Think fruits and vegetables, meat, eggs, and seafood are all a-go. You’re eating whole foods, and staying away from processed goods.The rules of Whole30 can be succinctly summed up with the following: It also got me to test that old adage where 70 percent of weight loss happened in the kitchen, rather than at the gym. Previously struggling with imbalanced hormones and experiencing difficulty in losing excess weight with just exercise alone, I was intrigued. Trying this programme recently for a month, I found remarkable success in terms of health and fitness, where the benefits not only stay with you long after your reset, but it also teach you important applications and insights for how best to eat for your body.įounded by Melissa Urban and her ex-husband Dallas Hartwig, Whole30 is a month-long elimination diet that cuts out a number of inflammatory foods that induce cravings, throw your hormones in a bender, ravage the gut, and cause overall inflammation in the body - yes, you give them up cold-turkey. At its core, Whole30 aims to give your body a month-long digestive reset and a way to counter chaotic eating habits. It’s advocated by A-listers such as Megan Fox, Miley Cyrus, Jessica Biel, and Busy Philipps, and Drunk Elephant founder Tiffany Masterson even quipped that her skincare was like “Whole30 for the face”. “Worse, recent studies show that people who choose intermittent fasting as a means to lose weight have a tendency to gain back even more weight due to hormonal responses to changes in the circadian rhythms of their metabolism.”Įnter Whole30. “The biggest issue with intermittent fasting is that … any results achieved will most likely be unsustainable as a person resumes their usual lifestyle,” she says. Health and fitness expert Andrea Marcellus, who founded wellness app And/Life, says that the popular mode of intermittent fasting is clearly not a sustainable way to diet, and may even result in rapid weight gain after the programme. How else can you lose weight but continue to eat your weight in cheese? Yet on the flip side, how could that ever be sustainable, or even good for you in the long term? No one who likes food likes the notion of eating boring, squeaky clean meals in order to achieve their goal physique, which is probably why today’s most popular diets are based on biohacking our way to a fit body - whether with prescribed times for eating (intermittent fasting), or tricking your body to burn energy in specific ways by eating only certain food groups (Keto). In search of the most sustainable and health benefit-packed diet possible, I stumbled on Whole30, a programme created in 2009 that’s been quickly finding a resurgence in the past two years.

Whole30 success story