PREFACE
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“We eat real food—fresh, natural food, like meat, vegetables, and fruit. We choose foods that are nutrient-dense, with lots of naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, over foods that have more calories but less nutrition. And food quality is important—we are careful about where our meat, seafood, and eggs come from, and we buy organic, local produce as often as possible.
“This is not a ‘diet’—we eat as much as we need to maintain strength, energy and a healthy body weight. We aim for well-balanced nutrition, so we eat both plants and animals. We get all the carbohydrates we need from vegetables and fruits, while healthy fats like avocado, coconut, and olive oil provide us with another excellent source of energy.
“Eating like this allows us to maintain a healthy metabolism and keeps our immune system in balance. It’s good for body composition, energy levels, sleep quality, mood, attention span, and quality of life. It helps eliminate sugar cravings and reestablishes a healthy relationship with food. It also works to minimize our risk for most lifestyle-related diseases and conditions, like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and autoimmune conditions.”
—Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, “Nutrition in 60 Seconds”
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If you’ve purchased this book for yourself, congratulations! You clearly care about your health and would like to take the necessary steps to becoming the healthiest version of you. Making changes is never easy, but what we’ve laid out for you here is an approachable path to a new, healthy relationship with food and sustainable, satisfying nutritional habits. Keep an open mind and be proud of yourself for taking the first—and most important—step toward changing your life.
If you’ve received this book as a gift, it means you are loved. Someone cares about you and your health so much that they are willing to facilitate your transformation and support you along the way. We think you’ll find our approach sensible, manageable, and, most important, immediately applicable to your situation, regardless of your age, health status, or habits. Use this book as a means to make permanent changes to your diet and lifestyle and jump-start your journey to optimal health. It is possible. The person who gave you this book believes in our methods—but more important, he or she believes in you.
And if at any point you begin to doubt your ability to make these changes in your own life, we want you to remember one very important thing:
You’ve already begun.
Because whatever you are seeking—improvement in energy, mood, focus, sleep, athletic performance, symptoms, medical conditions, body composition, or quality of life …
It starts with food.
Your partners in health,
Dallas and Melissa Hartwig
CHAPTER 1:
FOOD SHOULD MAKE YOU HEALTHY
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“I read up on the Whole30 and decided to participate. I have type 2 diabetes and, after hearing about the side effects of the medicine I was taking, decided that I wanted to stop my meds. By the fifth day of my program, my blood sugar was in the normal range! I can’t believe how fast it’s gone down with just the dietary changes. I completed my Whole30 and lost about six pounds … but the best part for me was feeling healthier, dropping a pant size, reducing my A1c levels by a point and a half, and being able to control my blood sugar! I’ve been off my diabetes medication since completing the program, and my doctor is very happy with the results.”
—Maricel B., Sugar Land, Texas
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We have a theory about food that directly influences the rest of this book.
The food you eat either makes you more healthy or less healthy. Those are your options.
There is no food neutral; there is no food Switzerland—every single thing you put in your mouth is either making you more healthy or less healthy.
It should be simple then, right? Just eat the foods that make you more healthy.
Well, it is and it isn’t.
See, making good food choices isn’t just about knowing what’s healthy. If that was the case, we’d just give you a copy of our shopping list and send you on your merry way (shortest book ever!). No, the way we choose the foods we eat is much more complicated and nuanced than that.
Food is highly emotional, in ways that go far beyond your conscious awareness.
Food is sneaky, affecting you in subtle ways you would never connect to your diet.
And by any definition, today’s modern food landscape is enormously confusing.
So, it’s actually not that easy.
We are going to make it easy.
We’re going to share our views on food. We’ll share our personal experiences. We’ll give you testimonials from others who have changed their lives just by changing the food on their plate. And we’ll give you the science—the studies, experiments, and conclusions that form the basis for all of our recommendations.
And then we’ll say, “Don’t just take our word for it.”
We are going to teach you how to turn yourself into a scientific experiment of one, so you can figure out for yourself, once and for all, whether the foods you are eating are making you more healthy or less healthy. And that’s worth more than any scientific findings you read about—because there hasn’t been a single scientific experiment that includes you as a subject.
Until now.
When you complete our Whole30 program, you’ll see for yourself the effects of more healthy and less healthy foods. By the time the program is over, you’ll know in no uncertain terms which foods are improving the quality of your life and which are detracting from your health. In just thirty days, you will have gained that incredibly powerful knowledge. Why is this knowledge so valuable?
Because it will change your life.
After implementing our program, you won’t have to wonder whether the foods you are eating are healthy for you. You’ll be able to make educated, informed food choices for the rest of your life. And you’ll know how to enjoy treats, sweets, and other “less healthy” foods in a way that is always moving you toward better health, fitness, and quality of life.
Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it? We don’t take the promise to change your life lightly.
Finally, by the time you turn the last page, you’ll know more than just why you should eat this way—you will know how to eat this way for the rest of your life. We’ll show you how to break free of unhealthy cravings, restore your body’s natural hunger mechanism, eat to satiety while still losing weight, and eliminate the symptoms of any number of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions—forever.
It starts with food.