“I just finished my first Whole30 and wanted to say thanks. I have always been fit and have eaten well, but my 50-year-old body really needed a tune-up. I also had high cholesterol (252) that gave concern to my doctor. Enter the Whole30. I lost 4 pounds, mostly around the waist area, which is nice; my waist is now a 31. I also got a blood workup and my results were excellent. My cholesterol is down to 207, triglycerides are normal, LDL-C is normal, and HDL-C is now in the healthy range. On top of all that, I am really enjoying cooking for myself and my family.”
—Bill B., Elmhurst, IL
Yes, it does. That’s not us being the tough guys, that’s science. The point of any elimination diet is to completely remove 100 percent of the potentially problematic foods from your life for a full 30 days straight. Without the complete removal, your body won’t experience what life is really like without these triggers. You may think one bite or sip here or there won’t really make a difference, but if you’re sensitive to these foods,* you require only a tiny amount to break the Whole30 “reset”—to disrupt the gut, fire up the immune system, and potentially trigger the symptoms of your condition.
Now, you might say, “But if I was sensitive, I’d know it.” Uh, no. You would not. Nobody knows they’re sensitive until something happens to make them realize they’re sensitive. We know people with celiac disease who walked around eating bread for decades before they realized there was a problem. The point of the Whole30 is to identify sensitivities. So until you’ve done the full Whole30 by the books (which means 100 percent compliance for at least 30 days), you may not know.
*This is especially true of grains (especially gluten), dairy products, soy, peanuts, and alcohol. BACK
The short answer is yes, first and foremost because of the science. You introduce something inflammatory into your newly “clean” environment and you have to start all over again. In addition, those are the rules. The Whole30 program is black and white: no slips, no cheats, no special occasions. The program requires 30 days straight of complete compliance, otherwise it’s back to Day 1 for you. There, wasn’t that easy? But don’t start over because we want you to—start over because you promised yourself you’d see this through. Because you made a commitment to yourself. You decided to push the “reset” button on your health, your habits, and your relationship with food, and change your life through the Whole30. So see that commitment through, because you deserve it.
Say you find yourself at Mom’s house for dinner on Day 22 triple-confirming the meal has no grains or legumes. Then halfway through the main course Mom says, “The secret ingredient in this meatloaf—soy sauce!” (Double whammy—soy sauce usually contains both soy and wheat.) In this context, you’ve done everything you can do. You asked the right questions, got the right answers, and proceeded exactly on plan with the Whole30, as far as you knew.
We’d still tell you to start over. The rules are the rules, and you’ll only achieve maximum benefit if you give yourself a full 30 days on the protocol. However, if the stress of starting from scratch or the amount of resentment you’d feel toward your mother would do more harm than good, we could understand if you chalked it up to a learning experience and just finished out your program. Ultimately, you’re all grown-ups, and it’s always up to you as to whether or not to start over.
The Whole30 is not a low-carb diet by design. We don’t count calories or carbohydrates, restrict carbohydrates, or give you any sort of guidance as to how many grams of carbohydrates you should be eating. (It’s also not a no-carb diet: people think of “carbs” as breads, cereals, and pastas, but vegetables and fruit contain carbohydrates, too!) By virtue of the nutrient-dense foods you’ll be choosing, your diet will likely include less carbohydrate than you used to eat, but that’s probably a good thing. Unless you’re incredibly active, do high-intensity activity or exercise a few times a week, or are in hard training for endurance sports, you don’t need piles of carbohydrates for energy. However, if you find yourself in one of these categories, you will have to purposefully include carb-dense vegetables and fruits into your daily diet, to ensure you have enough to fuel your activity level. Make it a point to eat potatoes, winter squashes like butternut and acorn, bananas or plantains, and other fruits every day, so your energy stores are sufficient to see you through your workout or long training run.
Not really. Atkins is a deliberately low-carb, high-fat diet with the primary purpose of helping participants lose weight. Tracking your caloric and carbohydrate intake is a mandatory part of staying in compliance with the given carb-gram ranges for each phase. Participants are encouraged to eat real food, but are also offered a prepackaged line of meals, shakes, and bars to supplement their meals. Cheese, milk, artificial sweeteners, and diet sodas are also allowed on the program.
By comparison, the Whole30 is not low- or high-anything—our meal template is actually quite moderate in terms of recommended amounts of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. More significant, the purpose of the Whole30 is to reset your health, your habits, and your relationship with food. It’s not designed for weight loss, although participants do lose weight as a result of improving their health. Finally, the Whole30 has no required weighing or measuring (in fact, that’s frowned upon), a much stronger focus on food quality, and specifically targets cravings and food addictions.
In a general sense, yes. The Whole30 was originally based on a Paleo framework, and generally omits foods that aren’t part of a typical Paleo diet, like grains and legumes. However, we don’t focus on evolution or history (what our Paleolithic ancestors may or may not have eaten). Our program is primarily concerned with how food in today’s modern world impacts our health and habits. We exclude some foods that some would consider technically “Paleo” (like honey or baked goods made with almond flour), and allow some foods that aren’t usually part of a Paleo plan (like potatoes and green beans). However, there is an awful lot of overlap; many people come to the Whole30 from a Paleo diet, or find a more general Paleo template works well for them when their Whole30 is over.
Habit research shows the average number of days to make a new habit stick is 66—but the harder and more complicated the change, the longer it will take you to really solidify the new behavior. Understanding habit research, we had a few choices to make when designing the program. We could have made it a Whole66 (or longer), but the idea of changing your diet in this fashion for more than two months would have scared a lot of people away. We could have made it short (like a Whole14), but we knew that wasn’t likely to bring you the stunning benefits of the program. So we chose a middle ground. Thirty days is long enough to create new habits and bring you stunning results, but not so long that you are afraid to take it on.
Under special circumstances, yes. We think inserting a “Whole7” or a “Whole10” into your life at key times is a great way to get an effective reset and get you back on track. The caveat? You have to have done a full Whole30 and be practicing your new, healthy habits more often than not in your everyday life to benefit. The more you do the Whole30 and the closer you live to these standards on a day-to-day basis, the faster you’ll be able to get through any negative consequences and jump into the Tiger Blood stage. (Remember “Tiger Blood” from our Whole30 Timeline?) Attempt a Whole7 on your first go-round or after six months of carb-a-palooza and you’ll end up with all of the unpleasant side effects, and none of the benefits!
For the experienced Whole30 participant, we recommend throwing in a Whole7 or Whole10 in the week before or after a vacation, just before a holiday, or during a time of stress, when eating healthy will help you better handle the challenge. The rules are exactly the same, and don’t limit yourself to seven or ten days—keep going until you feel like you’re back on healthy ground and in control of your food habits.
We talk about this in the Reintroduction section, but if you’ve got a chronic medical condition, an autoimmune disease, or a long history of unhealthy food habits or addictions, you may want to plan on being on the program longer than 30 days. While the basic program is long enough to steer you in the right direction and bring you some of the results you’re hoping to see, you can’t expect to fully reverse years (or decades!) of medical symptoms or food-related habits in just a month. Autoimmune conditions are especially stubborn, often requiring six months or more of dietary and lifestyle intervention to bring significant healing and resolution of symptoms. If you feel like you can commit to a Whole45, 60, or 90 right out of the gate, go for it! You can also take a wait-and-see approach, and decide whether or not to keep going come Day 31.
If you really wanted to, you could absolutely do the Whole30 for the rest of your life. Unlike other “diet” programs, the Whole30 has no temporary induction period, doesn’t restrict calories, and provides you with an abundance of the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and fiber essential for excellent long-term health, which means if you stayed on the program forever, you’d actually be optimally healthy. However, we don’t think you should make it a Whole365. From a practical perspective, following the Whole30 rules every single day could get pretty stressful. Plus, doing the Whole30 for the rest of your life would completely eliminate the opportunity to indulge in some truly extraordinary, really special off-plan foods. (You wouldn’t have to eat fresh pasta in Italy or toast with champagne at your best friend’s wedding, but we’d want you to feel like you could if you wanted to.) Remember, at some point, you have to take the things you’ve learned on the program out into the real world, and make your own decisions about what you think is “worth it” or not. If you never practice—if you always use the rules of the Whole30 to make those decisions for you—you will never truly attain food freedom.
We don’t recommend it. First, the Whole30 is primarily about awareness. The only way to learn how certain foods are actually affecting your health is by paying close attention during the 30-day elimination and the subsequent reintroduction period. But during the holidays, nobody has time to pay attention to anything—you simply can’t give the program the energy and attention it deserves. In addition, the holidays are already pretty stressful with events, gifts, and travel—not to mention the treats and temptations! You could be setting yourself up for a fall if you try to take on a program as rigorous as the Whole30 on top of an already stressful season. Finally, the holiday season is meant to celebrate family traditions, honoring your culture and heritage, and that celebration almost always includes special handmade foods. That kind of food should be honored, savored, and shared in the company of those you love, and you’ll miss out on that once-a-year experience if you are doing a Whole30.
That’s not to say you should dive face-first into every candy bowl you stumble across—feel free to throw in a Whole30 before the season to set yourself up for holiday success, and intersperse days of Whole30-style eating in between parties, gatherings, and events. (And make sure you join us at whole30.com every year on January 1st for our official New Year Whole30 kick-off!)
The scientific background of our general nutrition recommendations and the Whole30 program is outlined in detail in It Starts With Food. In addition, we have included more than 400 peer-reviewed studies supporting our recommendations in that book’s references.