Sunday, December 10th, 2017 – Day 1
I’ve been contemplating doing this for days. Ever since a producer asked me to work as a reporter in their next video that will be playing year long, day in and day out on a big screen TV right in the heart of the airport introducing Otaru city. I’m supposed to send them some pictures of possible outfits that I could wear in the show and right now nothing I want to wear out of my closet fits. I also am 5’10” and curvy which makes shopping for well fitting clothes in Japan a nearly impossible task.
I’ve tried the Whole 30 once before in that I joined a Whole 30 Facebook support group and read about what everyone else was eating. I’m a classic case of so many diets tried, so many diets failed. So this time I decided to thoroughly research what I would be getting into before getting into it. Unfortunately, in the meantime, I succumbed to a plea from my boy to make chocolate chip cookies and ate half of a half batch before bedtime effectively ruining any good eating and exercise I’d done all week. I’m running out of time. 
This morning (OK really this afternoon around 12:30pm- I was up until 5am writing) I made two eggs and an avocado with himalayan rock salt and 100% apple vinegar. 
Everything else sitting on table is out (for this diet) including the dried peas and furikake flakes. Lord help me.
3pm
For lunch I made lamb sautéed with Asian pear and plain salt and pepper. 
This has been the biggest pain so far- finding the blessed pepper! I always use either Arabiki S&P or Magic Salt in my cooking and on my food. But both contain sugar fairly high up on the ingredient list.
I ate a cucumber and a handful of seedless grapes. (A typo there was sexless grapes which also is technically correct- I mean, how do they get seedless anything to reproduce, I wonder?)
8:30pm
My family made a rare trip out with all four of us to the local home DIY everything center to look at handrails for the new ladder Hubby built for the boys loft in their room. We finally decided it was an expense we could do without for the time being. We went in two cars as the poles for the rails would have been too long to fit if everyone was riding in one so I sent the boys home, one needed to finish studying for a test, while I stayed behind and shopped for dinner and breakfast food. Auld Lang syne was playing in the background the entire 15 minutes before store closing.
I came home and made ground beef and sweet potato Paprikash with this recipe sans the hot pepper flakes. 
Everyone but the youngest enjoyed it. He kept refusing to eat claiming a full tummy between requests for chicken nuggets. At least I didn’t buy any more boxes of ice cream. It was mostly out of principle. We’re finally into deep snow season so they can have as much snow cream as they want.
Monday, December 11th- Day 2
2 am
I got the kids to bed by 11 (don’t judge- we’re all night owls and the weekend bed times were much later) and fell asleep myself until about 1am. When I went downstairs to get some water Hubby was busy working, an episode of Sasuke playing in the background. I got a nice shoulder rub for a few minutes and then remembered I needed to wash bento boxes for my kid’s chicken nugget lunch tomorrow and make my own salad for breakfast and lunch.
For the last month I’ve been on a half raw diet kick, eating big as mixing bowls salads for breakfast and lunch more days than not. Lots of fiber and they taste good! But I put all manner of unholy non whole 30 items in them like dried Craisins laden with sugar, basil sauce, and vinegars also listing sugar among the ingredients.
Today’s salad consists of chopped napa cabbage, celery, green apple skin on, purple cabbage, two seedless persimmons, chia, pumpkin and sunflower seeds (the latter two I’m still not 100% sure are compliant despite spending 10 minutes on Hubby’s phone looking it up) covered in lemon juice, 100% apple vinegar, basil infused olive oil and no sugar added salt and herb spice mix that I found last night at the DIY super center.
My friend Yukari and I are supposed to record a music video tomorrow at her house and will probably have lunch together. She’s offered to take me out as a thanks for singing in her special Christmas ukulele project and while I’ve been thoroughly looking forward to collecting on that promise, I’ll be taking a rain check and my own big as bowl of salad.
11:04 am
I spent the last hour and 15 minutes purchasing online movie tickets to the new Star Wars film for my oldest son’s birthday. There’s a lot of Japanese I can read but a lot more that I can’t. The little google translate pop up window saved me from accidentally purchasing senior citizens tickets or special high school groups of three or more “friendship” tickets, but it kept choosing Chinese instead of Japanese which added an extra step for every line I looked up.
I had a bowl of cold beef and sweet potato paprikash for breakfast and now a bowl of my super salad. 
You may have noticed that I’m not at my friend Yukari’s house as planned. That’s because while the snow doesn’t keep us down in the winter in Sapporo, rain and resulting slush can and did today.
Also hubby is a little scared of all the winter sicknesses and diseases like the flu and Noro virus that are going around the kindergarten and since it’s not obligatory for him to attend, our youngest stayed home today. It’s technically my day off as well so it’s best to get all the Christmas tree decoration boxes put away while cleaning up the general chaos that is my house. I never claimed to be a housework queen.
2 PM
The sweet potato and beef paprikash is about to become history. I have nearly a whole container of Costco bulgogi (Korean BBQ) in the fridge waiting to be cooked or frozen for future meals. It’s one of hubby’s favorites. Mine too but it’s definitely out for the next 29 days as I know the sauce definitely contains sugar.
On the bright side I did learn a new Japanese word last night when I checked the label on the can of tomatoes for the paprikash. The three ingredients listed are tomatoes, tomato juice andクエン酸 kuensan or “citric acid”. 
Perfectly acceptable to have extra vitamin C on this diet. I also still find the pull up tabs on canned food here super cool.
Overall I feel pretty good today except for the fact that I’ve wanted to back to bed pretty much ever since I woke up this morning. I think that’s less to do with my food energy stores than too many nights of less than five hours of sleep.
9:26pm
I really had no idea what to make for dinner tonight but I got a couple of good ones thanks to Pinterest on my way to the supermarket. Unfortunately everything (healthy) in the supermarket was wicked expensive thanks to cold weather, rising gas prices, who knows?
Chicken and pork were cheap so I made ginger pork (sans soy sauce for me) and almond crusted zucchini medallions to go with my big as salad. 
I also went ahead and cooked up some super yum chicken and broccoli sautéed in coconut oil with ginger and lemon zest and of course herb salt and pepper. It was the bomb! Even my littlest picky eater happily gobbled up the chicken though he promptly spit the broccoli back out.
Whenever I cook chicken I like to take the skin and crisp it up to make chicken bacon. Typically I use the oil for sautéing whatever the actual chicken dish is but today the oil got thrown out and the chicken bacon was consumed by my family before I could have more than the tiniest crumb of a taste.
This was completely intentional as I equally divided the chicken bacon between my kids leaving just those crumbs for me because I know this is a trigger food that once I start eating it I really can’t stop. Although it really wasn’t such a hardship today because the flavored really wasn’t overwhelming in the temptation factor. It was still amazing but I was somehow sated with my little crumbs. 
A good friend of mine sent me a text while I was cooking offering to share some “mixed peel” a.k.a. candied citrus peel in American English I think. I joked that I was interested if he was talking about a facial peel but if it had anything with sugar in it I wouldn’t be happy to have the temptation around during the next 29 days. His response was classic:
Wow! Good luck over Christmas! You go girl! 😊
So of course now I’m remembering all the amazing holiday foods coming up that I will be strictly forbidding myself from partaking in. (It’s only 30 days! It’s only 30 days! Keep chanting the mantra).
I responded:
I know! I must be incredibly crazy! However I know I have the willpower to not partake in the Christmas cake that my son won at a Halloween costume contest. I can also make my own turkey and tons of whole food dishes that are totally compliant. New Year’s might be a little trickier as Mom likes to put sugar in all her recipes. But we can do sashimi instead of sushi for New Year’s eve at our house with our little family so I think I’m set.
Yes, I may be overly optimistic but it’s not the worst character trait to have, right?
Now I’m just trying to figure out what to do with leftover half of the pumpkin pie that I just had to have even a couple weeks after Thanksgiving. As usual I made the crust gluten free (pecan and date crust!) but on a whim put a goodly helping of ground quinoa in it which was a mistake. I could eat it but it’s not the kind of thing you give away to friends. 
The pumpkin portion came out incredibly delish but it’s full of maple syrup and cream and butter. Anyone want to try my interesting pie?Tuesday, December 12th- Day 30:23amA quick break from writing my novel had me almost mindlessly reaching for the bag of margarine filled dinner rolls someone left sitting out on the sofa. (I swear our sofa is more for collecting stuff then actually sitting on!)I had a large banana around 10:30 as a pre-bed snack but obviously I didn’t stay in bed, rather opting to write a tricky scene . So now it’s time to ignore the seductively whole yet too sweet for this diet box of dates in the pantry and go for some “sexless” grapes. 
1:57amI ate an extra large みかん🍊mikan which I’ve always wanted to call a tangerine but upon some research is technically a clementine. Since no one where I’m from would recognize what that is, I tend to let the mikan be one of those words that I just use in its Japanese form. Like genkan for foyer and keitai for cell phone. When in Rome.8:30amI woke up kinda starving so sunk my teeth into a cucumber while I made scrambled eggs with avocado for my breakfast and a bento lunch box for my baby boy who hasn’t been to kindergarten in so many days due to hubby’s aversion to him picking up the flu or some other virus. Thankfully yesterday the school told us that the flu is the only thing left going around so I’m going to take my chances. 
My whole back feels stiff this morning but on the upside I think my jeans may have been just a smidgen easier to button than yesterday. Of course these are the jeans that spent an entire summer out in the monōki (shed) rather than me tell the friend who lost a considerable amount of weight and passed them on to me that size 14s would hang off me. That was a year and some change ago. Now they are one of only two pairs of jeans I own that I can even squeeze my hips into, albeit too short in the legs.
5:45pm
A 20 minute Power nap chalk full of dreams about my story and characters left me feeling a little disoriented when I had to get up and rush off to my evening class. However I noticed that walking up the four flights of stairs tonight was actually enjoyable for the first time in forever. I used to walk the extra fifth flight up and down just for the exercise not all that long ago but I’ve been loath to do anything but take the elevator, a special privilege as a guest teacher in this establishment, for so many months.
10:57pm
I had grandiose plans to make a sweet potato shepherd’s pie for dinner when I got home from work at 7:45 but what I got instead was my car stuck in the grooves of the ice on the road and 90 minutes of back aching labor to get it out with help from Hubby.
I did pop into the house to make sure the kids could be fed something for dinner. Picky eater had rice with flaked salmon and a cucumber, the only veggie he doesn’t hate, while I rushed to make a delicious pork and veggie coconut curry from ingredients on hand.
All of the non picky eaters enjoyed it. And I officially have three days in the books for a very compliant whole 30!
December 13th, Day 4
9:30amSuddenly my life is full of end of year rush narration and accompanying translation jobs. That means not enough sleep which is of course wearing on my energy but if I’m not mistaken I do feel a certain amount of pep that I can only attribute to the changes in my diet. Everything else in my life is still quite crazy. I am finding like the founder of the whole 30 says, that taking control of this aspect of one’s life is very empowering. I am proud of myself for keeping, as best as I can tell, perfect compliance with the diet for the last three days and starting on a fourth. (Unless you’re going to hold those tiny little bites of chicken skin bacon against me). For breakfast I had a refreshed version of my big as a mixing bowl salad with added leftover coconut ginger chicken and a few Mandarin orange slices all topped with black sesame.
1:20 pm
WARNING- rant ahead: I worked for about an hour on a re-translation of a narrative script that I’ll be recording in 5 days no less that must have come straight from the “bad place.” It was like pulling teeth to get the client to even accept that their original English script needed changes as it could not be read as it was. When I did a timed test to estimate how long it would take me to fix the 12 page monster I did not count on the little English that actually did make sense being completely wrong when comparing it to the original Japanese script. Therefore I grossly underestimated the time it would take to fix it and am effectually working for peanuts on a rush job that I should be getting paid twice if not triple to do under normal circumstances.
But I’m still happy for the work and work experience as the holidays are coming up and I’ll have too much free time with too little pay on my hands in my other jobs.
RANT OVER I took a much needed nap after that and dreamt that I absentmindedly took a big bite of some chocolate covered peanut caramel truffle that was sitting out on the counter top and didn’t realize what I’d done until I’d swallowed part of it. I spit out all that I could- it didn’t really taste that good to me even in a dream. I was contemplating if I really needed to start my whole 30 all over again from scratch due to this little mess up when I was abruptly pulled from sleep by a real life phone call.
The phone call was much more desirous than any chocolate dessert! It was the producer for the 10 minute show to be played in the airport with news that they are going ahead with the project and want me as their star reporter! We’re talking two days of walking around the charming port town of Otaru showing off local artisan works such as glass blowing, while trying my own hand at making sushi, Japanese confections, wearing a kimono and visiting the market place. They’re still also talking seriously about ending the show with me singing an original number in a street live performance.
Best of all, regarding this diet anyway is that the pictures they want of two or three outfit options don’t need to be prepared until right before the filming! All things being equal (though I’m sure they’re not) I should be a bit slimmer and more comfortable in my own clothes by then. Perhaps might even be able to buy a new jacket to throw into the mix.
I’m so excited! And sleepy. Back to that nap!
5:15pm
I’m starving! But in a good way. After my nap I got in a good 20 minute HIIT (high intensity interval training) workout in with a little yoga on the side. Then enjoyed a refreshing shower with a good bit of akasuri before putting on my favorite cowboy’s hand me down western shirt and digging into a pre-work meal of salad and curry with extra sweet potatoes thrown in.
8:30pm
I was actually looking forward to climbing the stairs at work tonight and indeed I enjoyed the exercise but due to the car switch I didn’t have my own indoor shoes and had to wear the guest slippers which feel like they’re going to fall off at any moment. My feet are extremely narrow for Japan. But maybe the gripping action added a little more to the exercise of it all.
We’re having sweet potato and beef paprikash again but this time with added mushrooms and made with fresh tomatoes. Only because the store I went to didn’t have any canned tomatoes. Just tomato sauces chock full of sugar.
My family didn’t seem to think it tasted very sweet or had a strong flavor profile but it was incredibly sweet to me. Those tomatoes! Yum!
December 14th- Day 5
3am
Yes I’m still awake but for good reason. I just finished that monstrous re-translation. 12 man hours, 7 1/2 of them of my own, on a project that under more reasonable circumstances should’ve taken two or three at most.
The last time I had a project like this which was just two or three weeks ago I found myself grabbing ice cream bars and bags of oily snacks and other sweets at regular intervals just to keep my brain working. It was all permissible because that’s what you do when you’re working through the night, right?
Instead this evening I found myself grabbing a box of strawberries and celebrating the finished work by making a beautiful “big as” salad with a scrumptious lemon-persimmon-strawberry dressing.
The dressing was kind of an invention of necessity as I only had one persimmon which was not nearly enough to make the proper ratio of fruit to vegetables in my salad.
4pm
My oldest child fell ill with what looks like could be the flu late last night, so this morning was a rush to get him to the doctor before I had to go to work. Thankfully I did all of my meal prep the night before and was able to be ready for an entire day out on only three hours of sleep.
After teaching kindergarten in the morning I dropped off two boxes of smaller sized clothes than my children can currently wear to some international students with a three-year-old and a baby on the way before heading to the Grand Hotel Starbucks to enjoy a coffee with a good friend and her two-year-old daughter who loves nothing more than running away for chase after her. It was an entertaining time!
So far I’ve had very little temptation on this diet but Starbucks has been…not hard but enlightening. See, when I walked in and saw the desert case full of all kinds of new seasonal treats that I haven’t tried yet my desire to try everything new really kicked in. I felt a longing but it was completely emotional/psychological as my body really is not craving sweets at all right now. 
I felt it again when I got to the coffee stand fraught with the typical creamers and sweeteners. I actually prefer to drink my coffee black since I like the Ying Yang balance of sweet treats with bitter drinks but I felt that same emotional connection and perhaps just mindless habit of reaching for the honey or vanilla sprinkles. Since they were out of the Christmas blend coffee that I wanted I put a dash of cinnamon in my coffee and I’ve been quite happy with that. I ate a banana with my friend’s little girl while waiting for her to get her coffee.
I think the caffeine might be affecting me more than I’m used to as I’m shaking a little bit while sipping on my first refill but it could be a combination of that and just three or four hours of sleep that’s really doing it.
And I hope you’ll all be as proud of me as I am of myself for this next one, but they actually came around with FREE SAMPLES of coffee and the seasonal cranberry delight tart that my Aussie friend told me she couldn’t imagine living without now that she’s had it! I turned it down flat even while thinking I could take it just for the picture opportunity but why risk it? 😂
10:00pm
A quick shopping trip on my way home from work provided some ingredients I haven’t tried yet in my whole30 experiment. I looked at the lamb and pork and the beef and the chicken wicked expensive right now. Japan is full of fish! I bought a large Ohotsuk fish that can serve my family of four and a pack of sashimi that was half price. 
It wasn’t until I got home that I remembered I’m not allowed to have soy sauce on this diet which is the traditional thing to dip sashimi in. I also looked at the ingredients on our various tubes of wasabi and they all contain things I should not be eating right now (or maybe ever- chemicals and starch- ick!)
So once again an idea born out of necessity produced a pretty awesome dip alternative. I went Mediterranean and made both a lemon and a ginger olive oil and vinegar dipping sauce.
They were even better together!
When I was researching this before jumping in headfirst I noticed a number of people say that day five was the hardest for whatever reason. For me I’m finding that the psychological side of food has a really reared its fascinating head throughout the day.
The sweet treats at Starbucks and the syrupy sugar substitutes did not tempt me physically in the least but something in my heart gravitated towards them. Thankfully it’s just 25 more days and I’m perfectly happy to stick to this.
I also steamed a frozen package of green beans with three small sausages chopped up in it, a dish I often make for my family. My oldest son and I like to pretend that they are the Very Hungry Catapillar. Unfortunately the sausages were the ones I thought my husband had thrown out that had already gone off their flavor, but since I had cooked a few without sausage for myself it wasn’t a complete waste. I was really surprised at how sweet they tasted!
Sausage is allowed on the whole 30 but it’s supposed to be the non-preservative no added sugar no added soy or chemicals kind. Every kind of sausage that I had in my fridge, which is quite a lot as it’s a family favorite, had all of those things and more. ick.
I forgot to mention that this afternoon I recorded end of year English announcements for a large department store in Sapporo and updated the “press two for English” telephone system for one of Hokkaido’s largest theme park resorts after which I went back to Starbucks with computer in hand to spend an hour with the characters in my novel. Al Capone finally got to make a proper cameo appearance.
Friday, December 15th- Day 6
0:55am
I just wanted to mention that all day the backside of my super tight stretch jeans was hanging a little bit looser than usual. I’m in no way satisfied with my figure at this point but I am happy with the direction my body is heading and excited too. After all it’s only 24 more days but I have a feeling all of my days after this experiment will be altered for the better. 
Also another physiological food trigger I met today was this highly-piggly display of Japanese New Years food. I’m not sure any of them actually taste all that great in reality but the colors and designs evoke strong feelings of celebration and scarcity in that they only come out once a year. 
9:35am
This morning was slow going after waking from a dream where I was embroiled in a confrontation that I am actively avoiding in the real world. The main things I care to share are that the music in my dream was really good (One Republic “Counting Stars” and something upbeat and poppy by Switchfoot), the reaction of the people was the same or worse than I imagined it would be in daylight, and I held my ground.
I also woke up stiff shouldered and groggy but again I’m pretty certain that’s more to do with a week long record average of 3 to 4 hours sleep per night than my food choices.
Like I said, I definitely take naps here and there but not nearly as many as I would have expected I’d need to to keep up this pace of late night translation and other sundry projects. Perhaps this diet change has given me the energy I need to get through these long days? Still, real sleep would be fantastic! I still hope to achieve it someday.
3pm
It feels much much later to me after this morning’s introspective dreams and rough awakening. But I’m enjoying a chicken veggie curry that took a lot of trial and error to get right (read edible -maybe even delicious now but it was a close call). 
It’s a combination of skinless chicken breast, coconut milk, pineapple, tomato, and broccoli steamed in the microwave with lemon and ginger from yesterday’s prep work. This was the first to dish which actually came out surprisingly decent.
It was just swimming in the watery coconut milk which wasn’t quite so appealing so I decided to save half of the main ingredients for a mild dish that my children will probably eat and take the other half plus liquid to make the curry. 
To the first dishes’ remaining liquid I added curry powder which tasted terrible because it was just spicy and bland. It soon became frenzied foraging through my kitchen to find ingredients that would somehow make this palatable if not as delicious as my last super successful curry attempt. It was a mental challenge to keep in mind the things that I should not be grabbing to put in the pot.
I also discovered in my quick research that Chia seeds are not approved for this diet which means my salad is bending the rules a little bit. I don’t actually like Chia seeds or dislike them. I just eat them because they’re supposed to be healthy so it’ll be no trouble to give them up for the rest of this experiment. What a shock this humongous salad that is. Wasted not, want not.
In the end I added half of a steamed kabocha pumpkin as a thickening ingredient, a can of tomatoes, a teaspoon of coconut oil and two or 3 tablespoons of coconut milk from a fresh can. A bit of garlic powder and a healthy teaspoon of salt with some extra herbed salt-and-pepper finally pushed it over that edge. 
In about an hour my oldest son and I are headed to see the new Star Wars movie to celebrate his birthday early! I wonder if I can actually stay awake all three hours of this movie… probably since were watching it in a 4Dx3D theater. Maybe it’s time to take a nap.
Saturday, December 16th- Day 7
4:30pm
Can I just say StarWars the Last Jedi in 4D was awesome! I even met a couple of cosplayers as well as Darth Vader.
I also met a number of Temptations that caused me to pause and reflect but did not best me in the end. For example the caramel popcorn at the theater was simply not an option for me to eat so that was easy. However, after the movie the Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel’s seasoned potatoes on my sons tray got me to reach out my hand for a brief moment before I realized, no, I can’t have that. So did the bag of candies he got from the posh candy store.
I was perfectly fine in the shop. I already knew from visiting a week ago last Monday when I performed a Christmas concert on the shopping mall stage that they didn’t have my favorite nonpareil pastel mint kisses. But that habit of just picking up a little something off of one of my kids plates or the open bag of potato chips or chocolate…that really made me pause. 
I ate before we left for the movie but it was three hours long so I was really starving like everyone else when it finished. I packed a banana and some Mandarin oranges which helped tide me over but I definitely needed some real food in my system. KFC had no grilled chicken options but thankfully the Freshness Burger shop was still open and had a nice avocado burger with only salt and pepper seasoning the beef patty. 
I made sure the raw onions that I can’t eat and any sauces were kept off. Unfortunately, they didn’t consider pickle relish a sauce and I was already halfway through the bun-less burger before I realized it was on there. But it didn’t taste particularly sweet as a lot of Japanese food tends not to be so I figured if I was going to break a rule this wasn’t a horrible one.
Today I slept fairly well for the first time in many days and finished up some translation work for the Japan railways English announcement updates I’ll be recording next week. Leftover salad and curry have kept me sated though I did make a pot of Apple Pie Tea. It lists 香料 [こうりょう (kouryou)] as the only ingredient besides black tea. At first I thought it said fruit juice which seemed a little odd for a teabag. Then I worried that it said fructose. But it turns out that it means flavoring. Tea is definitely something that brings about happy good feelings. I feel sophisticated when I drink something special out of my tea collection.
Now I’m looking at bananas in the fruit bowl thinking that could make some kind of interesting dessert-like creation but then I realize one of the faucets of this challenge is letting go of the psychological need for desserts for 30 days. So I will enjoy it just as it is happily. 
Ps. I finally threw away that leftover half of a pumpkin pie.
10pm
I took the kids to play at the local book and coffee shop with a lovely kids play area and spent a couple hours furthering the plot on my novel while they ran around in the background. The gelato shop has excellent cheap tea.
By the time we shopped for dinner supplies it got to be this late. Not that unusual for our family though.
I decided to do my own whole 30 version of fish and chips. Grilled salmon and mirin coated white fish with pan fried potatoes and carrots in olive oil and herb seasoning. 
All in all pretty good.
Today I am finding myself going through the all-too-familiar feelings of “this is not going to work” and “my body is doomed to stay the same” that usually come along within the first or second week of a diet.
The thing is I can tell my body is changing and quite rapidly. At least I’ve felt like it is. Not just the energy despite a gross lack of sleep but also slightly looser fitting clothes and feeling like one of my fat rolls has diminished. But I’m following this to the letter as much as I can including not weighing myself throughout. I didn’t weigh myself the day I started it either but not many days before a rather shocking number on the scale at the gym got branded into my mind.
Interesting. Just talking about those feelings seems to have diminished them quite a lot. I’m not sure if anyone is reading this but for what it’s worth if you are I’m happy you’re here
(My eldest is currently singing a ditty about yaki imo, roasted sweet potatoes, and we both realize that it could easily be misheard as “yucky imo” or yucky potato.)
I’m just a couple hours away from the end of week one. 23 more days to go!
Delaina Miyazaki 