Well, good news and bad news. Good news is that I think the Whole 30 is awesome. Bad news is that I now know I will not be able to continue on the Whole 30 while training for my marathon.
Let’s start off with the good part. I know you are not supposed to weigh yourself at all during your time on the whole 30, but I was just curious to see how it was affecting my body. Remember, I started on last Monday, October 17th. On Saturday morning I weighed myself. I had lost 7 pounds. Josh weighed himself on that Friday and he had lost 8 pounds. As for my body fat percentage, I measured it again today. (I have an awesome electronic machine to do this at school.) It read 16.9 percent. Talk about some quick results. Let me remind you that we were eating as much as we wanted. We were just eating food that was nutrient rich and not the processed food and sugar our taste buds love. We used the recipes we bought from the Whole9 website. Paleo Pad Thai was a favorite. I will eat that now it was so good. I also found out that I love spaghetti squash! It is an awesome alternative to noodles. The thing is you have to get creative with your meals. I can tell you for someone who loves eggs that I could go a few days without them.
My weight dropped, body fat percentage dropped, and I felt pretty good. Now, here is the reason why I am not going to continue Whole 30 as of this moment. Josh and I ran in the Houston Half Marathon this Sunday. I was really looking forward to it because I have trained the most for this race, more so than my other halves because of my marathon training. I mean I have been running 14 and 16 miles for my long runs. So 13.1 should have been a piece of cake. Well, it wasn’t. It was probably one of the most miserable runs that I have run in a very long time. I usually enjoy the race, but not Sunday. I felt so bad for Josh because this was his first race and he had to stop a lot for me. He was very sweet. I simply did not have enough energy, not enough fuel to keep me going for that distance. Maybe I wasn’t eating enough or drinking enough. I am not sure, all I know is that I know my body and it was not happy with me one bit. My past two halves have been a little under 2 hours and one just over it. My time this race was about 40 minutes slower than before.
So with that being said, I have decided to postpone my Whole30 until January. I am kind of bummed, but I know it is okay. In fact in the FAQ section for the Whole30 it does caution you that if you are training for your first marathon you might struggle a bit. I struggled tons. So marathon training trumps Whole 30 for now. I’ll keep you updated on how training is going!