BY JENNIFER BABISAK
MELISSA HARTWIG WANTS dieters to
rethink everything about their relationship with food. “Completely abandon the
traditional mentality of dieting,” the certified sports nutritionist says. In her new
books, The Whole;; Cookbook and Food
Freedom Forever, she encourages readers
to reject calorie counting, rebounding,
guilt and shame. She also delves into the
psychology of creating lasting changes in
both the physical and emotional aspects
of eating.
Hartwig’s Whole;; program advocates a strict ;;-day period of eating
unprocessed meats, fruits and vegetables
while eschewing grains, legumes, dairy,
alcohol and all forms of sugar. The program differs from the similar Paleo
approach to eating, in that it does not
allow baked goods made from grain substitutes like almond flour.
After ;; days of abstaining from the
banned food items, Hartwig, a Costco
member, encourages readers to slowly
reintroduce foods and evaluate how they
feel after eating each type of food. She
advises them to use this new information
in their budding relationship with “food
freedom,” developing healthy but unre-
stricted long-term eating habits that allow
for occasional indulgences in individually
defined “worth it” foods.
Cleaning up her plate
When Hartwig first tried the concept
of a ;;-day dietary reset on herself, in
;;;;, she was already lean and healthy—
she simply wanted to improve her athletic
performance. She blogged about the
results of that initial fast from potentially
inflammatory foods, readers embraced
the idea with enthusiasm and a Whole;;
community that now counts more than ;.;
million website (whole;;.com) visitors a
month was born.
Hartwig describes her first ;;-day
dietary reset as a “profound experience”
in which she realized that the physical
implications of eating unhealthy foods
weren’t as important as the psychological
impact of relying on them. As a recovering drug addict who has been clean for ;;
Fasting food
years, Hartwig saw parallels in the addict-
ing aspects of food. “People feel out of
control and addicted to food,” she says. “I
started to listen to people’s stories and
found there’s so much guilt and shame.”
Hartwig is notorious for a no-excuses
mentality, unapologetically asserting that
anyone is capable of adhering to the rigid
Whole;; program for a month. But she
hopes that the new books will promote
long-term dietary change that some read-
ers have previously struggled to achieve.
“For some people, it was hard to take a
FOR YOUR TABLE
Recipes and photos excerpted from The Whole30 Cookbook
© 2016 by Melissa Hartwig. Reproduced by permission of
Houghton Mi;in Harcourt. All rights reserved.
New thinking about what we eat
