Whole30 Eve

 First of all, this is going to be a long, exhausting entry. Cut me some slack, it's Whole30 Eve and I'm excited. Ye be warned.

So first of all, hey, hi, I'm Cheyenne, I'm a recovering food-a-holic.

 Hi, Cheyenne.

And this is me with my better, much cooler half, Seth. He's been my rock for forever and I don't know what I'd do without him, yadda yadda. You know you have a supportive boyfriend when the guy loathes veggies yet demands we should do the Whole30 TOGETHER. Seth, the allmighty veggie hater.

All hail. Now I kind of want some Sonic...

So, the rules of the Whole30 state you can't weigh yourself the entire duration of the program. Yeah, that isn't happening. While I don't own a scale (haven't since 2007) I've never been obsessed with weighing myself, skinny or fat. But I want to check in weekly to really get a feel of how the program is working with my body and affecting it. So we took our measurements (which will be posted in the future) as well as weighed in at his parent's house, and took some oh-so-classy Before Pictures. Absolutely dreadful. But a necessary evil :)

Oh no, you don't get to see those yet, instead, enjoy this weigh-in. I lost three pounds since last week, before I decided to do the Whole30. I was 217-whatever.

2,146 pounds.

Also - Shopping complete!

For those of you that know me, you know I'm on a tight tight tight budget. My better half bought us a week's worth of groceries, and we were shocked to see how cheap everything came out to be.

Oh hell yes.

To me, 89.17 is still a LOT of money. But on a normal weekday, we'll run to the store and spend at LEAST twenty dollars. This happens about three or four times a week. On the weekends we go out to eat at least twice, and he always pays, so this soaks up another $40ish dollars. You do the math.

Here is the list of items we got:

Vegetables:
Spaghetti squash
Zucchini
Yellow squash
Cauliflower
Broccoli
Green bell peppers
Mushrooms
Yellow onion
Leeks
Baby Carrots
Cabbage
Iceberg lettuce
Baby spinach
Celery
Cucumber
Avocados (fruit? whatever.)

Fruits:
Watermelon
Bananas
Lemons
Limes

Meats:
Whole 5 lb chicken
Two 1lb package of ground beef
1lb ground turkey
Sirloin steak
Three dozen eggs

Etc:
Water, water, and more water
Extra Light tasting olive oil
White vinegar
Ginger root
Garlic
Organic mint leaves

_

You'll notice I didn't get too much fruit or meat. The meat area was sectioned off, a LOT of meat was unavailable so I didn't get as much chicken as I wanted. Seth and I kept jokingly theorizing about an e coli outbreak. Well I was joking... Seth was honestly worried. Anyway, the Whole30 encourages fruit but at a minimum. We would have gotten more but we were already overwhelmed by our gigantic carriage of vegetables. I don't know how Seth felt but I was like a kid on Christmas day.

Behold, me in all my fat, yoga pants glory.

Which brings me to my day before the madness begins: Whole30 Eve. 

Today I got to enjoy being fat and fabulous, since I'm already hoping with all my might that I'll never have to experience this again (until pregnancy, oh joy). Instead of tuck and rolling, I got to hang out all day in public with yoga pants on, a rare sighting indeed. It was great. I felt like a crazy Walmart shopper at 3am. No offense to those that go out regularly in them, I'm just a jeans fan. That, as well as, well, I feel extraordinarily huge in sweatpants and yoga pants. So this was a special occasion. 

Now that I'm done ranting about yoga pants, let's move onto more food talk. We got home and cleaned out the rest of the fridge (old pizza, sour cream, milk... you get it.) which was liberating in itself. That's when I threw the 5lb whole chicken I purchased into the oven to prepare our chicken salad sandwiches for the next few days.

Bam.

Usually when I make a roasted chicken I make it herb crusted. But because I'm going to shred it into chicken salad, I don't want to taste thyme and rosemary. Disgusting. Anyway, I preheated the oven to 425 and patted it down with olive oil, kosher salt, pepper, and paprika, added a pinch of water to the pan, then popped it in for an hour and a half.

Voila.

I let it rest, then shredded that bad boy up and threw it into the fridge, Meanwhile, I made homemade mayo for the first time! It was super fun but ONLY because I own an electric mixer. If you don't... I'm sorry. I'm all about handmixing things when I bake, but making mayo by hand takes some serious elbow grease. You can find the recipe here. Instead of macadamia oil, I chose extra light tasting olive oil. 

I will say this: After successfully making this, I never want to buy store bought again! And that's coming from me, the mayonnaise fanatic. (We are not a Miracle Whip household.)

So after the chicken chilled, I chopped up some celery, mixed it with a pinch of lemon juice, salt, pepper, and the mayo and went to work on the chicken salad. You can use any favorite recipe, just stick with Whole30 rules and you're good to go.

This is one of the cheapest lunches ever, as well as super easy to make. The whole 5lb chicken cost $3.88. $3.88!!!!! So lunch tomorrow will be chicken salad lettuce wraps.

Miscellaneous whatevers~~

If you're freezer-dumb like I am, here's an awesome tip I got from my bestie who's also doing the Whole30 with me.

Double bag your meat.

Sounds obvious but I was always clueless as to why all of my meat that I'd take out of the packaging to repackage would immediately get freezerburnt. So this part is dedicated to the clueless folks like me.

I got this awesome ground turkey meat from Jennie-O. Gluten free, it boasted.

I'm obviously not going to eat the whole thing, so I sectioned it off into three portions and double bagged it.

More unnecessary pictures for your enjoyment.

Besides that, I made a slimming water concoction. This is a really popular drink, I've found dozens of the same recipe so I can just jot it down here. If you retain water easily like I do this drink is a plus because it's stuffed with cucumbers, a natural diuretic!

2 QT water

Whole or half cucumber depending on the size, peeled and sliced

One lemon, sliced into circles

Ten mint leaves, pinched

One tsp of grated ginger root

Throw the ingredients into a 2 QT container, pour water over, refrigerate overnight. Voila!

This concludes my Whole30 Eve.I started writing Sunday night and now it's 3am! I'm tired as heck and I need my beauty sleep for tomorrow's exciting first day, which will begin with my very first fritatta!

Night kids!