[Note: I like that they call it a program. I'm not thinking about it as a diet, and I don't think the Hartwigs intend for you to. In fact, it's sort of the antithesis of a diet.  I don't really want or need to be on a diet, especially since I think the way Americans especially approach diets is, for the most part, unhealthy. But diet is the word most people can associate easily with a change in eating habits, so I've tried to come up with a good response when people ask me what diet I'm doing. I've been saying that it's less about restricting what you eat and more about trying to change your approach to food in general.]

Bets hedged as they may be, I haven’t really experienced any of the negative things some people have written about at the beginning of the program. I had a very, very mild headache at the end of each of the first two days, but I’ve had no upset stomach and honestly no particularly strong cravings. Yesterday was the first day I even thought about wanting a Diet Coke.

That said, I have yet to experience anything particularly positive either. In fact, the more I read about the Whole30 in It Starts with Food, the more antagonistic I felt toward it, and at this point in the program, I’m feeling mostly ambivalent. I honestly didn’t buy a lot of the science they put forth in the book that was supposed to convince me not to eat things like legumes and dairy. And after some time on the program I’ve developed a few other criticisms.

The authors claim that food should be enjoyable. But the very nature of this program makes it not so! For the one thing, for the first 5 days of the program, I felt like all I was doing was thinking about food, cooking, and cleaning the kitchen. Normally Andy eats breakfast at work, but his meal would normally be oatmeal or granola with yogurt, so in order to replace that, I’ve been needing to provide breakfast, lunch, AND dinner options, which is new. So I felt like every time I turned around the kitchen was dirty again! Since I had more time to plan, this week has been much better so far, but it definitely takes a lot of work.

Secondly, this program makes socializing hard. (And I know the authors say, “this is not hard. Quitting heroin is hard. Beating cancer is hard. [...] Drinking your coffee black Is. Not. Hard.” I get that. But the Whole30 is, without a doubt, difficult some days!) I hate being “that girl” at restaurants or parties, having to ask what is in everything. We’ve managed a few outings since starting it: one featured a barbecue buffet, so we just left off the sauce, and one was for brunch, so Andy got eggs and breakfast meats and I got a salad. Last night my church community group had a cookout, and I know for a fact there was some honey in the sauce on a sweet potato I ate, but I decided to let it slide. I can only do so much.

On the flip side, among these outings I have passed up macaroni and cheese, chocolate cake, sushi at a work lunch, cake again at work, and various goodies at the cookout, and I have to admit that it feels pretty good to use that willpower muscle.

The other issue I take with the presentation of the Whole30 plan is their discouragement of eating snacks. They suggest that you eat enough lean protein and good fat at each meal so that you are not hungry until the next meal–and in fact, so that if you for some odd reason have to skip your next meal, you would be okay. They say, “Avoid snacking between meals because it turns your eating habits into grazing, and grazing can disrupt the normal functioning of leptin, insulin, and glucagon, and may promote inadvertent overconsumption.” Okay. But as one who has always struggled with blood sugar fluctuations, I have lately quite successfully structured my days around 3 meals and 2 snacks. I eat specifically portioned snacks, and I don’t graze except for on occasion. When I sit down to eat my snack, I eat my snack and that’s it. I normally eat some nuts or a granola bar a few hours between lunch and breakfast, and some sort of fruit or veggie between lunch and dinner, and I don’t see what’s so bad about that! For the sake of the program I’m giving it a try; I’ve actually started being able to make it from breakfast to lunch, but after lunch I get raging hungry around 5:00, still a few hours before we’ll be eating dinner. I can feel grossly stuffed at lunch and still get hungry like that–and I don’t think they would promote “grossly stuffed!” I just hate that this program that is supposed to promote healthy eating has made me feel guilty about one of my eating habits for the first time in my life.

So what are the positives? I’ve discovered some delicious new recipes that I think I’ll keep in my repertoire. I’ve been able to flex my meal-planning muscle and practice using willpower. And I get to think about what specific foods might be “worth it” to incorporate back in later. I’m glad the authors remind us that ”the Whole30 is just a springboard into a lifetime of healthy eating habits. We don’t exepect (or want) you to stay on the program forever, or eat according to our rules all the time! Think of the Whole30 as a tool, allowing you to build new, sustainable habits that will be with you for the rest of your life.”

That’s what’s getting me through so far, since I haven’t had any “magic” to report, but I’ll let you know if anything changes!

I’m linking up to Works for Me Wednesday at WeAreThatFamily.com!

As I made my way into the book, I found myself really into it! I was invested in the characters and intrigued by the plot. It was unique and the characters seemed like people I might encounter in real life at some point. I talked to my mom on the phone and expressed that I was surprised she hadn’t enjoyed the book more.

But then I got to the end, and I understood. It wasn’t that it was bad. I can’t even pinpoint exactly what I didn’t love about the ending. But the book in sum total was not as enjoyable to me as the middle.

And I thought, what a metaphor for life.

I often find that I’m living in anticipation of the next thing. I’m planning for a trip, or wondering what my career might look like, or thinking about what’s for dinner next Tuesday. None of that is bad: I wouldn’t be who I am if I weren’t a planner, and Andy and I wouldn’t eat such good meals if I didn’t think about them in advance. But by letting myself be preoccupied with what’s coming, maybe I miss some of what’s happening. By constantly looking to the end, maybe I miss the enjoyment of the middle.

So I’m taking my experience with the book to heart. I can love the middle, and it doesn’t matter what the end looks like. If I get to the end and it’s not that great, it doesn’t cheapen my experience of joy in the middle.

Just live in the middle, and love it.

Sometimes making a decision like that makes me feel like an adult. “I’m an adult and I’m going to stay up until midnight watching Veronica Mars because I can and no one can tell me not to!!” And then sometimes it just makes me feel like crap.

I know it’s important to give yourself grace. But I also think it’s important not to give yourself too much. Especially as a type-A personality, I need to have standards for myself. Holding myself to certain standards is, I’d say, a large part of what has made me successful at the things I’ve been successful at in my life. My parents were never super hard on me about grades because they knew I was hard enough on myself, and in fact I made mostly A’s for my entire school career.

I believe that I am capable of a lot and I strive for near-perfection in most things. I am perhaps more disappointed in myself over perceived failures than others because I believe I can be better (even over silly things like giving in to eating a cookie in the kitchen at work). But there’s gotta be a line somewhere between beating myself up and being grumpy over mess-ups while still not sabotaging myself on a Sunday night when I’m lured in by the computer.

How do you handle “keeping yourself in line?” Do you struggle with standards, whether realistic or not?

I’ve been surprised by the reaction of “lay” people (read: non-developers) when they find out that I am learning to code. I guess by being around so many smart programmers I’ve become inoculated to the foreignness that many people associate with computers. Plus, I’ve realized that I’ve picked up more than I knew from just asking Andy about what he worked on each day and from overhearing him practice conference talks. AND, I think I also retained some fundamentals from my two computer science classes in college. So every time someone new finds out that I’m learning Ruby, they’re astonished and impressed and it sort of makes me feel like a bad ass.

Honestly, I am definitely far from an awesome programmer at this point. As Andy would say, even experienced developers always have things they can learn, and I have even more than that. I’m still sort of learning how to even learn, if that makes any sense. I have access to the documentation of the Ruby language, and even that doesn’t always make sense to me. But as I hoped, learning to code has given Andy and me a great outlet for spending time together. He thrives on teaching me things and is even prouder of me than I am of myself when I catch on to something. I sometimes feel a bit like I am cheating because by the time I share my homework at the Rails Girls meetup I have already had help refining it (or maybe even approaching it in the first place)!

The homework assignments for Rails Girls have been escalating in difficulty and becoming more and more like real-world problems a developer-by-trade might actually face. This past Saturday, Andy and I began tackling the most recent assignment: an open-ended task of creating a to-do list in Ruby, which will eventually be translated into a Rails app (meaning something that can actually be on the internet!).

Working on this one project alone has introduced me to numerous topics, which was exciting! Until now, I’ve just been writing Ruby code to run in my command line, but with this project I started interacting with RSpec (a testing framework useful for Test Driven Development), using git to start pushing my work to GitHub (sort of social networking for code), and reading up on a lot of new Ruby concepts. Whew! By myself this would have been totally overwhelming, and I have unending respect for the people who can take a book or a website and learn on their own. But together with Andy, it was a blast! I think my next challenge will be getting over bumps in the road without turning to him for a hint or explanation, but I’ll either get there in time or I won’t. And if I never get there, I’ve still learned a lot and achieved a long-standing goal of having a shared hobby with my husband!

If you’re interested in seeing what Ruby looks like, or exploring code for the first time, TryRuby.org is a fun resource. It allows you to type simple commands right in the web browser and see them run immediately. And if you’re feeling a little more adventurous, I learned a lot from Learn Ruby the Hard Way and from solving Project Euler problems using Ruby.

Enter the Whole 30.

I’ve heard about this plan for awhile. I like that it doesn’t bill itself as a “diet.” Instead, its creators really want to help you change your mindset about food, and I think I’m ready for that. The caramel popcorn incident sent me over the edge.

The gist of the Whole 30 is that you eat whole foods for 30 days. It cuts out some elements that I’ve always thought were “healthy,” like all legumes and dairy, but it also cuts out the usual suspects: all added sugar and “sugar,” alcohol, grains, white potatoes. The authors say, “Eat foods with very few ingredients, all pronounceable ingredients, or better yet, no ingredients listed at all because they’re totally natural and unprocessed.”

I eat pretty healthy, and I am pretty active, but I think it’s easy to use moderation as a crutch. You know, a lot of times magazines and whatnot give the advice to “just take the stairs” and it’ll make a difference, but Jillian Michaels, fitness guru extraordinaire, says “That is a false method of lethargy that isn’t doing you any favors. You ARE capable of working out. You’re capable of working out HARD.” I’m sort of feeling that about my diet lately.

I also listened to a podcast recently featuring Stanford professor BJ Fogg and his premise that in order to enact personal change, you need to make the change so small that it doesn’t take any willpower. For example, he started doing one pushup every time he went to the bathroom. And eventually, he started doing more. And then pushups weren’t hard anymore, so he started doing them other times as well. He’s currently working on putting his socks on inside out, just as a means of being in control of his behaviors. And something about that appealed to me: being so conscious of yourself that you’re trying to change a random behavior just because you can.

So given all of that, it’s a perfect storm that’s making me want to try to Whole 30. I want to see what I feel like if I’m eating that way, and I want to change my behaviors just as an experiment.

I’m sort of dithering, which is exactly what the authors say not to do, but I’m planning to start at the beginning of a month, because for my obsessive compulsive self that just seems right. (Plus, I want to read the book ahead of time and really give the psychological side its due weight.) However, I realized there was no reason I couldn’t start making some of the suggested changes in the meantime! Two areas where I’m trying to break my patterns of thinking are in what constitutes a “meal” and in what a snack looks like. Somehow I’ve gotten it in my head that a meal includes a meat, a starch, and a veggie. (I also cook a fair amount of casseroles, but that’s a whole other post…) But who’s to say you can’t have 2 veggies instead of the starch?! And as far as snacks go, I often envision pretzels or a granola bar. But why can’t my snack be a hard-boiled egg?! So I’m playing with these mental shifts even though I haven’t fully dived into the Whole 30.

I’m trying in the build up to put more “whole food” recipe blogs in my line of vision. I don’t keep potato chips in the house and I mostly don’t miss them, so I’m applying a similar principle to what I consume on the internet. I’ll probably be excited about whatever is in front of me, so I can let it be caramel popcorn or I can try and let it be healthier fare. Most of the recipes I’ve looked at so far have looked delicious and honestly no more difficult than what I currently cook, and the array of snacks I can think about having on hand is exciting! I think that cheese will be the hardest for me to give up, because I’ve always thought of it as a pretty healthy, proteinatious snack option.

I’ve never done any sort of diet in my life EVER, so this feels like a really big deal to me. But I’m trying to be really careful not to think of it as a weight-loss strategy. I really want to change how I think about food. I get a little panicky thinking that I might love it and I might never eat a chocolate bar again, but I will just have to cross that bridge if I come to it. I’ll keep you posted once I get started as I find recipes I like, and I’ll report back about how I’m feeling.

Do you have a favorite diet plan or approach to food? Have you ever tackled a big behavorial change like this?

I have my grandmother’s pearls.

I grew up in the South with non-Southern parents, but a lot of Southern girl mannerisms made their way into my psyche regardless, and when I was in high school I decided I needed a strand of pearls. I didn’t get them for high school graduation as I had hoped, but one of the last times I visited my grandmother in college, she told us each we could begin picking things of hers that we wanted. And in what I had always thought of as her treasure trove of jewelry, we found a hopelessly tangled strand of pearls, and I laid claim to them. Southern pearls from my Yankee grandmother.

My mom took them and had a jeweler untangle and re-string them, but for whatever reason, my grandmother was adamant that I not have them before my college graduation. She made it to my wedding but not my commencement a month later, and it felt like a great ceremony when I got to put on her pearls that morning.

I was unfortunately never very close to my grandmother, who also happens to be my namesake. She lived in Connecticut and I in Mississippi, and there’s only so much of a childhood you can share that way. I always liked her, but she wasn’t a part of my daily life as so many of my friends’ grandmothers were. I was always sort of jealous of that. But I have my grandmother’s pearls, and that feels monumental to me. I think of her when I wear them, the things I never knew about her. Now that I’m an adult, I think I would have gotten to know her better. I would have enjoyed asking questions about her life and her experiences. She was a pretty cool lady, from what I gather. But instead I have her pearls.

I bought a t-shirt that has irregular cream-colored polka dots on it, and one day I felt inspired to wear my pearls with it. I had on jeans and flip flops and my grandmother’s pearls, and my coworker expressed that she should wear her pearls more often. You should, too. Because when you wear your grandmother’s pearls on a regular Tuesday, that regular Tuesday is better.

Here’s what I’m looking to add to my wardrobe:

• flare/bootcut jeans for everyday wear with sneakers
• straight, slim jeans to wear with flats
• slim black pants to wear with flats
• grey dress pants to wear with heels

• lace top
• top with fun sleeves
• sailor shirt with button details
• wrap or faux-wrap top
• white t-shirt(s), white camisoles

• black cotton cardigan
• grey cotton cardigan
• flowy grey open cardigan
• bright long cardigan with pockets

• grey sheath dress
• navy blousy dress with polka dots

• flowy skirt with high, wide waistband
• black skirt
• grey skirt

It looks like a lot when I type it all out! (I’ll likely ending up getting rid of a few more things as I purchase new stuff–some of my less favorite pairs of jeans, for example.) But what I’ve been gleaning from Audrey at Putting MeTogether is that you want to have options so that your wardrobe is “remixable.” That’s where I’m really struggling. I have a pretty good sense of what I like, what I feel comfortable in, and what works well on my body, but I’m not good at putting together “outfits.” So I’m hoping if I have some versatile pieces I’ll be able to begin playing with that.

My list is also sort of all over the place. Some of the items are really specific, and I can almost picture them in my head (which will likely make them impossible to shop for), while others are much more vague. A “lace top” could be just about anything. I also struggled with nailing down a color palette (though I lean toward the blue/green side of the spectrum for sure). I really find I just like all the colors! I am drawn to brights and it’s hard for me to envision turning down a shirt I love just because it’s not in my color scheme. So I’m not sure if I’ll stick to one or not. I did pick black and grey as my neutrals, though, which was mostly pragmatic. Audrey encourages branching out as far as what you consider a neutral, but honestly most of my nice shoes are black and just about all of my jackets, so I didn’t want to completely start over with that. I’ll likely throw some tans and nudes in the mix as well. I guess once I got down to it I was much more noncommittal than I initially intended to be! The main thing I’m trying to keep in mind is my goal of looking more polished. I think as long as that inspires my pieces I’ll be good to go.

I’m having a hard time envisioning shoes, as well. It seems like every time I picture an outfit I’m also picturing a specific style of shoe with it, but it’s just not practical to have that many pairs of shoes! Comfort is really important to me shoe-wise, so I’m a bit picky. I haven’t figured out yet how to address this situation.

I’ve tried to look online for some of these things to at least have inspiration pictures, but I honestly don’t seem to have an eye for that. If you have any suggestions based on my list I’d love to see them! And I’ll definitely try to report back with pictures as I purchase items.

Where are your favorite places to shop for good quality, versatile clothing items? Do you put much thought into what you wear?

That shouldn’t be an inherently revolutionary statement, but for the last few weeks my body has been rebelling against me. Every night I would look forward to that delicious moment when my head hit the pillow. I would ease under the covers and sigh a little sigh as I relaxed. And then, the laying there would begin.

I always start out trying to sleep on my right side, my left arm hugging a pillow and my right hand tucked under my face. I’ve slept the same way since I was a baby; there are pictures of me in my crib lying just like that, though the pillow was replaced with a bright pink cloth doll (who, by the way, is now rather gray, but still lives in my bedroom, along with her similarly-gray sister doll, not to be confused with a sister wife). I’m rather skilled at scrunching the pillow into just the right position to support my neck, except on the nights I am not, which recently has been every night. My neck and shoulders get tense.

So I flop over onto my left side, but I can never seem to figure out what to do with my right arm when it’s not the one supporting my head. So I flop onto my back, scrunch the pillow up and tuck another one under my knees, which they say you’re supposed to do to support your lower back. I feel like I am dozing off until all of a sudden, I am not. I get up and go to the bathroom. I come back and start the charade over on my right side again. An hour has passed.

Some nights I go out to the couch, and miraculously I am almost always able to fall asleep. Something about being squished against the straight back of the couch makes me feel comfortable enough to finally drop off. Many nights I wake back up in the early hours of the morning and try to go back to bed, but Andy has (understandably) moved to the middle, so I resign myself back to the couch. The alarm goes off and I groggily stumble into the shower. Or I make it through the night in my own bed, with hopes of getting up to go to the gym, but the alarm goes off and I can barely move.

I’ve been off my routine, and I am a creature of habit who needs her routine. Not being able to sleep is so dreadfully frustrating to me. One night in my insomniacial stupor I laid on the couch and cried. Other nights I punch the pillow. “I just want to sleep,” I shriek in my head. Every night, I would think, “This is the night. This is the night that I’ll fall right asleep and sleep well.” I never fell into the trap of worrying about not being able to sleep and thus not being able to sleep. In fact, I felt like I did everything right. I didn’t drink caffeine after lunch time. I started winding down well before I wanted to go to sleep, and if I read, I read in the dark with only a book light. I don’t watch TV too close to bedtime, and I rarely take my phone or computer into the bedroom. I took melatonin an hour or so before I wanted to drift off (or I took it at 1 in the morning after unsuccessfully trying to sleep for 2 hours). And yet, every night, the rotisserie of trying to get comfortable in my own bed, the bed for which I yearn when I am on vacation, the pillow that called to me as I wearily stumbled through my days, usurped my hope.

I had a phase like this in college as well and even went to the doctor about it. She, probably rightfully, was wary of prescribing me a sleeping pill. Normally when I can’t sleep, though, I can pinpoint something that is stressing me out. In fact, insomnia is usually my first sign that I’m under duress, my body cluing me into what my mind has not even figured out yet. But the most frustrating lately has been that I really don’t think I’ve been stressed, at least not for as long as the sleeplessness has been plaguing me.

So I caved last week and bought a supplement that a friend recommended. It has like every herb and hormone that I’ve ever heard of that promotes sleep, all wrapped up in one little pellet. And it was beautiful. It was worth every penny. I slept! I even made it to the gym one morning! And last night, sans pill, I fell asleep. And I got up this morning to go to the gym for the first time in quite awhile (I’ve been forced to transition to going in the afternoon, when I’ve gone at all, because of my lack of sleep). I have plenty of pills left, but my hope in buying them was just to break the cycle: to sleep normally enough a few nights that my body remembered how blissful it feels, how productive I can be when I’m rested. I’ll knock on wood as I type this, but for now I think it’s worked. Because last night, I went to sleep.

Do you struggle to sleep? How do you deal with insomnia?

A common theme I’m finding with Bethany House books is that they all have beautiful covers: striking photographs, a silky-smooth feel, and a satisfying shape and weight. I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but a nice cover sure does enhance my reading experience!

The book centers on Mallory, a successful and upwardly ambitious Congressional staffer who’s living up the single life in D.C. until she’s swept off her feet by a striking stranger. They enter into a whirlwind relationship and when he’s offered a seemingly top-notch job with an eccentric, wealthy researcher in Texas, she takes the plunge and marries him, becoming a step-mom to his toddler son and finding herself at loose ends getting used to small town life.

From the description on the back of the book, I expected this to be a pretty straightforward sweet romance, with some cutesy Southernisms thrown in as she acclimated to Texas. I somehow didn’t catch onto the fact that it was a mystery and somewhat of a page-turner!

Since I knew it was going to be a romance, I was okay with accepting the speedy transition from single girl to wife and mother. Daniel, the husband, was not a fully fleshed out character, but he was appealing enough to make the romance believable. I couldn’t quite believe his son Nick, though, and was really bothered by the way the author chose to transcribe his “kid speak.” It was distracting and not even that realistic to me. Other than that, their family unit was sweet and satisfying to follow.

It was fun to “get to know” the characters who inhabited Mallory’s small-town Texas, but I ended up feeling like I’d been left hanging by the way the conclusion came together. I’ll try not to give anything away, but it seemed to me like Wingate abandoned the mystery right at its climax and switched to explanatory prose in an epilogue, rather than continuing to let the reader follow along with the action. That was annoying to me. I felt like there was history with Mallory’s family and some of the other characters that was similarly brushed aside in favor of wrapping up the story, but I’m sure there’s a fine line between writing a book that reads well and writing a thousand page tome that no one will buy.

Another fun element was that Mallory becomes a blogger as she’s trying to find ways to fill her time. While her astronomical overnight success felt a bit unrealistic to me as a fellow blogger, I guess it could happen, and I was a little jealous of it!

While this was an enjoyable enough read, I found some of the plot structures to be a bit tenuous. It was as if Wingate wanted to write a book about legislation and so she had to find ways to fit that in, and it didn’t necessarily work for me. I can’t say that this book will have any sort of lasting impact on me.

Normally my response to  clothes slump would be to go out thrifting and just buy some things that make me happy, but I’ve been reading a blog called Putting Me Together that’s inspired me to put a bit more thought into what I bring into my closet. I’ve never really been into fashion, and in fact am sort of turned off by most fashion magazines and blogs because the clothes are over-the-top and expensive and I could never envision myself wearing them. But Audrey at Putting Me Together shops at Target and is all about finding clothes to fit your lifestyle…amen! In fact, she’s done a series lately called “Wardrobe from Scratch” that I’m hoping to try to follow, and I’ll report back here as I go!

I started with a ruthless purge of my closet on Saturday that filled one big trash bag and several regular plastic grocery bags with clothes. If my initial reaction was that I didn’t love it, it went in the bag. I’m planning to get the bags out as soon as I can so I’m not tempted to second guess myself! Some things I’m taking straight to the thrift store, but I’m going to try to sell some at Plato’s Closet in order to help fund step 2 of my wardrobe venture. Some of the clothes are fine but I’ve just had them for so long that I decided I could let go of them.

Though my lifestyle is fairly casual, I’ve decided I want to feel more polished, so that’s the word that’s going to inspire my wardrobe revision.

My next goal is to give some thought to Audrey’s color palette and then to use her Starter Kit Shopping List to make a fairly specific list of things to shop for. I’m hoping to take a trip to one of the outlet malls near Atlanta to try and get high-quality items, because I think that really is worth it. I’m already working on reminding myself that I might go shopping and not find anything, but that not being intentional about shopping is what got me here in the first place. If it’s not on my list, I won’t be allowed to buy it! It’s a little overwhelming to think about, but I think it’ll be worth it to invest a good chunk of time and money into making sure I have great clothes in which I feel great about myself.

How do you approach shopping? Have you successfully overhauled your wardrobe at any point?