Want to read some blog posts about my Whole30?

Hi, remaining readers of my lapsed blog! I actually hope there aren’t too many of you, because these upcoming posts are going to be fairly embarrassing.

I have gained tons of weight in the past roughly four years. That’s bad, but not as bad as some of the other health issues that have come along with it—like blood pressure that is borderline high, two Achilles tendons that have hurt on and off for the same four years, and lately a general feeling of inflammation and achiness.

I have tried a few things, but I’m 52, so I was sort of resigned to this being a perimenopausal hormone issue that’s largely out of my control. (Weight gain is literally my only symptom, though, so that’s kind of nice—but also not at all nice.) I didn’t want to do anything drastic, like “eat less and exercise more,” which would be bound to not only cause misery but also backfire spectacularly, given that my hormones are already in a tizzy. The only real solution I could think of was to try to walk more, but walking any kind of distance really hurts—and Achilles tendons can actually rupture if you abuse them. I also thought of biking, but I literally haven’t been able to get myself back on my bike since I rode it 112 miles in the Ironman, so…maybe someday.

I was musing about all this recently and M.H. said, “Why don’t you just do another Whole30?” Which is a great idea, because it’s not extreme (except, like, psychologically), and it will let me begin to evaluate to what extent my diet is contributing to all these issues. Also, I reread the book on the Whole30, and one of the first things they mention is that it helped one of the authors heal lingering tendinitis, which is really a thing I need desperately.

Anyway, I am a few days in now and have been writing about my Whole30 journey just for my own amusement. But blogging about challenges and self-improvement and self-experimentation is kind of my thing, so I decided it would be more fun for me to just hit Publish on those drafts, which I plan to do starting tomorrow.