Whole 30 Misadventures, Or Never Follow A Diet That Has A Name

Over the last three months–almost to the day, because today is October 11th, and my bicep tendon decided to blow apart back on July 10th–a lot has happened to my body. Most of it has been stressful. Some of it has been painful. Some of that pain has been by choice and some of it has been by necessity. You hear the phrase “everything can change in an instant” thrown around so casually that it almost never had meaning in the first place, but my entire life for three straight months has looked like someone decided I needed to know the import of those six words put together in that specific way, and goddamn if it wasn’t going to have to take a long time to just really jam it into my psyche so it sticks. 

So, being held captive by what is probably a deserved karmatic circumstance designed to teach me that I should not count on anything in my life, however small, and probably that I should be grateful for a bunch of shit that I’m too stubborn to really be grateful for, I have woken up for about 90 days in a row thinking some variant of “yep, the arm is still busted, and that’s probably going to shake out today roughly like it did yesterday. YES. Let’s DO IT.” This reality has slowly evolved from running around with my arm splinted up to in a brace to free but really screwed up to free but can function roughly how you’d expect the average 90 year-old’s arm to function to free but is still pretty weak and crotchety and atrophied-looking: 70 year-old woman edition. This reality has brought with it a bunch of questions from people I don’t really know about my arm, a bunch of pitying stares, people I know at a medium level of intimacy not really knowing what to say to me, a bunch more questions from people I don’t really know, at all, again, concerning my arm, like “is it ok now that there is no brace on it? Like are you all healed up now?”
Nope. A tendon that fully tears in half and then gets pulled through a hole someone drills through your bone and then stapled permanently there and now the bicep attached to it is too short and the tendon is too short until everything just sort of lengthens out again over time doesn’t “heal up” quickly. Like, just because it doesn’t look like something is seriously fucked up about me or my body–because my head is also really fucked up by the way, you just don’t see that part either–doesn’t mean everything is all good. In fact, despite the fact that I am two and a half months post-surgery, ish, I don’t really feel a lot better than when the event itself occurred. Sometimes when I go to sleep at night I just sort of relive what it felt like to have shit in my arm rip apart. I don’t really want to, but that’s what my sick psyche seems to like to do. I feel like my subconscious is really into torture porn–I maintain that I’m not, but it appears that my base self, the kind that sends me the dreams I wake up from thinking “ok, we are NEVER telling anyone about that one” really is into the whole “bodies getting torn apart deal.” Gross. Stop. 

Salute, motherfuckers, I no longer have to wear this thing.

So maybe you’re thinking the following: okay Janis, stop BITCHING about your injury. Seriously. Do you ever shut up about this? Do you ever stop thinking about it? STOP, oh my god, just stop, you didn’t die. What about the Whole 30 reference in the title of this post? Did you just use a popular, fad diet name in that title to get readers sucked into reading about your interminable ability to feel sorry for yourself? Fuck, man, I have other things to do today and this is seriously bringing me down. I wanted to read about dieting because I, like basically everyone else, don’t really feel like I have the exact right answer as to how I should eat, what I should eat, how much, when, is dairy bad, what does that really cut dude eat, how many anabolics are in her system at one time, is HIIT really better than steady state–I WANT TO READ ABOUT THESE THINGS. 
Alright, alright. Here’s what happened to me when I got the aformentioned injury I’m no longer allowed to directly talk about: I got really depressed and lost a fair amount of weight, particularly for a strength athlete trying to preserve lean mass. I also dealt with A LOT of swelling and inflammation, and thought that hey, let’s do whatever we can to combat that–I have control of my eating, so why don’t I try eating in a way that might at least at some small level help to correct the inflammation situation. I need more produce. I need to not eat stuff that is inflammatory. Maybe I can bring my weight back up while doing it. What is this Whole 30 thing? 

Cast and abs: Former is gone, the latter are going.

So I looked over the Whole 30 diet and immediately was like screw some of this, this shit is kind of neurotic. Like we’re restricting some things in a way that’s looking like Pathways To Eating Disorders 101, so I’m not going to do all of this. I’m going to follow some of the parameters here to change what I’m eating towards way more produce, way more good fats, and we’ll see how that goes. Also, I want to be able to eat at chipotle so I’m going to do that and just not eat rice or beans or tortilla thingies. So I did. I didn’t really track my intake because I just figured I was eating more. Also, technically on Whole 30 you’re not supposed to track your intake. So guess what? My weight continued to plummet. I’m not blaming this on following the Whole 30 diet. But at that point, for me, I was getting into “if your weight keeps dropping you are going to lose even more usable lean mass than you have already lost, so STOP DOING WHAT YOU’RE DOING YOU IDIOT” territory. So here are my critiques: 
1. I guess this whole thing makes sense for people who are legitimately attempting to isolate food allergy triggers. I also feel like if you are truly trying to do so, like if you truly think you have a food allergy, you should be probably working with a doctor and also running actual tests and shit. I mean maybe, I don’t know, I have an iron constitution and no food allergies, but I have known people who do and this is usually what it looks like when it’s a legitimate thing and not someone looking for a way to justify an eating disorder–and I HAVE had an eating disorder or five so I know what that looks like. So…if you suspect a food allergy call your freaking doctor and then maybe look into elimination diets that help you treat the whole thing like a science experiment with controls and variables. 
2. WTF there is like one complex carb source allowed, come on. I just can’t get behind that. A macro is a macro and whatnot but man, you mighhhhht hate your life if you struggle with one solid carb source. I don’t even like carbs THAT MUCH and this was some bullshit. Like I would also like to have oats please. 

3. Following the above, people really like to freak out about gluten and the overwhelming evidence I’ve seen about this is that there are very few ACTUAL gluten-sensitive people and the majority who claim this are basically justifying avoiding carb intake and hiding eating disordered eating patterns YES I SAID IT. Do you KNOW what actual celiac disease looks like? Like what it’s like to have that? That shit is NOT FUN. So calm the hell down about things like brown rice and oats and stuff that has a LOT OF GOOD STUFF IN IT FOR YOU. Damnnnnnnnnn. 

4. Ok, to be a little more serious and less argumentative, I feel like Whole 30 is restrictive to the point where anyone with any kind of history of eating issues is going to end up in a bad way at some point, somehow, because of it. That could manifest in different ways–a path into anorexia relapse, complete breakdown and binging because of perceived restriction, cycles between the two, etc–and perhaps more mild expressions of these two reactions. Because Whole 30 makes a LOT OF THINGS off limits. Off limits…does not tend to function well for people who psychologically struggle with food. It’s like taking a substance and telling a bunch of teenagers they can’t have it until they are 21. It’s SPECIAL BECAUSE IT’S OFF LIMITS GUYS, LET’S GO GET OUR OLDER SIBLING TO GO TO THE STORE FOR US. We’ve seen how that goes. Humans have the most interesting relationships with things they aren’t allowed to have, things that they might want. I mean relationships that end up making for really good movies and tv shows. So taking a diet where this is a main attribute of the diet…seems to me to be problematic. For many. 

Just like with training, the body would be easy if it was a robot one was exposing to variables and controls and changing with them. But the body is not a robot. Bodies contain minds. Whole 30 very likely works physiologically in very productive ways. I just…deeply caution people thinking about following it. Or anything else that is a fad–because yes, it’s a fad–paleo is a fad. Remember Atkins? That was/is a fad. Diets that are popular that have names end up looking like/being called fads 5 or so years after their mystique has died down. Question your intentions when you see something a lot of other people are doing and are inclined to try it out–just because a lot of people are doing it RIGHT NOW does not mean it is good. Duh, right? Right. I just figured you needed a reminder. 

Because when you’re desperate over something–when something in your life smacks you so hard in the face that nothing feels the same or in control anymore and you just want things to be DIFFERENT THAN THEY ARE, you look outside, around, everywhere but internally, for some way to feel differently–because it’s easier to do something different than feel different. Feelings can change by different actions, but generally they change if your beliefs change, and there’s only so much looking to the external is going to work for that without going back to searching for the real truth in the internal. That’s what trying to do the Whole 30 managed to illuminate, I guess. I mean my arm’s busted and I’m generally hanging on by a thread always so I would be careful about trusting anything my crazy self says, but I believe I might be right on this one. And I just like being able to eat oats again. 

Injury Files: My Rib and Me, Avoiding an Abusive Relationship

Me after the heaviest set of my return-to-squatting session yesterday. Look how HAPPY I look! Perfectionist scowl in place right here.

Working through this rib injury has been an opportunity for learning. I resent that. Whenever you hear the phrase “opportunity for learning,” you know it’s coming out of the mouth of someone’s sixth grade science teacher trying to coax him or her through the completion of his or her totally bungled potato-battery. Or it’s my mother during almost every phase of my adolescence when I came home from a crappy riding lesson with a sore set of glutes and a downtrodden face. I tend to sulk when the need for the phrase “opportunity for learning” arises. I do not like things that get in the way of my goals. In fact, I can’t think of anything that destabilizes the barely-functional bridges I’ve built over the pits of a self-loathing I’ve been attempting to navigate for most of my life. If I can’t be killing myself trying to achieve something, I have a hard time enjoying the process of living. If my father, or a smattering of other people, is reading this, he’s thinking “that is an extreme way of thinking about things.” You know what, Dad? You’re right. I’m extreme. You’re reading a blog about a girl who’s attempting to climb the national rankings in powerlifting, a maximal, extreme strength sport. If you don’t want extreme, please take a moment to browse such Internet entities as Pinterest, your local news station’s website, or maybe just close out all your browsers and stare at your desktop for a while.

The thing is, I can’t sit here and say being extreme isn’t sometimes misplaced, misinterpreted, and misguided. When injury has me on the brink of emotional meltdown–and it did this time, and it has before–the brand of extreme that’s causing that reaction has to be examined. I’ve been running from the act of this examination for several years now. When injury happens (that sounds like a 20/20 special waiting to be produced), I have done an excellent job at becoming completely unglued in the past. When I “busted my sternum,” I fell into a depression that left me 20 lb lighter and emotionally fragile. The Busted-Sternum Period was, of course, accompanied by a few other extremely unpleasant issues in my personal life, but the injury was basically what brought everything down. If I hadn’t had some fantastic support and if I hadn’t worked to try to see around some of the delusions I still hold about what is and is not truly important in life, this interruption in my training would have hit me harder than it did.

That said, I did end up suffering some hard hits over this. I finally went to a chiropractor for the first time in my life (after seeing both a general practitioner and a sports medicine guy) who, after telling me I pretty much had a dislocated rib, semi-literally jammed the thing back into place. Jason Bradley of Washington Street Wellness, you rock. I’m going to plug Dr Bradley here and say that should you or someone you know in the Iowa City area manage to knock some aspect of your skeletal system out of alignment, go see him. Not only is he damned good at what he does, he’s fun to talk with, particularly when you’re nervous about seeing a chiropractor because you’ve always been afraid of them.

So, that’s where I am with things right now. I’ve been doing some training and mostly keeping my strength up, although I had to basically take a full week off and have had to modify most of what I’ve been able to do for several weeks now because of this injury. I’m finally back to squatting and the rib is finally on its way to healing. There’s a lot of tissue inflammation in the area surrounding the formerly displaced rib, and that’s what’s hindering me now. It’s going to take my body a while to realize it’s back in order and for small tears to heal themselves up. This HAS been a learning experience, I’ll admit it. I’m not yet 27, so I guess I can allow learning experiences to take place now and then for the next few years. The point at which I will know everything, from what I have heard, is 30. I’m getting close.