the end of [round two]

If there is anyone still left reading this, I'm sure you're wondering where the last five days or so of food logs went.
The short answer is that my whole30 turned into a whole25.
You can judge and shake your head and leave it there, if you'd like. However, if you want to moral of the whole thing, feel free to stay awhile.

Friday was Day 25.
We went into London to meet up with a dear friend of Hubs who was one of the groomsmen in our wedding. He had come to London on a business trip and changed his flight to stay an extra day just to hang out with us. So, so cool.
Now, I have my list of "go-to" places when I'm in London, and I am not for one second making excuses for myself when I tell you what I am about to tell you. What I am saying is that I am learning about balance and priorities.
We had Jameson with us for the day, and by the time he'd finished napping in said friend's hotel room, and we got ourselves out into the city, it was already late afternoon. None of us had really had anything much to eat since breakfast and we were walking everywhere and it was COLD.
Jameson was miserable, I was miserable, everyone was miserable.
Plans were to head to the Aquarium and find a place to eat around there--except that none of my "approved" places were really in the vicinity. So, by the time we got to Westminster and bought Aquarium tickets, it was 3:30, Jameson was screaming from frozen fingers and an empty belly and I realized that it would do more harm than good to drag everyone to a tube station just so I could order plain chicken and a salad. Which means that we walked into a pub, and I ordered a hamburger (an effort to find the thing best option) which ended up being one of those frozen-patties-of-something-awful, and I broke a whole30 on craptastic food.

But you know what?

I don't feel bad about it.

I'd spent the last three weeks controlling, controlling, controlling EVERYTHING that went into my mouth--giving myself anxiety about too many carbs, eating too late at night, should I snack on fruit, is my body still burning fat, etc. But when it came time to decide between myself and my family, there wasn't a choice. I had this brainwave of realization that there has to be an element of balance to everything we do. It was more important to get Jameson out of the cold and some sort of food into him than it was to stick to my rigid principles "just because". So I made a conscious choice to eat off-plan, and I was absolutely fine with it.
Was I sad? Yeah, a little, because I don't like not-finishing things.
But did I regret it? Nope. And that was kind of surprising.

If I'm honest, my one big concern was how everyone else was going to take it.
I'd gotten so many people on this Whole30 wagon that I didn't want to "fail" and have them all look at me and say, "Well, if she does it, we might as well do it too."
But part of this balance is realizing that I am not responsible for anyone else and their experience with this. It is not my job to worry and obsess over other people and their diet. Should I answer questions and be supportive and encouraging?
Yes. Absolutely.
Do I need to lie in bed at night, heart-pounding, and adrenaline rushing as I think about how this bad experience they're having is somehow my fault and I need to find a way to fix it?
No. No way.

I feel like it's also important to note that this was my second whole30--I've done this before, whole hog, for 30 days completely. So that also contributed to my "okay-ness" with cutting it short. I already know (because I finished the first one and did the reintroduction) that I don't handle dairy or gluten well, that grains leave me massively bloated, and that I have a sugar dragon bigger than Smaug if I'm not careful. So I wasn't losing out on that part of the experience--learning what is and isn't okay for my body, because I'd had that already.

This was a hard round, you guys. I came into it expecting so much more victory than I felt like I got.
But maybe that was the point.
It's possible to take a good thing and make it a less-good thing by obsessing and worrying over it so much, that it then becomes a monster eating up your life rather than something to complement and enhance your life.
I need balance.
I need to remember that making a less-healthy food choice does not make me a bad person or a failure.
I need to remember that there is no ideal for my body--because it's mine, and I'm the only one that really knows what healthy feels like inside of it.
I need to remember that everything is a choice and I can choose whatever I want--more healthy or less healthy--and be okay with those choices.
I need to be okay with the fact that sometimes I'm going to order a pizza and drink a soda and eat some really good ice cream because my husband had his wisdom teeth out that afternoon and I need to take a break from overthinking everything (read: what I did last night).
I need to be okay with then eating fairly strict Paleo after that and knowing that it's not because I made a less-healthy choice the night before, but because I know that it's going to make me feel better than that pizza did.

So, there's a lot here.
I'm still working through it all and processing.
I'm learning how to live in the tension between too-much and not-enough.
Sadly, I'm pretty sure that it's something I'm going to have to live in for the rest of my life. But the good news is that I've done it, I know I can do it, and I want to do it--more than I want to self-medicate with pie--and that is the important part.

Talk to me.
How was your whole30? If you haven't tried it--will you? If you have--are you done with the "paleo" bandwagon forever?