It Starts With Food by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig

My very last read of 2016 wasn't a part of my theme-reading. It was more like a "get ready for 2017" pick. I'm looking to improve my health in the new year, with a special emphasis on fixing my relationship with food. It Starts With Food, by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig outlines a program to do just that, called the Whole30. I'm going to give it a try starting January 1st, so I wanted to explore this book to get all the background information I need before getting started.

This book is part diet philosophy, part scientific information about food, and part instructional manual for the Whole30 program. It also includes some recipes and a list of resources in the back to help readers take their knowledge about the program, and about how food impacts our bodies in general, to the next level. As I'm not a particularly science-minded person, some of the technical information was a bit tricky to understand, but in general, the Whole30 program is about changing the food we eat to help our bodies function the way they were designed to. This means getting rid of food that promotes unhealthy psychological, hormonal, digestive, or inflammatory responses and eating food that truly nourishes our bodies. It's similar to Paleo diets in that it cuts out processed foods and focuses on natural, healthy choices.

The most famous part of the program (and the part that caught on like wildfire across the internet last year), is the initial 30 day nutritional reset. When first starting the program, you must complete a 30 day cycle of eating only meats, vegetables, fruits, and healthy fats. Added sugar, pasta, dairy, soy, and alcohol, among other nutritionally dubious items, are not allowed. The Hartwig's theory is that your body needs a sufficiently long enough period to reset itself and begin healing from the years of damage you've probably done to it. After the strict 30 days are over, the book outlines a plan to slowly integrate some of the previously-forbidden foods back in to see if any of them make you sick.

An additional benefit of the initial 30 day reset is that it will supposedly help break people away from sugar and carb addictions and make it easier to resist these types of food in the future. Also, there is no calorie counting required, which I think is a great. The program as a whole is meant to help promote lifelong change in a person's relationship with food. I'm really hoping that this turns out to be true when I try it, because I've struggled with sticking to a healthy eating plan for years now. In 2017, I want to try something a little more strict, and this seems to fit the bill. 

It Starts With Food promotes a very healthy eating plan and makes an intuitive sort of sense. The information presented is laid out well and is fairly easy to understand. However, I'm not 100% sure that I buy everything the Hartwigs are selling. I suspect that the benefits of this program might be a bit overstated and verge into "too good to be true" territory. For example, they claim that sticking to this program can help to reverse a ton of health ailments, including allergies, migraines, and asthma. I don't doubt that the food we eat is tied to a lot of different medical issues, but I've never heard of a diet's ability to cure something like an allergy. I'm going to have to reserve judgement on how miraculous this program really is until I've tried it for myself. I hope it really is as life-changing as the authors state!

This was an interesting read, and I'm eager to try out this program for myself. The accessible language, the scientific research, and the wealth of additional resources included in the appendix make this a great introduction for people interested in trying the Whole30. It wasn't a particularly exciting read, but it contains a lot of great information for people who want to repair their relationship with food and get healthier.