I haven’t updated every day – I did say I wasn’t going to. But I am still sticking to Whole 30, I haven’t given up.

Days 6-8 have been about gradually feeling better. My Whole 30 doesn’t seem to be following the timeline exactly, but I’m getting the same symptoms in roughly the same order.

On day 6, I felt a bit better. I had errands to run all morning until about 1pm, then got home and rested until school pickup time. I didn’t achieve much, but had the energy to get my errands done without feeling like death. This was a big improvement on previous days.

The errands, unfortunately, were preparing for my son’s birthday. I seemed to spend the day surrounded by cake, sweets and everything I couldn’t eat. I resisted everything, but I did notice a tendency to overspend as compensation for resisting the sugar. I’ve noticed this before – I think it may be down to having finite willpower.

On day 7, I felt much better. I also felt completely sick of the diet. If I stayed at home all day, I was going to bounce off the walls. Moreover, the house was still full of cakes and sweets for my son’s birthday. So I went out. I had a giant mint tea at a coffee shop, and sat drinking it while thinking about all the things that I could still enjoy, rather than the things I couldn’t. Unfortunately what I thought was herbal mint tea was actually black tea with mint. The caffeine made me feel rubbish – gurgly stomach, buzzy head, hot flush. So I didn’t break the diet (tea is allowed), but I’ve decided no caffeine for me for the rest of the 30.

I then compounded my “success” by having lunch out, and carefully picking a healthy lunch (which wasn’t easy) of roast chicken, carrots and peas from the menu. Spot the error? I didn’t, until too late. I was so busy picking out veg to eat, that I forgot that peas are a legume, and banned on Whole 30. Doh! Luckily, a quick search of the forums (fora?) on the Whole 30 website showed that they consider accidentally eating some peas to be a technicality, and I don’t have to start again. Phew!

Despite the dicey nature of the day, it was really good to have a day out, to eat out, and to feel “normal”. It’s quite mentally intense, as well as physically intense, doing Whole 30, and the “treat day” really helped.

(Aside: what was my treat? I bought myself books. Books have always been my other weakness aside from sugar).

Day 8 was fairly productive – I felt back to “normal” and managed to get stuff done. I’ve got some catching up to do on housework, etc, from week one when I felt terrible. After lunch, however, I ran out of energy and needed a siesta. Day 9 is so far going the same – plenty of energy until after lunch, then a snooze. I think this is more of a sleep catch-up than an ongoing feature. I had a big sleep backlog, and each afternoon sleep is reducing the bags under my eyes a bit. I look almost normal again now, and I’ve got my colour back.

I’ve also noticed that I’m starting to get a bit bored with my food options. While I was short of energy in week one, I was preparing the simplest meals possible – grilled/cold meat with steamed veg. Everything tasted so good anyway that it wasn’t an issue. That’s one thing that I’ve really noticed – without sugar in my diet, I can taste the flavours of the food so much more. Vegetables that I used to think bland turn out to be delicious.

Nevertheless, I think its time to scout around the Whole 30 sites for some new recipes and try them out. One of the things I really need to do during these 30 days is try new recipes so that my healthy diet is varied enough to stick to long-term. One way to fail Whole 30, for me, would be to get through the 30 days successfully, but then to gradually reintroduce the crap into my diet out of boredom.

So: doing okay so far. Not perfect, but still on Whole 30 and still seeing improvements. Time to broaden my recipe repertoire now that I’m feeling a bit more confident. 9 days down, 21 more to go…