“When I started the Whole30, I weighed 415 pounds. I couldn’t walk longer than five minutes without my lower back cramping and feeling like it was on fire. For as long as I can remember my body has hurt with the lightest pressure. I had many other issues such as PCOS, irregular periods, bloating, and constant fatigue and headaches. I started my Whole30 on May 5, 2014. Just four months later, I can walk more than five miles with no pain at all. I have even started jogging in 15–20 second spurts during my walk. I have lost 65 pounds and have more energy than I’ve had in twenty years! I feel alive today. This has changed my life!”
—Ann Marie L., Frederick, MD
Yep. You’ll thank us for it, too. The point of the Whole30 is to figure out how the foods you used to eat are actually affecting you—your digestion, energy, sleep, mood, focus, cravings, athletic performance, and the symptoms of your medical condition. If you stuff your face with pizza, beer, and ice cream on Day 31, how will you know what food caused what symptoms later on, when you feel like junk? (And you will feel like junk.) Careful, systematic reintroduction is the key to identifying which specific foods aren’t okay for you (and the effects they have on your body and brain), so don’t skip this step, or try to speed it up. You’ve spent this long working so hard to change your life—what’s another ten days?
✪Tip: Reintroduction is actually a lifelong process. The more you pay attention to how you look, feel, perform, and live after eating certain foods, the more you’ll notice their subtle effects. For some, gluten makes them sad. For others, dairy makes them break out—but not until two or three days after exposure. In other cases, eating one piece of bread has few discernable side effects, but eating bread three days in a row makes people look three months pregnant. You should continue to pay attention to your body, brain, and symptoms when you eat off-plan foods, even after your official reintroduction period is over.
You don’t have to, but we recommend it. We’ve arranged your reintroduction food groups in the order of least likely to be problematic to most likely, per the scientific literature and feedback from thousands of Whole30 participants. Gluten comes last because it tends to have the most serious and long-lasting effects on your body and brain. If you start with gluten grains, you may have to wait a few extra days to let your system settle back down before reintroducing your next food group.
Yes, you should. The point of reintroduction is to carefully evaluate the effects of one food group at a time. If you still have hives, allergies, or stomach bloating three days after exposure to dairy, that means your gut and immune system are still fired up—and dumping even more potentially inflammatory foods on top of an already inflamed system isn’t a good idea. Stick to Whole30 eating until you no longer have symptoms, then wait one more day and reintroduce your next food group into a “clean” environment. You only get one shot to reintroduce and evaluate the effects, so be patient and do it right.
This is a tough one, because many of the foods in the other food groups will also contain sugar. If you choose to reintroduce pancakes on your gluten day, for example, you may have a hard time knowing if the lethargy, crankiness, and brain fog are from the pancake, the maple syrup, or (most likely) the combination of both. It’s safe to say that reintroducing sugar in significant quantities usually brings back cravings and energy slumps—but you probably won’t notice the three grams of sugar in your ketchup at all. If you want to specifically evaluate sugar by itself, do this first, and add a step (and another three days) to your reintroduction schedule. Keep the rest of your food Whole30-compliant, but add sugar to your morning coffee, drink a sugary fruit juice mid-morning, top your lunchtime sweet potato with ghee and honey, and pour a generous amount of maple syrup over poached peaches after dinner. See how the added sugar makes you feel—evaluate energy, mood, hunger, and especially cravings.
Going forward in your reintroduction schedule, don’t stress about a few grams of sugar here or there (like in your condiments, chicken sausage, or salad dressing). However, it’s still good to be aware of how often companies add sugar in places you wouldn’t suspect, so continue with your label reading.
✪Tip: If adding sugar back into your coffee makes you want to drink a lot more coffee, ask yourself, is that a good thing?
First, if you’re not missing it, feel free to skip this step—many Whole30ers have commented how little they actually missed drinking. If you choose to reintroduce alcohol, avoid gluten-containing alcohols (like beer, rye, scotch, or whiskey) during this stage, as your goal is to evaluate the alcohol, not the gluten, and experts aren’t sure whether distilled grain-based drinks are really gluten-free. Save those other drinks for your gluten reintroduction days, if you choose. (You’ll already know how the alcohol makes you feel, so if you get a new symptom, like bloating, digestive upset, or skin breakouts, you’ll know to blame the gluten and not the alcohol.) You can drink things like wine, tequila, or potato-based vodka in this stage to evaluate how the alcohol makes you look, feel, and live. Pay extra attention to whether you’re tempted to make poor food choices under the influence. The “reduced inhibition” that alcohol promotes is important to recognize!
✪Tip: If you drink wine, you are also getting a dose of sulfites, unless you specifically choose wine that is organically produced. If you end up with a headache, flushed skin, or other unpleasant effects, it may be difficult for you to tell whether it was the alcohol or the sulfites responsible. You could always test this further by drinking a non-sulfite beverage (like 100 percent agave tequila) and comparing effects. Just be sure to wait at least three days between experiments.
You don’t have to, but the more carefully and systematically you approach reintroduction, the more you’ll gain awareness of an individual food’s effects. If you already suspect you have a sensitivity to a particular food (like corn, soy, peanuts, etc.), consider breaking that food out and adding one step to the standard reintroduction schedule. That would alter the original schedule to look like this if you were evaluating corn on its own:
Day 1: Evaluate non-gluten containing alcohol (optional), while keeping the rest of your diet Whole30-compliant.
Day 4: Evaluate legumes, while keeping the rest of your diet Whole30-compliant.
Day 7: Evaluate corn, while keeping the rest of your diet Whole30-compliant.
Day 10: Evaluate other non-gluten grains (rice, certified gluten-free oats, quinoa, etc.) while keeping the rest of your diet Whole30-compliant.
Day 13: Evaluate dairy, while keeping the rest of your diet Whole30-compliant.
Day 16: Evaluate gluten grains, while keeping the rest of your diet Whole30-compliant.
You can also “test” certain foods later if you continue to eat mostly Whole30 meals, just by paying attention when you eat them. (This doesn’t work so well if you’ve gone back to eating meals with gluten, dairy, soy, etc. on a regular basis, however.)
First, before reintroducing any food to which you have had an allergic reaction in the past, you must consult with your health care provider. Allergies are not to be taken lightly, so don’t go this alone. Second, 30 days probably isn’t long enough for your immune system to have calmed down enough to reintroduce a food to which you have had a serious allergic response. Our general rule of thumb is that you must go one full year without any exposure to that food before you can even consider reintroduction. (And we do mean zero exposure—don’t eat even a tiny bite of that troublemaking substance all year long.) If you’ve been working hard to heal your gut and avoid the trigger for a full year, only then is it time to talk with your doctor about reintroducing, if it’s that important to you.
✪Tip: If you don’t have a diagnosed allergy but have experienced negative effects when eating certain foods (like bloating when eating certain fruits, or hives when eating eggs), your health care provider may decide there is more leeway to re-test these foods. Note, however, that it still might require more than 30 days of gut healing to notice a difference, and you still may find that large quantities or repeated exposures to that food is not okay.
It’s hard to come up with a comprehensive list, because everyone has a different experience when eating foods that their bodies don’t tolerate well. However, here are some general things to look for when you reintroduce off-plan foods:
Digestion: Are things moving too fast or too slow? Do you have gas, bloating, pain, or cramping? Has your heartburn or GERD returned?
Energy: Are you back to a 3 p.m. slump, dragging yourself out of bed in the morning, or just feeling lethargic? Are your workouts suffering, or have you lost motivation to exercise?
Sleep: Are you sleeping more restlessly? Do you have a hard time falling asleep? Are you waking up in the middle of the night, or too early in the morning?
Cravings: Is your Sugar Dragon back in full effect? Are you having a hard time resisting the pull of sugar or carbs? Are you now eating foods just because they’re in front of you?
Mood and psychology: Are you cranky, moody, or otherwise less happy than you’ve been? Have your anxiety, depression, attention deficit, or compulsive habits returned?
Behavior (especially in kids): Do you notice more tantrums, talking back, inability to control emotions or behaviors, or a lack of focus or shortened attention span?
Skin: Did you break out, get a rash or hives, or see a reappearance of eczema, psoriasis, or other skin conditions?
Breathing: Are you congested or having sinus pain? Have your “seasonal allergies” reappeared? Are you experiencing shortness of breath or asthma?
Pain and inflammation: Have you triggered a migraine or headache? Has your chronic pain, fatigue, tendinitis, or arthritis returned? Are joints more sore, stiff, or swollen? Do you have other tangible symptoms of inflammation?
Medical conditions: Have your symptoms reappeared or gotten worse?
Some effects will be impossible to ignore, while others are subtle and may require a few more “tests” before you can reliably attribute the cause with the effect. Awareness is key—make sure you actually pay attention to all of these areas immediately after eating the food, later on that day, and in the days to come.
The Whole30 will not create a sensitivity. There are a few reasons why this food may bother you now in ways (you think) it never did before. First, after 30-plus days on the program, you have so much more awareness about how food affects you. It’s highly likely that this food used to upset your digestion, make you break out, or bring on sinus issues, but you just didn’t notice it. (It’s like a smoker asserting he feels great. Is he really feeling great, or have the effects of the smoking on his lungs become his new “normal,” where he doesn’t even notice them anymore?) You’ve been feeling so good these last few weeks that any disruption to your system is a definite diversion from your new normal—one that cannot be ignored. So when reintroducing this food upsets your digestion, skin, or sinuses, you really notice, because you’ve been without these effects for some time now.
Second, when you’re eating foods your body doesn’t like, it creates all kinds of defense mechanisms to help protect you. Your gut bacterial population changes, you build up a bigger mucosal lining (a “buffer zone”) in your gut, and your immune system goes on high alert. When you remove these triggers, the body adapts again. It no longer needs to protect you from the food you’ve been eating, so your gut and immune system are able to “relax” and begin to recover. This is a healthier state of being, but it also means these same defenses aren’t in place when you reintroduce the food. It’s like this: If someone kicked you in the shins every time they saw you, you’d probably put on some shin guards, right? But if they stopped kicking you for a month straight, you’d probably relax and think, “Great, I can take these shin guards off now.” Imagine how much more it would hurt if they came along the very next day and kicked you again, after your shins had time to (partly) heal from the damage!
In summary, the Whole30 only showed you what was already there, magnified so you’ll really pay attention. If a reintroduced food negatively impacts you now, you can be sure it was doing that all along to some degree.
We can’t answer that for you—that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. We will say that if your body is clearly telling you, “I don’t like this food!” you’d be wise to listen, and leave that food off your everyday plate. After all, ignoring these signals is what led you toward all the symptoms and conditions you’re now trying to reverse with the Whole30. However, if you discover ice cream gives you gas and bloating, but you really love ice cream, you’re free to eat it anyway. Only you can make that call—but remember, you also have to own the consequences.
Maybe. Remember, reintroduction isn’t just a ten-day process, and sometimes it takes more time (or more exposure) for us to notice the negative effects foods have on our system. For example, Melissa can eat a small piece of bread with dinner and not notice any issues, but if she has three pieces of bread, she gets lethargic and kind of depressed. In other instances, the negative effects of these foods are cumulative—you don’t notice their effects on the first day, but by the fourth day in a row, you’ve got symptoms. You may also experience “silent” consequences (at first)—nothing noticeable on a moment-by-moment basis, until one day a week later you wake up and you realize your energy levels are in the tank and your knee hurts again. The lesson? Continue to pay attention to how off-plan foods make you feel (both physically and psychologically), and err on the side of caution when it comes to reincorporating these foods into your everyday routine.
✪Tip: The scientific literature against gluten, peanuts, and added sugar (specifically) is so convincing that we think these should be off your everyday plate whether you notice symptoms or not. You don’t have to stress about a few grams of sugar in your ketchup or the once-a-year Christmas cookies your mom bakes, but in general, we believe these items make everyone less healthy—so read your labels even after your Whole30 is done, and indulge with caution (if at all).
Absolutely, although we’d encourage you to separate these foods from the rest of your reintroduction schedule, and pay just as much attention to how these make you feel. For example, when your general reintroduction is over, go ahead and have pancakes made from bananas and egg for breakfast and almond flour cookies after dinner, but be just as rigorous about evaluating how you look, feel, and live after eating these sweet treats. For many, they’ll reawaken your Sugar Dragon in a major way, leading you to crave off-plan foods that you’ve already decided aren’t good for your everyday plate. Others find the extra sugar in their day (even if it is from a “natural” source) negatively impacts hunger, mood, and energy levels.
This is a tricky one, because we would have wanted you to plan your Whole30 a little differently from the get-go. (Go back to Getting Started with the Whole30 for help with planning your Whole30 start date.) Ideally, you’ll have time to get through both the program and your reintroduction before you are thrown into a situation where you’ll be tempted to Eat All the Things. However, that’s not what happened, so now we have to deal with the situation at hand.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, you’re not going to complete the reintroduction as outlined while traipsing through Italy. You’re just not. And that’s okay. We would never want you to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience for your Whole30 reintroduction—but that doesn’t mean you have a free pass to mindlessly inhale gelato. If you eat everything you haven’t been eating all at once, you will likely ruin your vacation (at least for that day), so tread with caution. Try to keep treats to one food group at a time, if possible, and only eat as much as you need to satisfy your taste buds. (You don’t have to eat four slices of freshly baked bread if one will do.) Pay attention to how foods make you feel, and choose your next meal based on the consequences of the last. If gelato makes you feel like junk, there’s no need to retest that particular experiment. Finally, plan on getting back on the Whole30 (even if it’s just for a week or two) as soon as you get home, because your brain will probably be back in full-on “old habits” mode—and you don’t want your “vacation” from healthy eating to continue months after your trip is over.
✪Tip: Many people report the bread in Europe isn’t as disruptive to their systems as the bread in the U.S. Some theorize that the strains of wheat overseas aren’t as hybridized, which makes the gluten less troublesome in our guts. We don’t have any scientific evidence of this, but take heed—just because you eat bread in Italy with little consequence doesn’t mean you’ll have that same experience when you’re back in the United States.