You’ll never make me hate Whole30
But diet culture can still kiss my ass.
TW: Discussions of diet culture, disordered and restrictive eating habits.
It’s the first day of a new year, which means the internet is full of ideas to “fix” your life. The near-constant push to optimize every moment of our day-to-day (and monetize everything we enjoy and/or are remotely good at, #ThanksCapitalism) leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and when the BFFs were chatting about resolutions and the push for diets and workouts and AllTheThings a few weeks ago, Whole30 came up. I found myself saying, “You’ll never make me hate Whole30!” Which, at surface level, probably sounds weird, because a lot of folks assume Whole30 is a weight loss diet, and I’m pretty outspoken about body neutrality, my disgust with anti-fatness, and my history with disordered eating.
Allow me to grab my soapbox.
The traditional definition of the term “diet” is simple: the foods we, or any other living organism, regularly consume. But in a world obsessed with thinness over everything, diet has become something synonymous with attempts to lose weight, and often means a way of eating that’s not evidence-based and has been misrepresented to make us continue to value thinness over actual health by forcing ourselves into restrictive habits that ultimately harm us more than help us, and very rarely lead to better health outcomes. Or, in other words, that crap that reaches a fever pitch at the end and beginning of every new year. All the major dictionaries put that into much tidier words, of course, but I’m not a dictionary, so let’s just call the bullshit what it is.
Because of our societal obsession with thinness, weight loss, and diet culture (broadly called “wellness” especially when paired with all that optimizing), it’s common for people to assume that any diet that restricts or removes any food is a weight loss diet. But in the actual health world, we know elimination diets are incredibly useful tools, and a typical starting point for treating a variety of chronic, physical health conditions. A reframe I wholeheartedly (lol) believe:
Whole30 is an elimination diet, not a weight loss diet.
I found Whole30 in 2012, a few months after the program’s first book was published, and shortly after I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), an endocrine disorder often mistakenly classified as a reproductive disorder. I had been asking the doctors to test me for PCOS for a decade at that point, and initially I felt relief when my symptoms were given a name. That was until I realized the doctors didn’t know how to treat it. I had always thought once I had the diagnosis, a magical world of treatment would open up. Joke was on me!
The doctor who diagnosed me said there were two treatment options: birth control to mask some of the symptoms or metformin, a drug used for diabetic insulin resistance and often prescribed off-label for non-diabetic PCOS insulin resistance. I chose metformin, and was sick for two months before I gave up on it and started looking for other options.
While you can find a lot of PCOS information (and misinformation) out there now, at the time, there was basically only one blogger who was maintaining any kind of regular updating, providing resources and the like, and not much in the way of official organizations or vetted resources. So I started looking at the research, trying to piece things together (as patients so often have to do), while also looking at options to treat some of the symptoms. Whole30 shared a lot of what they call non-scale victories, or NSVs, and caught my eye because a lot of those NSVs were things I was actively trying to solve for. I bought the book and just started implementing things willy-nilly before I even finished reading it. Pro tip: Don’t do that. 😂
My partner and I did our first official Whole30 in January 2013. It was… challenging. Prior to Whole30, we were “gym rats” — working out was our hobby, we both worked as trainers in gyms in addition to our regular jobs, and we were all in on fitness (with a hefty helping of toxic mindset stirred in). Pain is not, in fact, weakness leaving the body, and no, we didn’t need to just push ourselves harder to feel better (wtf were we thinking?!).
But my nutrition education was pretty lacking. Thanks or no thanks to a lifetime of disordered eating, and some absolutely terrible advice from nutritionists and dietitians, my food priority before I found Whole30 was simply to stay under 1,200 calories a day. Which is absolutely absurd, to be crystal fucking clear. I figured as long as I wasn’t cutting food groups, I was being healthy. All better! /sarcasm
Whole30 required us to rethink everything we thought we knew about nutrition. We needed to read labels, we needed to plan ahead, we needed to make a lot more food than we were used to, and our preteen complained bitterly about missing our regular ice cream trips and chips-and-queso family nights. And all the cool Whole30-approved food that exists now? Yeah, that wasn’t a thing a decade ago. We screwed up, repeatedly. Our most common mistake was finishing a 30-day round and not doing the reintroduction of foods properly, if at all.
Still, we were seeing some of those NSVs. I was sleeping better, my skin was less inflamed, my hair loss was lessening, my cycles were more regular, my mood was more consistent, I was experiencing hunger signals for the first time in my life, and so on. So we kept going back to it, three or four times a year, curious what else might happen if we actually followed the protocol all the way through the reintroduction phase. Sometimes we made it through, sometimes we didn’t, but we always learned something.
Because I am who I am, Whole30 also piqued my interest in learning more about nutrition in general. Which is ultimately what started me on the path to stop prioritizing weight loss in my life, and also helped me pinpoint a lot of the places where I was still holding internalized ableism and using it against myself.
One of the ways my internalized ableism showed up was how I dismissed some of what I learned from Whole30. Over and over and over again I learned that removing gluten and dairy made me feel better and lessened the symptoms of several of my health conditions. But I didn’t trust my own experience. I told myself I couldn’t go fully gluten- and dairy-free because it would be a hardship on other people in my life, and that wouldn’t be fair to them because a doctor hadn’t diagnosed me as having allergies. Maybe I was just making up the benefits I was experiencing? Placebo effect!
I lost years of my life that I could have been feeling better more frequently to my own internalized ableism and not believing my own experiences.
A few years ago, which could be 2018 or 2021 with how my brain is remembering time these days, I was in the middle of a Whole30 round, and I realized some of my disordered eating thoughts had come roaring back. I was so.incredibly.frustrated with myself, and spent 24 hours debating whether to stop the round or not. Ultimately I did stop, because I think completing a Whole30 in a disordered way goes against the spirit of the program. After I stopped, I spent a not-insignificant amount of time parsing through what triggered me. There were some life things at play, some program updates I wasn’t sure how I wanted to engage with, and a lot of new chatter from people on the internet about using Whole30 as a weight loss diet. Then there were the recipes. Look, I get that content creators need to do what they need to do for SEO purposes, but at least half of the recipes that are tagged as Whole30 aren’t, and that’s frustrating as hell. (This is also true for other dietary restrictions, and can be dangerous for folks with allergies.) We had always kept our Whole30 meals pretty basic, and it could get a little boring at times. So I’d go online to find a new recipe, and find all these cool meals that either weren’t actually Whole30, or required time I didn’t have, or resources and tools we didn’t have and couldn’t access.
But I felt like I had my life together when I would do a round. Which makes sense, in that Whole30 requires conscious food choices and somewhat regular meal times — left to my own devices, I’m likely to be sitting here writing at 11:30 p.m. while snacking on gluten-free cereal after realizing I haven’t really eaten all day because I was “too busy” — and because I would feel better while doing a round, since I was proactively removing allergens I wouldn’t allow myself to accept were actual allergies.
A year ago, in January 2024 — 11 years after my first official Whole30, and after doing more than 30 rounds of Whole30 — I started a doctor-supervised medical elimination diet to try and find some relief from persistent symptoms the doctor suspected may be related to food allergies. The primary difference in that diet and the Whole30 was the order in which foods were removed. In the medical elimination diet, we removed foods every 3-5 days. In total, it took about 45 days to remove all of the potential allergens, and then reintroduce them. On Whole30, the foods come out all at once, you spend 30 days without them, and then you reintroduce them. About 45 days total. There was no major difference in which foods we removed in either approach.
My results? The.exact.same.
I cried for days. If I had trusted my own experience with Whole30, I would have trusted my learning that I am allergic to gluten and dairy, among other things. I lost years of my life that I could have been feeling better more frequently to my own internalized ableism and not believing my own experiences.
When I went to my primary doctor and shared the results, she immediately put gluten and dairy in my chart as allergies. “But don’t I need an actual test for that?” She calmly told me that based on my experience, we could safely call it an allergy. I cried again.
One of the things I appreciate about Whole30 and Melissa Urban, the program’s creator, is how they listen and adjust. For example, they don’t use before and after photos now, but they did in the beginning, which they acknowledge contributed to misconceptions about the program and anti-fatness in general. They also regularly review their own assumptions and new research, and make changes to the program as they learn more.
I do my best not to speak in absolutes, and that includes not making blanket recommendations. Whole30 isn’t right for everyone — which they also acknowledge. But I respect the hell out of the program, the creator and team, and the role it’s played in my life. There’s a fresh round starting tomorrow, and while I won’t be joining this time, I may just do one more round to see how it feels with everything I’ve learned now.