Hartwig - The whole30 day by day: your daily guide to whole30 success

For my son. Tonight, I am thankful for you.

Copyright 2017 by Thirty & Co., LLC

Whole30 is a registered trademark of Thirty & Co., LLC.
Whole30 and the Whole30 logo are trademarks of Thirty & Co., LLC.

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-328-83923-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-328-83930-5 (ebook)

Cover and interior design by Vertigo Design NYC

Illustrations by Virginia de Vries

v1.1217

To Justin Schwartz, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, your support in this project has been especially meaningful. Thank you for getting as excited about these pages as I was, and then helping me make them even better.

To Bruce Nichols, Ellen Archer, Marina Padakis, Claire Safran, Jessica Gilo, Adriana Rizzo, and the entire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team, on behalf of my Whole30 community, thank you. You have helped me change so many lives, and I am forever grateful.

To Andrea Magyar and Trish Bunnett at Penguin Canada, thank you for your continued support of the Whole30 program. Our Canadian community is lucky to have you on our team.

To Christy Fletcher, its incredible to look at what weve done together. Thank you for always being in my corner, and caring so much about our mission and the people we serve.

To Grainne Fox, Melissa Chinchillo, Erin McFadden, Sylvie Greenberg, Sarah Fuentes, and the Fletcher and Company team, thank you for lending your expertise to these books and my engagements.

To my Whole30 team: Kristen Crandall, Shanna Keller, Jen Kendall, Karyn Scott, and Tawni Schall; thank you for your help and encouragement on this book, and for holding down the whole darn fort while I wrote it. You are the heart and soul of Whole30.

To Virginia de Vries, thank you for bringing this book to life with your creativity and talent. It looks more beautiful than I ever could have imagined, and that is all thanks to you. I am so grateful to have you on our team.

To my April 2017 Whole30 Facebook groupYOU are here in these pages. Your hard work, dedication, grace, and generosity in sharing your experience, its all been captured here. Without you, this book would not have been possible. Thank you for giving so much of yourselves to this community, and this project.

To my family and friends, you are my biggest cheerleaders, and I am grateful to have you to lean on. To my mom, who has surely bought a dozen copies of everything Ive ever written, I love you.

To my son, you are my whole world. All of this is for you. I love you inside-out.

Finally, to YOU, my Whole30ers... you give so much more to me than I could ever give to you. You have all my love and support, heart emoji.

Since the programs creation in 2009, Ive written or co-authored six books about the Whole30, all of which I consider my book-babies. The process of bringing each one to life was meaningful and rewarding in its own way; true labors of love, equal parts frustrating and exhilarating. As a parent, I know Im not supposed to have favorites... but if you promise not to tell the other books, this one holds a special place in my heart. Ive had the idea for The Whole30 Day by Day for years, but this was not the kind of book I could just sit down and write. If I was going to guide you through the Whole30 one day at a time, making sure my recommendations, tips, and strategies were timely and effective for as many of you as possible, I needed to do my research.

So I did. For more than three years, I studied you and your Whole30 journey. Which days are the hardest, where do you need a swift dose of tough love, how many times should I remind you to eat more? At what point, specifically, do you transition from Why is this so hard? to I could do this forever!? Which parts scare you the most, when could you use a good laugh, and how many days does Kill All the Things really last?

I followed you on social media, comparing your experience to our original Whole30 Timeline. I casually posed questions: Are you dreaming about food yet? We posted short surveys: Did you eat All the Things on Day 31, or did you feel too good to throw yourself down the junk food aisle? I searched your hashtags, wondering when and under what circumstances #whole30fail was most likely to show up.

My research culminated in April 2017, when I led hundreds of people through a group Whole30 on my Facebook page. I connected with them twice a day for 30 days, asking what they needed to stay motivated, inspired, and accountable; posing advice I thought would be helpful; and logging their responses.

Only then did I begin to write, starting with Day 1: Welcome to the Whole30. Let me give you a pep talk. Here is what you need to focus on today. Look to these resources for help. Take these steps to make tomorrow as successful as possible. When I went back and read what I had written, I got goosebumps. More than three years of research, distilled down to just six pagessix pages that will play a huge part in your Whole30 success story.

How could this book not be my favorite?

I hope you love the process of working through The Whole30 Day by Day as much as I enjoyed the process of creating it for you. Welcome to the Whole30; Im so happy youre here.

Best in health,
Melissa

I think of this book as the companion guide to The Whole30; the icing on that books how to cake. Which is actually a really bad analogy given the rules of the Whole30, but the mashed potatoes on the meatloaf doesnt translate as nicely. The Whole30 is all about the practical application of the program: eat this, not that, and plan like this, prep like that. It gives you a taste of what to expect during your 30 days but doesnt dive deep into the daily challenges, emotional ups and downs, and physical variables youre likely to experience on the program.

This companion guide is very, very different. Ive observed hundreds of thousands of people do the Whole30 since 2009, and everything I know about the program, the people who complete it, and the results they achieve went in this book. Consider it your field manual for the Whole30, helping you plan and prepare; guiding you through the program with motivation, support, and resources specific to each day; and taking you straight through the mission-critical reintroduction period.

Ill start you off on Day 0, with basic planning and preparation guidance and action items to set yourself up for Whole30 success. Then, when youre ready, youll turn the page to Day 1, diving into the heart of The Whole30 Day by Daya comprehensive guide to every day of your Whole30 journey.

Each day is broken down into seven sections, designed to be read as part of your morning routine.

• Timeline: This section explains what you might expect to feel and experience during that day; physically, mentally, and emotionally. While every day may not exactly match your experience, our timeline has proven to be a tongue-in-cheek but eerily accurate predictor of a typical Whole30 journey. During your first Whole30 (especially the first ten days), it really does help knowing that what you are going through is normal and expected, even if you are a little bit ahead of or behind the curve.