Hey guys! Happy post-thanksgiving!

I missed you, but I was busy doing family things and spending quality time trying to pump into my kid’s brain that I, ONLY ME, am her mother, not the daycare ladies who are probably nicer and funnier and know more stupid baby songs, whatever. They can’t compete with those 9 months of just her and I hanging out and eating egg rolls for breakfast. Special times.

Before we dive back into the gripping conclusion of my journey through the uncharted territory that was Whole30, I have a couple housekeeping things to get out of the way.

First, it has been brought to my attention by someone who may have my same last name and pay half my mortgage that my swearing has not, as promised, been kept in check. I apologize and need to do a better job if for no other reason than I don’t want my kid picking up my bad habits and telling the sweet sweet daycare ladies to “fuck off” when she’s asked to pick up her toys.

SO rule three back from blog post numero uno is now very much back in play and I will do my darndest (see, SEE what I’m doing?) to find alternative words for those four letter suckers that have taken up permanent residence in my vocabulary. In “real” life I’ve been trying to utilize the phrase “holy bananas” a lot more and I gotta say, it’s growing on me much like the long yellow fruit does on the tree… or vine or whatever they do. Sprout? Who TF knows. Ahh, and yes as you see, I’m going to use acronyms wherever possible to skirt around rule three because well, I hate it.

Second, a couple people (yes a solid TWO) asked me how they can get notified about when a new blog is posted and I figured if two asked, hell there has to be AT LEAST another two who haven’t, but are interested. So I’ve included a handy screenshot for how you subscribe via mobile. If you hit that little follow button at the bottom right it will prompt you for an email address and then you’ll get an email whenever I post a new blog.

THAT IS THE ONLY TIME you will get emailed. I’m not going to subscribe you to CatFacts™ or fill your inbox with emails about the sale I’m having on oddly patterned mom leggings. Nope! You’ll just get an email about new blog posts when they happen because that’s how I roll. And also because I have no idea how to even access the emails, so there’s that. If you unsubscribe at any point I probably won’t know that either, so rest assured if I stop liking your Instagram things or start giving you likes instead of loves on FB, it’s probably because your stuff has gotten lame and not unsubscribe related. Do better.

Oh and if you’re reading my blog on a desktop I don’t know where the subscribe button is, sorry. You lose.

NOW ON TO THE BLOG!!! because I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to be finished with this topic and move on to some more timely (and juicy) holiday stuff. So much juice.

Now where were we??? Themes, yes. I’m gonna go ahead and combine 3 and 4 because four was really just an arbitrary number that I came up with when I could remember the month of October more clearly. It’s kind of a blur now, so let’s skip to the end. All in agreement? Bully!

3 & 4. The Aftermath and Takeaways
Whole30 came to a conclusion for us at midnight on October 30th. The next day was Halloween and Dave and I had both taken the day off from work bc we wanted to be home to take the kid trick or treating while it was still light out so she didn’t get eaten by a coyote, but having the day off also meant we could choose our own adventure to bust out of Whole30 in a blaze of glory.

We chose The Cheesecake Factory.

For those of you who don’t know, I have a long complicated history with the Cheesecake Factory. I worked there for a while in college and was subsequently fired from there when I told a customer that bread doesn’t just “jump in the basket on its own” after she accused me of daring to graze the side of her sourdough with my hand.

After that fateful day, I desperately wanted to hate the castle of cake made from cheese and tried to stay away. I padded my days with Red Lobster and The Olive Garden hoping to fill the mediocre restaurant chain-sized hole in my heart, but it was useless. The Factory beckoned and after a short boycott period, I went home. The CF doesn’t judge and soon it was as if I’d never left. We were joined together once again and broke bread over family style portions for one from the Encyclopedia Britannica of menus.

I get made fun of a lot for this CF obsession and there are only two people in my life who understand the very essence of what makes it so great and I happened to marry one of them. So it made perfect sense to dive back into the world of sugar and carbs in a place that felt like the building equivalent of a warm hug topped with whip cream.

So it was.

Whole30 ended with a diet coke and little slice of heaven that was shaped like a triangle and tasted like red velvet with cheese made from cream. It was the taste equivalent of that moment when you wake up in a panic thinking it’s Monday, but then realize it’s MotherEffin’ Sunday and you ease back into your dreams with the covers pulled snug and tight.

THAT. It tasted like that.

Because I wanted to see if Whole30 had actually done anything other than make me hate every human eating a slice of bread, on Halloween morning I took what the diet folks like to call “progress pics,” which consisted of me taking photos in front of a full length mirror wearing nothing but mismatched bra and undies. I won’t post those here because I don’t think we’re all at that stage in our relationship yet, but I can say after the final weigh-in I discovered I’d lost a total of 6lbs in the month of October.

Now I know that seems like next to nothing. What’s six pounds? That’s like an average sized avocado or a really big grape, BUT my quest began 3 months prior to October with a plan to lose 15lbs and I saw ZERO progress for those three months, so needless to say it was a pretty big freakin’ deal to me.

Dave didn’t weigh himself before or after, but it’s safe to say he looked good before and even gooder after.

Our cat Poe, who’s a notorious food beggar because someone, not gonna name names, might have started sharing her bowls of soup with him at a young age, was pretty amped about the protein palooza going on at the Breh house all throughout October and definitely got his fair share of nibbles. He didn’t do a before/after weigh-in either, so the jury is still out on Whole30’s effect on cats, but rest assured it will be confirmed whenever that time of year comes around when we remember cats need to go to the vet to avoid an Old Yeller situation.

After our victory lunch and the powdered sugar dust settled, I thought long and hard about what I planned to take with me from Whole30 and keep incorporated into my daily diet. The weekday meals with Dave are going to stay because I like looking at him and sometimes he says something cool. I’m also sticking about as low carb as possible because as much as I wanted to believe the type of calorie doesn’t matter and it’s all calories in, calories out, it does. It freaking does. Or at least it does for ME at this stage in my life as evidenced by the 30-day experiment. There’s just no denying at this point that carbs are the delicious devil that kept me out of size 4 jeans for too many months post baby.

So it is.

However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t moterboat the hell out of my sister-in-law’s stuffing on Thanksgiving. There are some things and some occasions I won’t compromise. That list includes birthday cake (I don’t care who’s birthday it is, any old bullshit relative I see once a year or co-worker I mildly despise will do, I don’t discriminate) all holiday meals (OBVI!) and whip cream mainlined straight from the can – the way God intended.

The things I WON’T be taking with me from Whole30 include:

1. Using Ghee for anything. Ghee is non-dairy overpriced butter goo and it sucks. That’s all you need to know. Don’t even google it. I refuse to grant Ghee any more power than it already has. Get off the earth, Ghee. Nobody likes you.

2. Attempting to cook anything thicker than a toothpick on the stove – my GOD the number of times I cut into things after cooking them for what felt like an eternity only to see that pink flesh staring back at me in all its mocking glory was infuriating. Fuck the stove. Yes, I said it.

3. Cutting out dairy. Guys, cheese is awesome and an invention that should be celebrated in all its many forms. Unless you have an allergy, if you don’t support cheese, I’m sorry we just can’t hang out.

That brings me to the end of all I have to say about Whole30. Will I ever do it again? Eh. I feel like it’s one of those things you have to do just to say you did it and then move on with your life. However I said the same thing about running a marathon and we all know how that story went (if you don’t: spoiler alert, I was training for my second full marathon when I got pregnant and the kid ruined everything, but it will happen again) So who knows. Maybe another Whole30 is in my future and maybe next time I’ll actually do it perfectly.

Yeah, I failed to mention that I went on a trip to LA in the middle of October and at one point was served a salad with parmesan cheese, which I ate because I didn’t want to be THAT girl with my co-workers sending back food and making them wait to devour their delicious California meals.

When I got home, I sulked into the living room, sat down next to Dave with my tail between my legs and told him my nasty parmesan secret that occurred during my time away.

His response: “Uh yeah that’s cool… I ate a pizza.”

FIN.

 

October 1st fell on Monday this year and the weekend before Dave and I dove into our month-long quest for nutritional nirvana can only be described as a carb fest free-for-all-sugar-orgie bonanaza. There was pasta and sushi and cookies and whip cream – Oh God, So. Much. Whip. Cream. As I watched the clock tick closer and closer to midnight on Sunday I started panic eating. I mainlined noodles up until the very last daunting second.

Guys, it was gross.

And I regret nothing.  

Alas, Monday rolled around as it tends to do and as the sunlight hit our faces on October 1st we slowly opened our eyes to the harsh reality of a total carbohangover and the sinking feeling that we had made a huge mistake. But because Dave and I are both stubborn AF, neither wanted to admit to each other that we had doubts, so we forged ahead and didn’t look back until Halloween.

As much as I could easily make fun of Whole30 and the HORRIBLE first world problem that was suffering through it for this entire blog post, I should pause here for moment and explain to those of you who aren’t familiar with it what exactly Whole30 is and what it isn’t.

The idea behind Whole30 is to strip all the unnecessary and problematic foods from your diet and eat only whole and natural foods with no added sweeteners. Basically you eat like an animal that consumes both fruits, veggies and meat, but no sugar. Like a bear who’s afraid of bees. And hasn’t learned to bake.

That means all fruits, veggies and meats are in and all dairy, sugars, starches (except potatoes) and legumes are out. It’s pretty damn close to a low carb or a paleo diet with a few notable exceptions like you can’t have peanuts (because they’re technically a legume) and even artificial sweeteners like Splenda are a no no, which means diet soda is out. There’s some other fine print and yada yada, but that’s the gist of it.

Now one of the really cool things about these 30 days is you don’t count calories and you don’t weigh yourself – those things are strictly off limits. Which was really freeing in a way. I, Lindsey Breh, who weighs herself daily and sometimes more than once a day like after a really satisfying pee (yo, why not?) had to learn to let go and just trust that the process was doing its thing. I’ve also been trained to subconsciously count every calorie I’ve ever consumed since the age of 15. THAT’S A CRAPTON OF MATH, so I was more than happy to put away my calculator and just rely on feeling full as my guide.

Ok so those are the rules. To help me along my Whole30 quest I purchased no fewer than 4 approved cookbooks and also a handy field guide thing that I can’t remember the name to at the moment, but it’s a day by day breakdown for the entire 30 days and gives helpful little tricks and tips each day. I read it out loud to Dave each night when we got into bed. Sometimes he listened.

I’ve racked my brain about how best to take you through this without turning it into a blog of epic proportions a la the Odyssey and I’ve settled on a theme format. I narrowed down my Whole30 experience into four key themes that pretty much cover everything. So here we go.   

1: SUGAR IS LIFE and my life is over

I honestly had no idea how addicted I was to sugar, or sweetness in general, until this little experiment.

No, I’m lying.

I might have had an inkling there was a problem when I was too embarrassed to go through the Starbucks drive thru because admitting just how many Splendas I put in my coffee was a secret shame too difficult to bear. Now I don’t actually know the exact number of Splendas I put in each latte because I would just grab what I loving called “a mitt full” and then quietly hunch over the cup, ripping and dumping each packet into my coffee as quickly as possible before Mr. Joe Businessman made his way to the mixing station and judged me for my life choices. But it’s safe to say it was a lot. Like a metric fuckton a lot.

A red flag moment might have also been that time I broke a toe chasing a double chocolate malted milk ball as it rolled through my kitchen. But really, that could happen to anyone.  

So it was super interesting to cut all sweet things from my diet and watch my body struggle HARD with what felt like a physical yearning for anything containing the white gold I so desired. I wish I could tell you that the need dissipated and went away completely after 30 days.

It did not.

HOWEVER, my taste for sugar in drinks actually did. I no longer want sugar in my coffee or iced tea and diet soda tastes more akin to a dessert now, which is really interesting. So if nothing else, I can say Whole30 cured me of my Splenda obsession and probably saved me from that third eye I’d inevitably grow on my forehead from overconsumption.

Chocolate though? Naw. We still buds.

2. “How was your day honey?” and other things June Cleaver might have said.

Turns out there’s no such thing as a pre-packaged Whole30 approved meal. You have to prep and cook EVERYTHING. The prepping is something I was pretty adept at doing prior to Whole30, however the cooking part? Not so much. And definitely not every damn night.

I honestly used to scoff at 1950s-esq moms who cooked dinner every night because I didn’t see the point, but after a few trial and errors, stove burns, WHY IS IT STILL RAW IN THE MIDDLE!!! fist shakes at the sky, broken glass in a pile of raw chicken, wondering what that smell was coming from the garbage (hint: prior day’s chicken a la glass shards) and a balsamic reduction that will still be stuck to the bottom of that tragic saucepan long after my grandkids have grown and died, I can safely say I hit my stride.

Dave and I got into a good groove where he would put the kid to bed and I would start on dinner and by the time we both reconnected there was a warm meal on the table and there we sat staring at each other wondering what comes after “how was your day?”

Naw, for real, actually sitting down with Dave to a dinner every night was pretty fantastic. Sure I missed a bunch of TV and don’t know what the hell is going on with that sinking ship known as Grey’s Anatomy Season whatever-teenth (I’M WITH YOU TO THE BITTER END MEREDITH!) but that’s nothing a good old sick day marathon can’t fix. It was pretty cool to have the 10-15 minutes it took us to devour our protein packed meals and enjoy each other’s company.

I know, barf, right?

YES, I LIKE MY HUSBAND. BUGGER OFF!
(Are you British now? No I’ve just used “fuck” too many times already in this post.)

I’m going to go ahead and break here and I’ll pick back up with the last two themes in the next blog because this has gotten a bit long and also I haven’t thought of them yet.

Stay tuned for the gripping conclusion and final tally for how many pounds my cat gained from eating my Whole30 fails.

Hint: he’s fluffy and he know it.

In order to be the four star tour guide you deserve and efficiently take you on my journey through Whole30 I need to first take you back to the beginning and explain why I got in the car in the first place.

Last year I got pregnant (remember, not a mom blog) and it sucked. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my daughter, but I hated being pregnant because pregnancy hated me. I puked preeeety much every day for nine months straight. It became part of life – I’d puke in the Costco parking lot, step over it and carry on inside to buy me some giant ass muffins. And a Vitamix.

So naturally in order to combat this output of food, I compensated with input and ate EVERYTHING.

I didn’t eat A LOT of the things. I ate ALL of the things.

My daughter popped out weighing 6lbs and change and was made up of 98% cupcakes and 2% cold lo mein noodles, which were consumed mainly for breakfast. Why? I don’t know. It felt right at the time.

One Sunday I bought a birthday cake at the grocery store. Was it someone’s birthday? I dunno, probably. But not anyone I knew.

It was delicious.

Much to my surprise, when Quinn made the transition from puke inducing fetus demon to squishy adorable baby, she did not bring those 40ish lbs of late night burrito fat with her. Those pounds remained squarely on my ass. And as such I had werk to do.

So I ran lots of miles and calorie counted and did all the things that used to work pre-pregnancy, but I hit some roadblocks. Turns out pregnancy FUCKS your body up. Like rewires and shifts organs, fucked up. Some things go away forever. Some new things pop up that you didn’t invite. And most surprisingly to me, weight hangs around like the long graduated high school football captain who still comes to games hoping to score with sophomore cheerleaders.

Drastic measures needed to be taken. So I did what every logical 37-yr old white chick does – I turned to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for some answers.

No you didn’t.

Oh yes I did!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Housewives franchise, first off, how dare you. Second, on the BH version there is a Housewife named Teddi Mellencamp who happens to be, wait for it, an “Accountability Coach.” Yep, this is a real job. A job that you too can aspire to with the only prerequisite being you have a ginormously famous father with gobs of money to fund your bullshit undergraduate major until you pop out four years later with your degree and ability to invent a job title.

Now apparently Teddi has been somewhat successful as an AC and has amassed a team of these coaches and even put together a program to help little nobodies like me lose weight, look fantastic and feel like everything in life is under control just as long as we’re fitting into size 2 jeans.

I took one look at this flimsy program and said, “SIGN ME UP!”

It was 2 weeks later, after accepting my low low deposit of $500, that they sent me the meal plan that would help me realize my Beverly Hills self. This is going to shock you, but the plan was less of a meal plan and more of a “just don’t fucking eat anything” plan.

And my dumb ass, ladies and gents, paid five hundred benjis for it.

Well that wasn’t gonna work. So after a bit of arguing and questioning, Teddi booted me out of her skinny people club and sent me and my $500 refund packing. I’m sure she and the other accountability coaches had a good laugh about it over celery sticks and then for dinner they went to bed.

So I was back to square one.

But all hope was not lost! For those of you who don’t know, I work for a fitness company and my co-workers are forever talking about and trying new diets, fitness challenges and have their ear to the ground when it comes to what’s new in the health world. Whole30 has been out there for a while and many of them had gone through it, so I figured what the hell. Let’s do it.

Dave, my trusty husband, was so pleased I had chosen to avoid Teddi’s starve-myself-to-success diet, that he was more than happy to join me on my 30 day quest.

So on October 1st we took the plunge. The month would include a week long business trip to LA, my birthday and a few other carb-filled speed pumps that provided tough challenges along the way. I will elaborate more in Part 2, but for now I can say that yes, Dave and I are still married. Whole30 did not break us. But we are scarred.

Also my cat is fatter.

Stay tuned

I know what you’re thinking. Somebody needs to tell homegirl it’s 2018 and blogs are about as cool as snap bracelets.

I know. I know. Who writes a blog?

Me. I do. Also Bill Gates. And Beyonce.

I’m starting a blog/cool shiz website because I’ve been watching the slow decline of Facebook (or so all the younger millennials at my office tell me) and Instagram seems like a poor trade with lots of limitations. I don’t want to have to put a link in my bio in order to elaborate on a thought past x number of characters. It’s weird. I don’t like it.

I’ve always loved writing, but ever since I switched my major from Journalism in undergrad because fact checking, while necessary, was laaaaaame, nobody pays me to do it anymore. So I’ve been looking for an outlet to scratch that proverbial itch ever since. There are stories I want to tell and personal experiences I’d like to share, but I didn’t want to bombard people or force them to read things that don’t interest them by flooding their social media feeds with my brain nuggets.

So I began to look for a better solution. After doing some research and consulting with people much smarter than me, I landed on the idea for a website that’s a mix of a blog and other cool things from my life and the world around me that I think are worth sharing. I don’t know if people are going to read it or like it or pass it on, but I do know it’s going to be a little piece of me that I put out into the world for no other reason that because it’s fun. And honestly what’s the point of all this crap if we’re not having just a little bit of fun anymore.

Ok, so what about the name? Do you ACTUALLY eat candy for breakfast?

Well, yeah.

Also, no.

The name of the website is more figurative than literal. It stems from the fact that I spent my formative years thinking adults had all this shit figured out. They were confident, put together and we could look to them for all the answers.

Then I became an adult.

Maybe I missed the boat or didn’t get the memo or my manual is lost in the mail, but I will be the first to admit I know even less than I did as a kid and have exactly ZERO figured out. I spent all those years wishing to be an adult with all the answers and freedom to eat candy for breakfast and here I am, clueless as I sit in bed gnawing on a leftover Halloween fun-sized Milky Way at 6:27am wondering if I should even bother with eyeliner today.

Candy For Breakfast is born.

Alright, so what can I expect from this uncategorized website I just clicked on a link to because I’m afraid you’ll ask me if I did later?

I’m so glad you asked!

Some rules:

1. First off, this is NOT A MOM BLOG. I repeat, THIS IS NOT A MOM BLOG. I know exactly shit about shit when it comes to raising a kid. And while I know many mom blogs are about exactly that, I will not be posting about how crazy my life is on a weekly basis and how frantic mom life can be in a Cathy-comic esq fashion so we can all have a hearty laugh about how ridic parenting is. ACK!

We know raising a kid is ridiculous. It’s old news and I don’t think I have anything special to offer that you can’t read on one of the other 1,000 Momblobs out there. (Typo intentional.) 

So no, this is not a mom blog.

2. Yes, I am a mom. And as such, occasionally stuff about the little snot machine I birthed will sneak its way into my posts and stories. In my eyes Quinn is the cutest thing to grace this planet and is more fascinating than a Season One Stranger Things bingefest on crack, but I acknowledge that to you, dear readers (except for you mom – kidding, she’s not gonna read this), Quinn is just another basic kid being raised by another basic mom who both do basic stuff.

Except for the times when she does awesome stuff. I’ll tell you about that stuff.

3. As much as my husband has tried to break me of this, I swear. I swear like a smelly old sailor who stubbed his toe on an anchor and I do it a lot. HOWEVER, I am going to do my best to keep this site as curse word free has possible. That said, sometimes Fuck happens. There are occasions where no other word will do and I don’t want to rob you of the complete reading experience by censoring myself. So when Fuck happens, I want you to know I thought long and hard about it and decided to let it make an appearance for the greater good of the blog and humanity.

4. I have no “point of view” or shtick. Before I started this site, lots of people told me I needed to have a unique perspective or a general theme to build around.

Well fuck that. (see rule 3)

My site, much like my life, is ALL over the damn place. One week I’m committed to eating a clean diet by following Whole30 and the next I’m face down in a pile of purple buttercream frosting wondering where the weekend went. That’s how things go and I can’t pretend I’m anything other than a mix of a million thoughts and motivations at any one moment. There will be personal stories, photos, sketches done by yours truly, guest writers, trash talk and a probably a bunch of other things that will evolve as I go along. 

So I’m putting it all out there – raw, uncut and filter free. Yes, part of being in my industry means I’m adept at photoshop and marketing spin, but I promise you, dear readers, I’m going to hand you every unairbrushed pimple on a silver platter. That’s a double-decker metaphor sandwich, but I think we’re all on the same page here.

Well that’s all I have for now. Thanks for stopping by and taking a moment with me today. I look forward to spending some good, bad and blerg moments with you in the future.

Giddy up, Internet.