Now that your reset is done, it’s time to eat All the Things! You’ve been so good, surely you deserve a reward . . . right?

You know better by now. That’s something you used to do with those old quick-fix weight-loss plans, but it isn’t at all the right mind-set for a reset. Still, it may be hard to shake the idea that your “diet” is “over” and you can return to old favorite foods and habits; an idea that will compromise your motivation to follow a proper reintroduction. But remember, reintroduction is mission-critical to your Food Freedom plan. To reduce the chance that you’ll blow this off, you need to shift your mind-set from “diet” to “reset,” so let’s take a page straight out of habit research.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology examined craving levels among flight attendants during a short flight (3 to 5½ hours long) and a long flight (8 to 13 hours long). All flight attendants recruited for the study were smokers. You’d assume that cravings would be much worse during the long flight, as the flight attendants knew they couldn’t smoke again for quite some time. What the study actually found, however, was that cravings weren’t tied to flight duration, but to the time remaining in the flight, when the brain perceived a reward in sight. In fact, craving levels at the three-hour mark of the short flight were actually much higher than the three-hour mark of the long flight. Why? Because the short flight was about to land, and the attendants knew a cigarette (reward) was on the horizon.

What do jonesing flight attendants have to do with your reset?

A large body of evidence shows that cravings are largely determined by environmental cues and expectations. Thinking about your reset “ending” is the same as knowing your plane is about to land; your brain believes that a reward is imminent. To combat this, simply think about your reset as moving in phases, with no definite beginning and end. Yes, the elimination portion was 30 days, and today it’s Day 31 . . . but it’s not over; you’re simply moving into the reintroduction phase. After which you’ll move into the Food Freedom phase. And after that, the oops-I’m-back-to-drinking-wine-after-work-every-day phase (because I told you this would happen), which brings you right back to the reset phase.

See? It’s not over—you’re just ready to start the next chapter, where you’ll get to reintroduce some of the delicious foods you’ve been missing, while still paying careful attention to the experience and remaining fully in control. That sounds way healthier than rebounding with a sugar-fat-salt fiesta, doesn’t it?

We’re Not Dieting

To reinforce this point, continue to bring yourself back to this idea every time you get stuck in a diet mind-set. This is not that. You’re not dieting. You’re not deprived. You’re not desperately chasing quick weight loss. You are conscientiously resetting your health, habits, and relationship with food; creating the perfect, balanced, sustainable diet; and taking control of the food you are eating—even the “less healthy” stuff. Write it down if you have to: “I am not dieting.” You’ve never done this kind of program before, so you’ll have to work hard to change the way you think about it. It’s understandable if that takes time—just keep reminding yourself, and eventually, it will stick.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may be feeling guilty or anxious about the thought of reintroducing the foods you’ve been missing. You’ll bring bread, wine, or chocolate back in because you’ve missed it so much and want to know how it’s going to impact you, but then you won’t allow yourself to enjoy the experience because you feel so darn guilty about it.

This is not food freedom.

Remember, you didn’t eliminate your reset foods because they were bad or unhealthy, you eliminated them to see how they worked for you. The point isn’t to give them up forever; it’s to evaluate the impact they have on your body and brain, and then decide what role you want them to play in your new, healthy lifestyle.

There is no guilt in this. It’s just part of the process. Let’s go back to the pet analogy:

Say you have a dog. Every day, you wake up and your nose is a little itchy, your eyes are a little red, and your throat is scratchy. You love your dog, but you recognize that you don’t feel well, and you’d like to feel better. You start to wonder if your dog is the culprit. So in an effort to figure out your sensitivities, you send your dog to your mom’s house for a month.

You really miss your dog, so when the month is up, you want to see whether you can bring him back into the house without firing up your allergies. So you go pick him up and bring him home.

Do you feel guilty about bringing your dog back? Of course not! In fact, you’re psyched to see him, crossing your fingers that you can have him around without getting stuffy again. And yay! After some trial and error, you discovered you can. So you happily invite him back home to stay, because you love your dog and you’ve figured out that as long as he’s not sleeping on your bed and gets bathed once a week, you can have your dog and still maintain a mostly allergy-free existence.

This is winning.

In the elimination/reintroduction scenario, your dog = bread. (Or wine, or cheese . . . )

You’ve missed it. You love it. You’re still not sure if it’s going to work for you, but that’s why you reintroduce. Don’t feel guilty about it. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Savor the return of the delicious, special foods you’ve been missing, and then figure out whether you want to include those foods in your new life in some capacity.

Reintroduction is a necessary step toward food freedom. So is losing the idea that foods are universally “good” or “bad.” Remember, even if these foods don’t work for you, that still doesn’t make them unhealthy, just less healthy for you.

Reintroduction Reinforcement

Reintroduction should take between 10 and 30 days and is not to be rushed! Foods must be reintroduced one at a time, while maintaining the reset diet. Think of it like a scientific experiment, where you’re looking to systematically evaluate just one factor at a time to see how it impacts you. If, on Day 31, you run right out and eat pizza, ice cream, and beer, how will you know if the gluten in the pizza crust or the milk in the mint chocolate chip made your face break out? Was it the beer or the cheese that made your belly bloat? Did the sugar, the processed carbs, or the alcohol tank your energy?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, remember that the reintroduction phase is just as crucial to complete as outlined as the elimination. Without reintroducing the foods and drinks you’ve cut out carefully and systematically, one at a time, you’ll never know how individual foods are affecting your energy, sleep, mood, cravings, digestion, symptoms, or medical condition. You’ll miss the opportunity to compare how you look and feel without these foods to how you look and feel when you consume them. And you won’t have the critical information you need to create the perfect diet for you.

Without a proper elimination and reintroduction, there is no food freedom.

Let’s return to the pet analogy. Again, you have five pets (a dog, two cats, the rabbit, and a bird), and again, you’re feeling stuffy, wheezy, and itchy. In an effort to diagnose the cause of your symptoms, you send all your pets to your mom’s, and you don’t go visit them at all—no contact except for Facetime. (They love Facetime.) When the month is over, you feel amazing—allergy symptoms are totally gone! To celebrate, you have your mom bring all your pets back home to you, and you have a reunion group-snuggle with them all at once. The next morning, you wake up, and all your allergy symptoms are back with a vengeance.

So now you know that your animals are definitely contributing to your allergies. But do you know which animals may be the culprit? Nope. Are you just as physically miserable as the day you gave them away? Yes—perhaps more so, because now you know how good you could be feeling. Have you put yourself and your pets through a month of hardship and learned virtually nothing from the process? Yes, that’s exactly what you’ve done.

It might feel hard, but substitute bread, wine, cheese, cookies, and peanut butter for the animals. Now imagine trying to figure out which of these commonly problematic foods has been negatively impacting your energy, sleep, cravings, bloating, acne, allergies, asthma, migraines, joint pain, hives, or depression when you reintroduce them all into your diet at the same time.

You can’t.

In summary, you have to eliminate and reintroduce carefully and systematically. It’s the fastest and easiest way to know how the foods you’ve been eating are impacting you. In fact, most medical doctors agree that a structured elimination diet is the most effective way to identify food sensitivities—more so than lab tests in many cases. And it’s the reintroduction phase that tells you which foods are actually worth it, and which make you feel so poorly, you’re happy to live without them.

Reintroduction Guidelines

The Whole30 outlined two different sample reintroduction schedules, and I welcome you to borrow them if you want some guidance. However, you don’t have to follow a set schedule or specific reintroduction food order. The key is reintroducing just one variable at a time and leaving enough space (generally two to three days) between reintroduction food groups to allow any side effects to present themselves and subside.

On the designated reintroduction day, you’ll want to reintroduce enough of that food group to really test the effects. If you just have one sip of milk on dairy day, you may not notice anything, which may lead you to believe that milk is totally fine. While that approach may sound appealing (“I reintroduced and everything was okay!”), you want to “go big” here, too, and really subject your body and brain to the potential negative effects of these previously eliminated foods. Reintroduce several items from that food group throughout the course of your reintroduction day. That means on dairy day, you’ll put cream in your coffee, drink milk with breakfast, eat a yogurt with lunch, and liberally sprinkle cheese on your dinner salad.

The exception here is alcohol. Let’s not get drunk before noon, m’kay? Try no more than two glasses of your favorite beverage with dinner—trust me, that will be enough to evaluate the impact.

Ideally, you’re reintroducing foods in order of least likely to be problematic to most likely to be problematic, but this is hard if you’re not sure which foods are going to negatively impact you. A rule of thumb: Added sugar, gluten-free alcohol (like wine), legumes, and non-gluten grains can be reintroduced toward the beginning, but save dairy and gluten for the very last phases. (Again, you can use the sample reintroduction scheduled outlined in The Whole30 to guide you here, even if you’ve designed your own reset.)

Reintroducing sugar is hard, as it almost always comes tied in with other food groups (like gluten or dairy). If you want to see what reintroducing sugar alone feels like, add sweetener to your morning coffee, drizzle honey over your sweet potato at lunch, have a sweet tea in the afternoon, and enjoy some poached peaches with maple syrup after dinner. Then, when you reintroduce other food groups that also contain sugar (like flavored yogurt or a muffin), you’ll be able to compare the effects of eating just sugar with eating sugar plus that other food group.

It’s tough to come up with a comprehensive list of everything that could happen when you reintroduce these potentially less-healthy foods, because various components of different foods interact with every single person in a unique fashion. You’re looking for any noticeable changes—a reversal of improvement, a return to not-so-awesome, a decline in performance, or a resurgence of symptoms.

Sometimes it’s obvious; if you suddenly look three months pregnant, your skin breaks out, your sweet tooth acts up, or your joints swell or hurt again, that’s a pretty clear indicator that the reintroduced item isn’t making you healthier. Whole30 alumna Kelsey discovered this for herself when she reintroduced dairy in the form of a milkshake. Within 20 minutes, she was doubled over in stomach pain, and she remained bloated and gassy for a few days. Kelsey was shocked at the impact of dairy on her system, saying, “I knew gluten upset me, and I’d had gall bladder issues in the past, but I didn’t ever suspect that dairy would be so problematic. Now I know, so I will just stay away from it unless it’s really worth it.”

However, keep an eye out for the subtleties, too. Maybe it’s a little tougher to wake up in the morning, your focus at work at 2 p.m. isn’t quite as sharp, your mood takes a sharp turn for the bummed, or you find yourself prowling through the pantry more frequently.

Reintroduction Ideas

You may be finding it hard to reintroduce just that one food group on any given day, when most of the stuff you want to eat includes more than one potentially problematic ingredient. Rule of thumb: Keep reintroduction foods minimally processed and generally low in added sugar, so you can evaluate just one factor at a time. Here are some examples:

  • Non-gluten grains: corn on the cob, homemade popcorn with ghee or clarified butter, 100% corn tortillas, gluten-free oatmeal, white or brown rice, a side of quinoa
  • Dairy: heavy cream or full-fat milk, butter, plain yogurt or kefir, cheese, cottage cheese, cream cheese, whey protein powder
  • Gluten-containing grains: whole-grain bread, wraps, or tortillas; pasta or couscous; crackers; low-sugar whole-grain cereals
  • Gluten-containing alcohol: beer
  • Gluten-free alcohol: gluten-free beer or cider, wine, and unflavored vodka, tequila, gin, rum, or any distilled (unflavored) spirits.*

* Distilled spirits, even those made from wheat, rye, or barley, are generally considered gluten-free. Anecdotally, however, many gluten-sensitive individuals stay away from rye, whiskey, Scotch, bourbon, and vodkas made from wheat. While the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center says the distillation process makes these liquors safe, use your own judgment.

Pay Attention

Here is a list of things you could evaluate during the reintroduction phase, to determine if a particular food is having a negative impact on you:

  • Digestion
  • Energy
  • Sleep
  • Cravings
  • Mood/happiness
  • Attention span/focus
  • Self-confidence
  • Skin
  • Allergies
  • Breathing (asthma, congestion)
  • Headaches/migraines
  • Athletic performance or recovery
  • Pain
  • Inflammation
  • Medical symptoms

Sample Reintroduction Schedule

(based on the Craving-Buster Reset)

Days 1–30: Elimination

Day 31: Reintroduce nuts and seeds, all by themselves (almond butter on your apple with breakfast, a handful of macadamias with lunch, and toasted almonds on your dinner salad)

Days 32–33: Back to the strict elimination diet

Day 34: Reintroduce non-gluten grains all by themselves (gluten-free oatmeal for breakfast, quinoa mixed into your lunch salad, and 100% corn tortillas instead of lettuce wraps for dinner)

Days 35–36: Back to the strict elimination diet

Day 37: Reintroduce dairy, all by itself (heavy cream in your coffee, cheddar cheese in your breakfast omelet, plain Greek yogurt with lunch, and feta over your zucchini noodles at dinner)

Days 38–39: Back to the strict elimination diet

Day 40: Reintroduce gluten-containing grains, all by themselves (whole wheat flakes with unsweetened almond milk for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and whole wheat pasta with dinner)

Days 41–42: Back to the strict elimination diet

Day 43: Reintroduce alcohol, all by itself (two glasses of beer, wine, potato vodka, or tequila)

Day 44–45: Back to the strict elimination diet

Day 46: Reintroduce added sugars, including dried fruit, all by themselves (sugar in your coffee, a dried-fruit-and-nut bar with lunch, brown sugar and ghee over your sweet potato at dinner)

Day 47–48: Back to the strict elimination diet

Day 49: Reintroduce baked goods, sweets, and treats, ideally gluten- and dairy-free (a gluten-free muffin with breakfast, a handful of date-and-coconut balls with lunch, and some dark chocolate with your tea after dinner)

And while Days 46 and 49 sound like the best days ever, eating this much sugar, baked goods, and sweets in a short period of time is seriously likely to be problematic. UNDERSTATEMENT. Pay really close attention here; your Sugar Dragon will likely awaken with a vengeance, and may require several additional days of reset to calm.

Repeat this process based on the foods you’ve eliminated during your specific reset until everything has been reintroduced and carefully evaluated. You can break this schedule down as detailed as you like, too—reintroduction could easily stretch out for another full 30 days or longer. If you want to evaluate cheese separately from other forms of dairy, make that two different sessions. If you miss corn a ton, but those other gluten-grains not so much, do a corn-only day (try corn tortillas with your breakfast eggs, baked tortilla chips and salsa with lunch, and corn on the cob with dinner), waiting a few days before testing out other non-gluten grains.

Finally, remember that the impact of these potentially less-healthy foods adds up. If at any point you feel like you haven’t adequately recovered from the effects of the reintroduced foods, give yourself a few more days between food groups. Allow the side effects to settle before adding anything else, as the point is to bring the eliminated foods back into a “clean” environment so you can properly evaluate their impact.

Not Missing It?

If you’re not missing a particular food that you suspect is making you less healthy, don’t bother reintroducing it. Waffles weren’t your thing? Skip them on Day 46! Don’t care about testing how wine impacts you because you feel so good without it? Skip the alcohol reintroduction for now. Remember, reintroduction is a lifelong process, so you can always leave something out of this structured timeline, and just pay attention later if it comes across your field of vision and you decide you want to test the waters.

During your reintroduction process, you’ll be bombarded with lots of information coming at you all at once. The changes to your energy, sleep, mood, cravings, digestion, skin, joints, athletic performance, recovery, and medical symptoms may be numerous and overlapping. It may be difficult to remember exactly how individual meals or specific foods impacted you physically, psychologically, and emotionally during this time period if you aren’t writing at least some of it down.

You probably won’t want to do this. It sounds like even more effort, when you’ve already been working so hard. You’ll think it feels like overkill. This is just your brain trying to convince you not to remember, because boy, will it want you to bring some of these foods back into your life, regardless of the consequences.

Which is exactly why you should listen to me, and not the toddler inside your head screaming for a cookie.

Keep a reintroduction journal either on paper, in your computer, or in the Notes app on your smartphone. It can be as simple or as detailed as you’d like to make it, although the more detail you add, the better prepared you’ll be to make good choices for yourself going forward. Create a new entry for each day, and track how things go after each reintroduced item. Evaluate the same things that improved on your Non-Scale Victory checklist (page 33) and write a summary of your thoughts and experiences at the end of each day. A sample reintroduction journal day might look like this:

7 a.m. Added sugar to my coffee. It tasted good, but I’m used to drinking it black now. Won’t do this again.

8 a.m. Veggie frittata and side of berries with breakfast. Topped my berries at breakfast with some maple syrup. Way too sweet. Fruit does not need sugar.

10 a.m. Feeling good, no cravings.

11:30 a.m. Giant protein salad for lunch + honey in my tea. It was good. The end.

2 p.m. Snack: That Banana Bread dried-fruit-and-nut bar was delicious. Like candy. So happy. I ate two. Oops.

3 p.m. My head is on my desk. This hasn’t happened in a month. Shoot.

4 p.m. I want another dried-fruit-and-nut bar. Or that leftover muffin on the counter. Or the candy in my co-worker’s jar. Anything. I’ll take anything. MUST RESIST.

6 p.m. Stuffed peppers with pesto for dinner, skipping the brown sugar on my roasted butternut squash. I just don’t want it.

9 p.m. I’m back to prowling the pantry looking for something sweet. Damn you, sugar! Back to my reset for a few days, until my Sugar Dragon calms down.

End of day thoughts: When I add sugar to meals, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal. When I eat it by itself (snack or dessert), my cravings came back with a vengeance, and I felt out of control again. I’m going to be really careful with stand-alone treats and desserts going forward.

Ultimately, when you’ve reintroduced every food and drink you’ve been missing, have paid close attention to what changes (for better or worse) when you eat them, and have a good understanding of how these items impact your health, habits, and relationship with food . . . you’re done with your reset! So how did it go?

Evaluating Your Reset

By the time your reset is over, you should feel like a brand-new person. (Yes, I set the standard that high, mostly because that’s how nearly all Whole30ers report feeling by Day 31.) Your energy should be rocking, your sleep improved, your digestion better, and your tummy flatter. Your skin will be glowing, and your aches and pains will have diminished. That annoying thing that used to happen? It isn’t happening anymore. And everyone wants to know, “What have you been doing?” You’re happier, more self-confident, and your cravings are dramatically reduced. In fact, you don’t even want most of the foods you couldn’t wait to devour when your reset was over, because you just feel so good.

Oh, and your pants may be looser, too, which wasn’t the point, but is still pretty sweet.

You’ve also learned an incredible amount in a very short time about how the foods you’ve been eating have been affecting you. You can draw clear lines between eating X food and seeing Y effect on your body, energy, or mood. Your awareness and self-control are at an all-time high, built on a solid foundation of changed tastes, improved blood sugar regulation, more evenly balanced hormones, a healthier digestive tract, and a calmer immune system. In other words, you’ve successfully pushed the reset button on your health, habits, and relationship with food.

This is how you feel, right?

If the answer is yes, high five! You’ve successfully taken the first step toward lifelong food freedom. But if you’re not feeling this way, that’s okay, too. Not even the Whole30 works this well for everyone who tries it, and if you’ve designed your own plan, I did mention that you may need some tweaks along the way (or a few attempts) before you found yourself fully “reset.”

But before you throw in the towel and accept the idea that your reset “just didn’t work,” let’s troubleshoot the most common scenarios.

You didn’t go “big” enough. If you didn’t do the full Whole30 or one of the more comprehensive elimination plans, there’s a good chance you still have things in your diet that are negatively impacting you; keeping your cravings alive, energy in flux, digestion disrupted, and immune system active. Solution: Go bigger! Do the Whole30 by the book or work with a functional medicine doctor (page 235) to design an elimination plan specifically for you.

Another Push for Whole30

If your self-designed reset wasn’t everything you hoped it would be, I’ll encourage you one more time to try the Whole30. The plan’s structure, incredible social support, and extensive resources may be just what you need to push you over the edge from feeling so-so about your reset to feeling like your entire life just changed. Oh, and do it now. Yes, right now. Don’t wait, don’t give yourself a month “off,” and don’t tell yourself you’ll start after this holiday or that special event. Do it now, while you’re still in “healthy eating” mode, and build on the improvements you did see during your self-designed reset. By Day 31 of your Whole30, I’d be shocked if you didn’t reread the first few paragraphs of this section and say, “Well, NOW I understand what she was talking about!”

You didn’t do it right. Yeah, I said it, because this process demands some serious self-analysis. Did you really stick to your reset 100%? Did you truly embrace the spirit and intention of the program, not just the technicalities? (Translation: Did you just complete 30 days full of egg-and-banana “pancakes”; late-night dried fruit with coconut butter snacks; and bacon-wrapped, cashew butter–stuffed dates? I know that last thing sounds amazing, but stay focused here.) Did you really focus on improving your health, or were you so stuck on weight loss that you took your reset to an unhealthy place, cutting calories, restricting fruit, or deliberately eating low-fat? Solution: Do it again. Do it right. The end.

Thirty days wasn’t long enough. While radical health improvements can take place in just 30 days, when you put it into context, decades of less-than-healthy behavior often can’t compete with just one month of new action. Resetting your metabolism takes time, especially if you’ve been eating a Standard American Diet (SAD) for years. And fixing an unhealthy psychological relationship with food—plus the cravings, habits, and emotional ties that go along with one—is often the toughest battle to win. If you’re feeling better but were hoping for more improvements (especially if you feel like your cravings aren’t yet under control), extending your plan a bit longer may help. Solution: Return to your reset for another 15 to 30 days, and see if that brings you the “magic” you seek.

You’re paying attention to the wrong things. You really, really wanted to lose weight, but you didn’t lose weight, or you didn’t lose as much as you had hoped. So you deem the reset a failure, because the number on the scale didn’t budge. Solution: This fix has more to do with gaining perspective and less to do with the need for a new or longer reset. I’m also betting you chose not to journal your experience along the way, which is why you’re not able to really see and recognize all the improvements you’ve made. Reevaluate what else happened during your reset. Go back to the Non-Scale Victory Checklist (remember that, from page 33?) and mark off everything that got better during the program, no matter how small. Ask yourself, Why am I still giving my scale this much power? Isn’t it finally time to give that up? (It is. You’ll thank me.)

Diet isn’t your biggest issue. If you’re coming from a SAD (even a “healthy” one, focused on whole grains and low-fat everything), I’d be shocked if the Whole30 or one of the bigger resets proposed here didn’t dramatically improve how you look, feel, and live. But if you can honestly say you went pretty big, followed it 100%, and still aren’t checking many things off your #NSV sheet, then it’s time to look at other factors. Solution: Find a functional medicine practitioner to help you figure out why you’re still not feeling well, but maintain your healthy reset diet, because asking if you’ve eliminated gluten, dairy, and processed foods will be the first thing a good practitioner will do. Once you’ve implemented your doctor’s treatment plan, you can return to this book knowing you’ve got all the factors in place to properly reset and move forward.

Building a Life of Food Freedom

So now you’ve got a complete reset plan: how to eliminate, how to reintroduce, what to pay attention to along the way, and how to correct if you find your chosen method of reset wasn’t as effective as you’d hoped. Congratulations! Your reset is over!

Um, now what?

First, I’ll tell you what’s not next: a sharp drop into an abyss of “That was great and I feel amazing but I’m totally lost on what to do next.” That’s what happened with all your other diets, but as you’ve been reminding yourself all along, this is not that.

Now I’m going to give you a detailed road map for taking what you’ve learned during your reset and turning those lessons into a balanced diet that’s perfect for you. I’ll tell you how to sustain, even in times of stress, the new, healthy habits you created during your reset. I’ll teach you how to talk to family and friends about your new lifestyle, which common situations are most likely to throw you off your healthy-eating game, how to recover when you slide back into old habits, and how to maintain the food freedom you’ve found for the rest of your life.

Translation: This time, you have a plan.

Feel better? Good. Now take a moment to be proud of your hard work and achievements, and bask in the glory of feeling totally in control of the food you’re eating for the first time in a long while.

And when you’re done with that . . . take a deep breath, because there’s still work to be done.