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I wanna try Whole30 myself for the next month. Hey guys, welcome to another diet review. You've seen me cover intermittent fasting, keto, well now it's time for me to cover another incredibly popular diet. This time we're taking on Whole30. Are you ready?
Many people call this a diet, and I feel that's somewhat of a misnomer. I think it should be called the Whole30 challenge or a Whole30 reset because what it does is it eliminates certain food groups very strictly for the first 30 days, and then allows you to gradually reintroduce them back into your diet and see how they affect your body. There are eight hard and fast rules that you have to follow religiously during Whole30. If you break one of these rules and slip up, you have to restart the 30-day cycle, because as the founders describe in their book, it's not just a reset of the diet you eat. It's an elimination diet, and if you reintroduce one of the foods prematurely, that's going to skew the results and you won't learn as much from the 30-day period.
Don't consume any added sugars or sweeteners, artificial or otherwise. Do not consume alcohol in any form. Do not eat grains. This includes wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, rice, quinoa, and buckwheat. Do not eat legumes. This includes beans of all kinds, peas, chickpeas, lentils, and peanuts. This also includes all forms of soy, soy sauce, miso, tofu, and tempeh. No go on dairy. This includes cow's, goat's, or sheep's milk products such as milk, cream, cheese, kefir, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, and frozen yogurt. The only exceptions are clarified butter or ghee. No consumption of carrageenans, sulfites, or MSG. Do not try to recreate baked goods, treats, or junk foods with approved ingredients. You can't weigh yourself or take measurements of any kind. This means no calorie counting as well.
While there are claims of improved athletic performance, sleep, fat loss, improved cognition, and decreased food cravings, the majority of the claims really center around the fact that you're going to have an improved relationship with food, that you'll have an understanding of how food affects your body, what works, what doesn't, and because of that, you're ultimately going to be a healthier person.
I thought it would be beneficial to do what I like about Whole30 and then state my concerns, and after that I'll give you an overall guidance on what I would recommend to a patient, generally speaking if they're sitting in front of me.
My favorite thing about Whole30 is that it absolutely makes you swear off sugary, overprocessed, junk food. Now if you watch any piece of my content, this is the first piece of advice I'd give to anybody, because if you can eliminate that alone, you're going to see tremendous health benefits, and if I'm going to give a little spoiler here, I think a lot of the benefits of Whole30 come from just eliminating that. It certainly can help with weight loss because if you're going to go on an elimination diet where you're taking foods out, especially foods that are quite unhealthy and contribute to obesity, odds are you're going to be losing weight as a result. It puts a focus on real and whole foods because often times when we're dieting, we're trying to find shortcuts and ways that we can still eat foods that are unhealthy and overprocessed. This really makes you focus on eating vegetables and plant-based foods, and that seems to be at the core of Whole30.
I love that it takes the focus away from weighing yourself every single day. I have so many patients who get overly zeroed in on these numbers, and forget that eating well is not just about losing weight, but also about being healthy, and if we get too focused on the numbers, we can often neglect other factors of our diets that can contribute to health problems.
It can increase consumer competency. What I mean is that you're going to become more aware of what ingredients are found in your foods. For example, many people don't know that sugar is found in ketchup. Therefore, ketchup is not a Whole30 approved food. Knowing those little insights and tidbits can go a long way even if you don't follow Whole30 for the rest of your life. It can change your eating habits for the better by increasing your awareness of how food integrates into your lifestyle. For example, if you're coming home every night and having two glasses of wine to decompress, after doing Whole30 you may find a different, maybe even healthier, alternative way to decompress without needing alcohol.
In addition, it highlights how certain food choices can affect your cravings. It's that gut-brain connection we sometimes talk about, where if you eat a lot of sugary foods, it's actually going to encourage you to eat more of that. There's a great study that I covered on my YouTube channel about how processed foods can affect the amount of calories you take in throughout the day. That will be dropped down below in my description, so check that one out.
Here's my first and main concern with Whole30. I think it puts an overemphasis on anecdotal evidence of people who've had tremendous success with the Whole30 platform. The next 30 days will change your life. They will change the way you think about food, they will change your taste, they will change your habits and your cravings, they will restore healthy emotional relationships with food and with your body. The physical benefits of Whole30 are profound: a full 96% of participants lose weight and improve their body composition without counting or restricting calories. Also commonly reported are consistently high energy levels, better sleep, improved focus, mental clarity, a return to a healthy digestive system, improved athletic performance, and a sunnier disposition.
I have no doubt that these benefits occurred in some of the people who have done Whole30. But to make the promise that this is going to happen to almost everybody who does it, I don't like overpromising results to my patients because I think that ultimately does them a disservice. It makes them believe that this is the miracle cure-all they've been waiting for, and in some cases it may be true. Someone who has been eating junk food their whole life, who has a disordered digestive system because of that junk, can be helped and can have their life changed, but to make it seem like no matter who you are this is going to change your life, I think that's an overstatement.
As a practicing physician, I know that patients who are suffering with diseases are really susceptible to any kind of marketing hype that promises them a cure for their illnesses. On the cover of this book it says more significantly that many people have reported the magical elimination of a variety of symptoms, diseases, and conditions in just 30 days, and they go on to list a whole host of conditions including eczema, psoriasis, chronic fatigue, asthma, sinus infections, allergies, migraines, acid reflux, Crohn's, celiac, IBS, bipolar disorder, depression, Lyme disease, endometriosis, PCOS, and even autism. They don't outright state that Whole30 is the cure for any of these conditions, because then they would be in legal trouble, but the fact that they're even conflating the possibility that Whole30 can be a treatment for autism or a cure for autism, I think is borderline ridiculous and again does a disservice to our patients.
What I think is quite interesting is that some of the symptoms Whole30 aims to remove can actually be caused by a nutritional deficiency, and Whole30 on its own can exacerbate some of these nutritional deficiencies. For example, imagine I have a patient who's chronically fatigued and having difficulty with energy levels and sleep, and I find that they're Vitamin D deficient, that they have a very low Vitamin D level. Now, eliminating all types of dairy will certainly exacerbate that condition, but had I not run these tests beforehand and the patient went on Whole30 without consulting me first, think about the negative outcomes that could have occurred. Putting junk and processed foods aside for a moment, the foods you're eliminating while on Whole30 can be problematic for some people, but for most, eliminating them will yield no benefit, and in some cases can fuel nutritional deficiencies or even exacerbate medical problems.
Something else that's problematic is that Whole30 tries very hard to be a proper elimination diet, which is the gold standard doctors use to identify food sensitivities, but while it comes close, it's not exactly accurate. For example, if we're going to do a restrictive diet of any sort, we would do it for 90 days, because that's how long it takes for the immune system to sort of shut down its response. On top of that, I rarely jump to saying let's eliminate everything and see what sticks. It's a shock-based approach that may work in some instances, but may also make my patient's life much more problematic than it needs to be. In their reintroduction protocol within the book, they say to introduce foods every two or three days, but then they go on to contradict themselves, saying that you may have a negative reaction a week later. So at that point you've already introduced three foods. How do you know which one is causing a negative reaction? It really becomes problematic that this is not done in a systematic way like we would do in a medical center.
Finally, I'm not a huge fan of restrictive diets like this because generally they don't have long-term success rates, and I fear there could be psychological problems that develop when you say to yourself, you absolutely can't have a single cookie or you're a failure. That sort of anxiety is not good for anybody, especially those who are prone to disordered eating.
So what's my overall take on this Whole30 challenge? I think it's quite interesting. I think it's cool to be able to give yourself a test of willpower for thirty days. I am the main proponent of removing junk food and processed food and increasing whole foods in your diet, so I totally agree with Whole30 on that. However, if I have a patient who is having symptoms they're concerned about, I wouldn't jump to giving them a restrictive diet to figure out if it's the result of food sensitivities without doing some testing first. So my recommendation: if you're having some sort of weird symptoms going on and you're considering Whole30, pump the brakes a little bit. Ask your doctor, talk to a registered dietitian, ask whether this is right for you, and whether you've checked everything else that could be contributing to your symptoms. Once you've done that and have the all-clear from a registered health professional, by all means check it out and let me know how it goes. Whole30 isn't for everybody and it's not perfect, but there are certain core principles within Whole30 that are absolutely ideal for everybody, and I think that by following it and learning a little more about our own bodies, it can actually do some good, so I'm a fan.
I wanna try Whole30 myself for the next month. I'm going to do exactly as it says, follow those eight principles, and I'm going to vlog along the way, letting you know how my little journey is going. Are you excited? If you're excited, definitely let me know down below in the comments. If you have any outstanding questions, ask them down below. As you know, I'm very active in the comment section, and if you want to check out a really cool video, click right here. As always, stay happy and healthy.