Today is Day 11 of my second Whole 30. As I dug in to my dinner this evening, I realized two things. One was that it tasted sooooo gooood. The other was that it tasted like something that I used to enjoy pre - Whole30. I could not believe how much the taste of my grass - fed ground beef in Price Chopper Sicilian Gravy with chopped black olives tasted like a Subway Meatball Marinara sub, minus the pasty white sub roll and the cheese. As I proceeded to savor the deliciousness of it all, panic set in. I started to wonder whether this newly discovered taste sensation would qualify as SWYPO, for the purposes of my Whole 30.
If I had been eating dinner by myself, I would simply have put down my fork, picked up my smartphone, and looked up an answer in the Whole 30 forum. I was not eating dinner by myself, though, I never do. My two dining companions are always right there with me, B in his high chair, and D on my lap. When you are dining with a 15 month old and a three and a half year old, you can not easily pick up your smartphone during dinner. Not only that, you can't really tell the wee folk that "Mommy just needs to check whether she just had sex with her pants on".
After the kids went to bed, I visited the Whole30 forum and the 9 Blog, in search of an answer to my question. Of course the answer was there, it always is! As I read the forum, as well as the recent blog post on this topic, I breathed a sigh of relief. It turns out that my yummy dinner was not SWYPO because it fit within the protein/fat/vegetable requirements of the Whole 30 meal template and, perhaps more importantly, it was not an attempt to paleo - ify an old favorite or support an unhealthy habit. It truly was an accident that it happened to taste sort of like a Subway sub, only much, much yummier. If I had to choose my dinner or the sub, my dinner would win every time, even though there were other veggies (carrots) on the plate to fill it up.
As for the kids, that little guy in the picture is B. He's my paleo pal. Seriously. I am pretty sure that his favorite food is either ground beef or home made breakfast sausage. He usually eats a good amount of veggies, too. Then, there's D. D did not find our dinner to be quite as delicious as I did. He ate a few carrots and decided that he was done. Of course, he asked for a bowl of oatmeal about a half hour before bed. I made it for him, despite being upset that he has developed a habit of not eating at dinner and then asking for something different right before bed. At some time in the near future, I will have to figure out what to do about that because it's driving me bonkers. I'm not sure whether it is because I'm sticking strictly to my Whole30 and trying to keep the kids as close to it as I can without food becoming a constant battleground, or what, but I'm really frustrated. I know that it's not oatmeal envy, because I don't miss oatmeal at all. Whatever it is, I am sure that I will figure it out, some way, somehow. For now, I can remind myself that giving D some grain and dairy is less important than trying to use power and control to manage his food choices.
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