Honest Whole30 Diet Review | Doctor Mike On Diets | Wednesday Checkup

– I wanna try Whole30
myself for the next month. Hey guys, welcome to another diet review. You've seen me cover intermitting fasting, keto, well now it's time
for me to cover another incredibly popular diet. This time were taking on Whole30. Are you ready? (vocalizing) (music) Let's thank Thrive Market
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for you waiting in your inbox. All right, let's talk Whole30.

Many people call this a diet, and I feel that's like
somewhat of a misnomer. I think it should be called
the Whole30 challenge or a Whole30 reset because what it does is it eliminates certain
food groups very strictly for the first 30 days, and then allows you to
gradually reintroduce them back into your diet and see how they affect your body. There are eight hard and
fast rules that you have to follow religiously during Whole30. If you break one of
these rules and slip up, you have to restart the 30 day cycle, because as the founders
describe in their book, it's not just the reset
of the diet you eat.

It's an elimination diet
and if you reintroduce one of the foods in prematurely, that's gonna skew the results
and you won't learn as much from the 30-day period. Don't consume any added
sugars or sweeteners, artificial or otherwise. Do not consumer alcohol in any form. Do not eat grains. This includes wheat,
rye, barley, oats, corn, rice, quinoa, and buckwheat. Do not eat legumes. This includes beans of all kinds, peas, chickpeas, lentils, and peanuts. This also includes all forms of soy, soy sauce, miso, tofu, tempeh. No go on dairy. This includes cow's, goat's,
or sheep's milk products such as milk, cream, cheese,
kefir, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, and frozen yogurt.

The only exceptions are
clarified butter or ghee. No consumption of
carrageenans, sulfites, or MSG. Do not try and recreate baked
goods, treats, or junk foods with approved ingredients. You can't weigh yourself or
take measurements of any kind. This means no calorie counting as well. While there are claims of
improved athletic performance, sleep, fat loss, improved cognition, decreased food cravings, the majority of the claims
really center around the fact that you're gonna have an
improved relationship with food, that you'll have understanding of how food affects your body, what
works, what doesn't, and because of that, your ultimately gonna be a healthier person. I thought it would be
beneficial to do what I like about Whole30 and then state my concerns, and after that I'll give you an overall guidance on what I would
recommend to a patient, generally speaking if they're
sitting in front of me.

My favorite thing about Whole30 is that it absolutely makes you swear
off sugary, over processed, junk food. Now if you watch any piece of my content, this is the first piece of
advice I'd give to anybody, because if you can eliminate that alone, you're gonna see
tremendous health benefits, and if I'm gonna give
a little spoiler here, I think a lot of the benefits of Whole30 come from just eliminating that. It certainly can help
with weight loss because if your gonna go on an
elimination diet where you're you're taking foods out, especially foods that
are quite unhealthy and contribute to obesity. Odds are you're gonna be
losing weight as a result. It puts a focus on real
and whole foods because often times when were dieting, we're trying to find short
cuts and ways that we can still eat foods that are
unhealthy and over processed. This really makes you focus
and eat vegetables, plant-based foods, and that seems to
be at the core of Whole30.

I love that it takes the
focus away from weighing yourself every single day. I have to many patients
that get over zeroed in on these numbers, and forget that eating
well is not just about losing weight, but it's
also about being healthy, and if we get to focused on the numbers, we can often times neglect
other factors of our diets that can contribute
to health problems. It can increase consumer competency. What I mean is that your
gonna more away of what ingredients are found in your foods. For example, many people
don't know that sugar is found in ketchup. Therefor, ketchup is not
a Whole30 approved food. Knowing those little insights and tidbits, can go a long way even if you don't follow Whole30 for the rest of your life. It can change your eating
habits for the better by increasing your awareness
of how food integrates into your lifestyle. For example, if your
coming home every night and you're having two
glasses wine to decompress.

After doing Whole30 you
may find a different, maybe even healthier,
alternative way to decompress without needing alcohol. In addition, it highlight
how certain food choices can affect your cravings. It's that gut-brain connection
we sometimes talk about where if you eat a lot of sugary foods, it's actually gonna encourage
you to eat more of that. There's actually a great
study that I covered on my YouTube channel about
how processed foods can affect the amount of calories you take in throughout the day. That's definitely gonna be
dropped down below in my description, so check that one out. Here's my first and main
concern with Whole30, I think it puts an over-emphasis
on anecdotal evidence of people who've had
tremendous success with the Whole30 platform.

The next 30 days will change your life. They will change the way
you think about food, they will change your taste, it
will change your habits and your cravings, it will restore healthy
emotional relationships with food and with your body, the physical benefits
of Whole30 are profound, a full 96% of participants
lose weight and improve their body composition without
counting or restricting calories. Also commonly reported, consistently high energy
levels, better sleep, improved focus, mental
clarity, and a return to a healthy digestive system, improved athletic performance,
and a sunnier disposition. I know way doubt that there
were these benefits in some of the people that have done Whole30.

To make this promise
that this is gonna happen to almost everybody that does it, I don't like over-promising
results to my patients because I think that ultimately
provides them a disservice. It makes them believe that
this is the miracle cure-all thing that they've been waiting for, and in some cases it is, it may be true. Someone who has been eating
junk food their whole life, has disordered digestive
system because they've been eating this junk, this can help and this
can change their life, but to make it seem like
no matter who you are this is gonna change your life, I think it's a bit of an over-statement. As a practicing physician,
I know that patients who are suffering with diseases are really susceptible to any
kind of marketing hype that's promising them a
cure for their illness's. On the cover of this book it says, more significant, many people
have reported the magical elimination of a variety
of symptoms, diseases, and conditions in just 30 days, and they go onto list a
whole host of conditions including eczema, psoriasis,
chronic fatigue, asthma, sinus infections, allergies,
migraines, acid reflex, Crohn's, celiac, IBS,
bipolar disorder, depression, Lyme's disease, endometriosis,
PCOS, and even autism.

They don't out right
state that Whole30 is the cure for any of these conditions because then they would be in legal trouble, but the fact that they're even
conflating the possibility that Whole30 can be a
treatment for autism or a cure for autism, I think that borderline is
a little bit ridiculous and again is doing a
disservice to our patients. What I think is quite
interesting is that some of the symptoms that Whole30 aims to remove, can actually be caused by
a nutritional deficiency, and Whole30 on its own
can exacerbate some of these nutritional deficiencies. For example, imagine
I have a patient who's chronically fatigued and
having difficulty with energy levels and sleep so on so fourth, and I find that there Vitamin D deficient, that they have a very low Vitamin D level. Now, eliminating all types
of dairy will certainly exacerbate that condition, but had I not run these
tests beforehand and the patient went on Whole30
without consulting me first, think about the negative outcomes
that could have occurred.

Putting junk and processed
foods aside for a moment, the foods that you're
eliminating while on Whole30, can be problematic to some people, but for most, eliminating
them will yield no benefit and in actually some
cases can fuel nutritional deficiencies or even
exacerbate medical problems. Something else that's
problematic is that Whole30 tries very hard to be a
proper elimination diet, which is the gold standard
that doctors use trying to identify food sensitivities, but while it comes close, it's not exactly accurate. For example, if were gonna
do a restrictive diet of any sort, we would do it for 90 days because that's how long it takes for the
immune system to sort of shut down its response. On top of that, I rarely jump to saying let's eliminate everything
and see what sticks. It's kind of a shock on
approach that may work in some instances, but may
also make my patient's life so much more problematic
than it needs to be, and in their reintroduction
protocol within the book, they say to introduce foods
every two, three days, but then they go on to say
to contradict themselves, that you may have a negative
reaction a week later.

So, at that point you've
already introduced three foods. How do you know which one is
causing a negative reaction? It really becomes problematic
that this is not done in a systemic way like we
would do in a medical center, and finally I'm not a huge
fan of restrictive diets like this because generally
you they don't have long-term success rates and I fear that
there could be psychological problems that develop
when you say to yourself, you absolutely can't have a
single cookie or your a failure.

I mean, that sort of anxiety
is not good for anybody, especially those who are
prone to disordered eating. So, what's my overall take
on this Whole30 challenge? I think it's quite interesting. I think it's cool to be
able to give yourself a test of will power for thirty days. I am the main proponent
of removing junk food, processed food, increasing
whole foods in your diet, so I totally agree with Whole30 on that. However, if I have a patient
that's having some sort of symptoms that their concerned about, I wouldn't jump to giving
them a restrictive diet to figure out if it's the result of food sensitivities without
doing some testing first. So my recommendation, if your having some sort
of weird symptoms going on and you're considering Whole30, pump the brakes a little bit. Ask your doctor, talked
to a registered dietician, is this right for you, have you checked everything else that
can be contributing to your symptoms? Once you do that and you
have the all clear from a registered health professional, by all means check it out
and let me know how it goes.

Whole30 isn't for everybody
and it's not perfect, but there's some certain
core principles within Whole30 that are absolutely
ideal for everybody, and I think by following it,
learning a little bit more about our own bodies, that can actually do some good, so I'm a fan. I wanna try Whole30
myself for the next month. I'm gonna do exactly as it says, follow those eight principles, and I'm gonna vlog along
the way letting you know how my little journey is going. Are you excited? If you're excited, definitely let me know
down below in the comments. If you have any outstanding questions, ask them down below. As you know, I'm very active
in the comment section and if you want to check
out a really cool video, click right here. As always, stay happy and healthy. (music).

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