of cranberry juice in my fiber supplement. I have managed to continue my fiber supplement in plain water this month but it was much easier to take when I could do about 1/3 juice to 2/3 water. (I did try unsweetened cranberry juice and let me just say that it was WAY to sour!). So my plan is to have a couple glasses of wine and a little cranberry juice for those first two days and then abstain for two days. Hopefully the juice can stick around on a daily basis and the wine on a not quite daily basis! I’ll do the same with dairy, hoping to add back minimal amounts of dairy as the mood strikes.
Grains are a different story for me entirely. I suspect that I am going to have at least some issues in this department, so I am adding them back one at a time instead of lumping them in to two categories: gluten free and gluten containing grains. I am most hopeful for oatmeal here, it was a surprising favorite for me after my surgery and you know what my doc said, eat lots of fiber! I’m going to wait and see how I do with them before making too many plans about what my typical diet will look like long term.
Jason is another story all together. He is not worried about any sensitivities but remains the most supportive husband in the world and willing to go along with whatever I’m up for at dinner time. Eggs for breakfast every day are out, though, and he’s looking forward to oatmeal and shredded wheat in just a couple more days time.
So, looking at that calendar it is clear that I will still be doing a lot more Whole 30 cooking in the coming month. Which is good because I am a few days behind on the final week of my meal plan! I’m not sure anyone noticed, but we still haven’t made chicken curry or that flank steak stir fry. We’ve been having leftovers and yes I did make the chicken cutlets from Cooking Whole 30 again! What can I say, they are good, and the chicken is nice to have left over for salads. We didn’t have any pears so I roasted an apple instead and it was just as good. I also put a lot more mustard in the vinaigrette.
I’ll be back tomorrow with my final post from our Whole 30. And I hope to see you all in February for a mix of recipe posts. I will continue to bring you all my favorite healthy meal ideas, but I’m excited to bring back some baking to my blog! I may be on a slow reintroduction as far as baked goods go, but the men in my life are not. And what better month than February to share a homemade treat with those you love? So stick around, I’ve got a lot of great recipes to bring you next month!