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The Whole Smiths

The Whole Smiths

Whole Eating + Happy Living

  • Facebook
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  • Recipes
    • Cooking Method
      • 5 Ingredients or Less
      • 30 Minutes or Less
      • Easy-to-Make
      • Instant Pot
      • Make Ahead, Keep on Hand
      • One Dish, Pan, Pot or Sheet Pan
      • Weekend Living
    • Dietary Guidelines
      • Dairy-Free
      • Gluten-Free
      • Grain-Free
      • Paleo
      • Vegan
      • Vegetarian
      • Whole30
    • Meal Type
      • Breakfast + Brunch
      • Dinner
      • Lunch
      • Soups, Stews, + Chilis Too
      • Vegetables, Sides + Salads
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      • Snacks + Appetizers
  • COOKBOOKS
    • Good Food Cookbook
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My Food Freedom and Recipes for Beyond Your Whole30

10 recipes from the Whole Smiths that are great for life after Whole30. As well, a bit about how I approach my Food Freedom today and how I got here.

Ohhh man. It’s Monday and I’m coming off four days of a non-stop girls weekend in LA with two of my girlfriends and here I am thinking I can pull off a killer blog post about Food Freedom. But you know what? I got this. Not only because I slay Mondays but because I’m realizing that this weekend was a perfect example of how I eat clean but in moderation, even while away. I’ll be sprinkling some of the my most popular post-Whole30 recipes throughout the article, so if you see something you like make sure to click it and Pin it or save it for later. You can also head over to pre-order my new book, The Good Food Cookbook, HERE as it’s loaded with recipes that contain recipes that are perfect for life post-Whole30.

Mustard Roasted Crispy Chicken from the Whole Smiths. The secret to the crispy crust on it is pork rinds! Paleo friendly and gluten-free. A MUST Pin.
Crispy Mustard Roasted Chicken

So let’s make one thing clear because I get this question a lot. No, I don’t eat Whole30 every day. I don’t really know that anyone does nor do I think anyone should have that as their end goal. And before I go any further that that, I want to make something else clear. This is my version of food freedom, you will have your own. This is simply how I approach food and hopefully bits will resonate with you and your journey and you can find some ideas that will incorporate well into your food life.

I realize for me to start talking about my Food Freedom I need to back up many years to how I used to view food. I came from a family that was health conscious. My parents were active, whether it was my dad playing a plethora of sports or my mom hitting up the elliptical machine at the gym I always had a notion that movement was healthy. Our pantry wasn’t loaded up with Twinkies and unlimited supplies of soda. But as a child of the 80’s and 90’s we had lot’s of granola bars, some processed fruit snacks, low-fat string cheese, wheat bread and margarine. You know, the “healthy” stuff.

banana blondies gluten free paleo
Paleo Banana Blondies

However along with that healthy 80’s/90’s mentality came the notion that healthy meant skinny. The messages  surrounding “healthy” always seemed to focus on making you skinny. That’s what I grew up around. Skinny = healthy. And less food = skinny = healthy made a lot of sense to me. Diets were big then and everyone always seemed to “be on a diet”. Which in my young eyes meant not eating a lot of food. So this is the image of food I grew up to know and what was imprinted into my mind.

Baja Shrimp Tacos

Knowing what I know now, it’s such a flawed picture. I saw that relationship with food play out through my life many times in many ways. While I can never say I had a true eating disorder, I think it’s fair to say I had a disordered relationship with food. I used food as a vehicle to make me feel good when I was unhappy but I also used food as the enemy when I wasn’t feeling great about myself and needed something to control in my life. I want to make one thing clear, I never had such an issue with food that I felt my health was in danger or that anyone else would ever think that I did. My weight was always fairly steady within a 15 pound flux depending on how much of a gym rat I was at the time and I never really went without because I loved food too much. I was still healthy but my mind was fucked up on how I viewed food. As an emotional tool rather that a vehicle to wellness.

The reason why I want to emphasize this is because I think that it’s easy to think of clinically diagnosed eating disorders as the only flawed relationships with food. However, so many more of us struggle on a different level with how we view and use food. We become a prisoner to what we are eating. Is it too much? Is it too little? Oh man, I just ate four brownies, why did I do that to myself and then proceed to feel guilty after that. What we eat plays into our worth at that moment and beyond.

Green Chile Chipotle Burger

About 15 years ago a friend said something to me that I will never forget. It was a friend’s sister that I had become close with. In my mind she was kind of a badass. She was the ultimate doesn’t give an kind of eff girl, kinda like a honey badger. She wasn’t a super girlie girl and that idea that she ever cared about what she ate struck me as strange, she didn’t seem the “type” to care about that stuff. But we were talking one day and she said, “Every woman is one step away from an eating disorder.” The context of that was that women (and perhaps men but I’m a woman and I’ll speak to my own experience) overthink about our food intake and use it as more than just nourishment for our bodies and develop an unhealthy relationship to it. It was then that I realized so many of us used food as a tool the wrong way.

Apple + Cherry Frittata

Now that I’ve laid the foundation of how I (and what I anticipate to be so many others) developed and viewed my relationship with food over all of these years, where has that left me? How have I come to a point where food doesn’t control me or my worth in the way that it did for so many years.

By eating real food the majority of the time. Not always, but most.

It’s that simple. But let’s talk about why and why it didn’t happen overnight and why I still grab a bag of Cheetos when I want them.

It was a process for me, starting with when my children were born. I was looking for the best way to nourish them. Was it being a vegan or vegetarian? Was it just eating fish and vegetables? Was dairy good for them or terrible? I had no idea. But when I started learning about the paleo diet, it made sense. I’m not super strict about all of the tenants of paleo but I look at it as a diet on mostly unprocessed, real foods. I felt that these foods were the foods that our body has evolved all of these years to be able to process properly. So I went with that. What was the most natural way to eat and how can I make it realistic in today’s modern society?

Frozen Cherries “Jubilee”

I slowly started eliminating things from my diet and finding replacements for them. My daily Diet Cokes were replaced my kombuchas and gluten was replaced by gluten-free items (not always a better choice for what it’s worth). I started finding things that I could easily swap out with substitutions I liked. I stopped buying traditional milk and tarted using almond milk in it’s place as a permanent change. As I made more and more changes, the more they stuck. My suggestion to you is to start with the easy ones and make them permanent. What have you had an easy time with on your Whole30? Decide to make that change permanent. Do you love having a large Whole30 compliant breakfast to get your days going? Great! Make that part of your morning from here on out. Do you not miss creamer in your coffee? Perfect. You’re done with it. Write out a list of changes you’ve made on Whole30 that you are happy to keep that you can say right now you can make permanent.

Paleo Chicken Enchiladas

Next, what are you struggling with? Maybe it was your coffee creamer. Find an alternative that you can be happy with. Perhaps it is an almond based creamer that has a touch of sugar but you’re ok with that because dairy was really what was killing you. Or maybe it’s adding some plain almond milk and a hint of maple syrup or honey. Maybe wine was difficult for you to go without during your Whole30 but if you have some now, you have a headache after (like me) and decide for yourself if it’s worth it to have anymore. Or perhaps it’s about having just half a glass. Find some of the areas you struggle with a make a list for that too. Think about the “why” it was hard for you and come up with a better alternative. Maybe that alternative isn’t perfectly Whole30 compliant but it’s a better choice than what you were doing before.

Start with that and know that as time goes on and after you implement more and more changes, things will get easier. Maybe after time, you won’t even want added sweetener in your coffee. But it’s not going to be overnight and it’s not going to be on the day you finish your Whole30. Be ok with that. Truly. Sit with that and be ok with that. Know that completing your Whole30 is just the start of your Food Freedom. It’s not the end all be all. You will learn things on your Whole30 that you can’t unlearn, you have that knowledge with you to take forward and learn from. Do it.

Grain-free No'tmeal from the Whole Smiths. The perfect cozy dish to start your day! Paleo-friendly and gluten-free.
Grain-Free No’tmeal

But when you dive head first into a cheesecake, that’s all good too. Allow yourself not to feel the guilt that your mind is telling you to feel. For me that’s the most important part, releasing the guilt attached to food. It’s all good. It was just a piece (or three) of cheesecake. It’s just food and you are ALWAYS able to move on from it. It’s not like you tattoo’d your face guys. You always have the power to choose different moving forward.

And here’s the thing, I made my husband a Key Lime Pie last week for his birthday. That thing is all crap, let me tell you. It’s a shit ton of condensed milk (i.e. boiled down milk and loads of sugar), sour cream, crumbled cookies as a crust and whipped cream. I had two pieces and hot damn it was good. I immediately got snarfly, phlegmy, and bloated from all of that dairy and sugar but I didn’t even care. I worked hard on that pie, it was his birthday and it was freaking amazing. But here’s the deal, I didn’t feel guilty. Because our dinner was actually Whole30 compliant (braised short ribs and mashed potatoes) and I’ve eliminated eating foods like that from my diet on a regular basis. So when I do eat them, I don’t feel guilty because it’s not part of my regular diet. I know it is a treat to be enjoyed and I know I’ll be eating well then next day. I didn’t have it for breakfast the next morning but I did have another (smaller) slice the next day. It’s all good.

A dairy-dree, gluten-free chocolate hazelnut spread that is paleo friendly by the Whole Smiths. BETTER than Nutella, a must-Pin and MUST-try.
Chocolate Hazelnut Spread

My point is when the majority of my food decisions are foods that fuel me and make me feel great, I don’t sweat the other stuff because that’s not the majority of what I eat anymore. I also know that “skinny” doesn’t equal healthy and it isn’t even a goal for me anymore. Being fit (enough) and well is however. But it took more than a couple of weeks to get here. It took almost 4 years from when I started eating paleo to today. I might have figured it out on year 3 but I wasn’t counting. It was a continual process of making better decisions because I knew better now. Choosing to keep persevering despite regular face flops into candy, cakes and mac n cheese was the key to success.

An easy to make summer salad with tomatoes and corn from the Whole Smiths. SUCH a hit and a total crowd pleaser. A must-make.
Zesty Corn Salad

This post is getting a bit long so I need to start wrapping things up. But what about those of you who need more structure than that? Guidelines to thrive? Maybe that’s why you did so well on your Whole30 because there were clear rules of what you need to do. But now what? I encourage you to make the lists I talked about above and create your own plan around that. Nobody is going to hold your hand and the only person to hold you accountable is still going to be yourself. But take what you’re learned from your Whole30 and create your own framework for the next 30 days after you’ve completed your reintroduction. Incorporate what you’ve learned and see where that leads you. Commit and be true to yourself. Maybe you’ll dive into some Halloween candy one day but there’s always tomorrow and you’ll make a different choice (if you want) the next time. Your framework may evolve month to month depending on what you learn.

Ok, whew that was a lot. I’m spent and need to go gab the kids from school now. I hope this article will shed some grace into your food journey and give you some ideas of how I’ve come to find mine and in turn give you the trust to know you will find yours as long as you continue on your path.

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Note: I only work with companies and products that I feel passionately about and that align with the Whole Smiths’ views and that this post contains sponsored content. While I am compensated for the work I do, my opinions and bad jokes are always 100% my own.

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Comments

  1. Courtney says

    October 17, 2017 at 2:08 am

    Thanks for sharing! Figuring a out a balance is something I struggle with, but love your message of “no guilt”!!

    Reply
    • Michelle says

      November 8, 2017 at 7:55 pm

      I’m so happy you found it helpful!

      Reply
  2. Megan says

    October 17, 2017 at 3:53 am

    Completely random note: my mom and husband both get headaches from wine that have sulfites in them as well. However, they noticed that organic red wines (no sulfites) don’t affect them. Don’t know if you’ve tried it, but it might make a difference with your “worth it”. 🙂

    Reply
    • Michelle says

      November 8, 2017 at 7:55 pm

      That’s great to know! Thank you for sharing!

      Reply
  3. Cristey says

    October 17, 2017 at 4:24 pm

    This was so practical and helpful I took notes. Thank you.

    Reply
    • Michelle says

      November 8, 2017 at 7:55 pm

      So glad to hear that!

      Reply
  4. Lynda says

    February 1, 2018 at 5:01 am

    I just finished my first Whole30 and I plan to continue with it. Loved this post-your story about growing up was almost identical to mine! Looking forward to Food Freedom!

    Reply
  5. Mallory says

    April 5, 2018 at 4:02 pm

    This was everything I needed to hear! I’m almost a month out from ending my first whole30 and I have had the hardest time with food freedom. I’ve had a bad habit of associating foods with behaviors of “good or bad” and always feeling guilty for choosing to eat “not so clean”

    It’s been a struggle, but it’s nice hearing perspective that it happens and it takes time. I know that I enjoyed learning how to prepare foods that were healthy and clean and I intend to carry that with me. My food freedom is going to be a journey, but I’m going to try your method of writing lists! Any other tips?

    Reply

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Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the internet, I’m Michelle and welcome to the Whole Smiths. These days I’m a mother to two smiley girls, a happy wife to one fantastic dude and we live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Including myself. After that, I asked people to Including myself.  After that, I asked people to elaborate if they were willing. I received hundreds of messages with similar themes.  Increases in levels of anxiety, negativity, loneliness. Parents struggling working from home while managing distance learning. Despair, monotony. Unappreciated teachers. People experiencing loss of loved ones on top of it all.  Changes in tolerances levels of what we were willing to accept in relationships and society. Reevaluating careers, relationships and more.  Reading all of your messages, I kept finding myself saying “Uh huh, yep, totally, me too”. I didn’t feel so alone in this and wished I could share all of the responses with you as well.  So let’s do it here. If you’re comfortable, share in the comments how you’re feeling. Others are in the same boat and it helps knowing you are not alone.  In the meantime, it’s something to start turning around. For all of us, and I firmly believe we can. I’m planning to start finding guests and topics for @getwellthypodcast that will help us address this.  I’m also going to share one (little) thing on my stories every day that brings me joy or happiness. My hope is that it will help trigger something in *your* day that brings you joy that you can focus on. I encourage you to share your moments and tag me as well.  I firmly believe all of this will make us stronger in, we just need to actively pull out of this to get there.
Wanna make your Sunday brunch extra special? My To Wanna make your Sunday brunch extra special? My Tomato Basil Baked Eggs will do just that.  Cam’s birthday is Monday and she couldn’t decided if she wanted these or donuts for her birthday breakfast. I gotta say I’m pretty  impressed am soon to be 11 year was making that consideration.  But they are THAT good.  Recipe at the link in my profile.  https://www.thewholesmiths.com/tomato-basil-baked-eggs/
Legit all I seem to be craving these days are cold Legit all I seem to be craving these days are cold salads. Like ice cold.  Like this Thousand Island Wedge Salad. 🥰  I love me a wedge salad but sometimes hate that it doesn’t feel like a complete meal... so I changed it up a bit and added some egg for protein. And bacon because... bacon!  What do you think? Are you in salad season yet or still on soup season?  Recipe at the link in my profile.  https://www.thewholesmiths.com/thousand-island-dressing-wedge-salad/
Time truly does fly. ❤️ It feels just yesterd Time truly does fly. ❤️  It feels just yesterday I took this picture. People warn you that time flies, don’t wait till the end to realize they were right.  Enjoy the now. Let love in and share yours.  Valentine’s Day isn’t about romantic love in our home but it’s about finding love wherever you can. Any nook and cranny. Friendships, family, nature, community, wherever.  We choose love. Happy Valentine’s Day. ❤️
These Cherry Bourbon Chocolate Truffles will make These Cherry Bourbon Chocolate Truffles will make you feel like the world’s finest chocolatier... or Lucy in the scene where’s there’s chocolate everywhere and she’s stuffing ‘em in her bra.  Either way, they’re delicious and actually supper easy to make.  Besides, we all know the only way to say “I love you” and mean it is with some chocolate and a cheesy card. At least it’s not Palmer’s. ☺️  Ok really though, these truffles are the shizzzz. In fact, just make them for yourself and share them with no one.  https://www.thewholesmiths.com/cherry-bourbon-chocolate-truffles-recipe/
I know it’s all about Brady and Gronk right now I know it’s all about Brady and Gronk right now (blah) but here’s a throwback to when @thepetitepanaderya and I got to be a part of the SB Halftime field team crew in 2016.  It has always been on my bucket list to be on the field for the Halftime show, so when SB was here in Santa Clara, I was going to find a way.  I saw you could sign up to be a part of the field team that puts together the stage so I signed up. It was two weeks of practicing and they paid us minimum wage, although I would have done it for free.  A few hundred people were part of it and we were each assigned to a “cart”. We were taught exactly what to do, how to assemble the various parts of the stage and QUICK. It all had to be put together in around 7 minutes.  We weren’t allowed to have any cell phones out during practices and signed confidentiality waivers. The second week we got to watch the performers rehearse (over and over again). JayZ and Blue Ivy were in the stands watching. Bruno Mars was perfection and nailed everything every time. I was blown away at how talented he was live. Chris Martin was so kind. Beyoncé drove in front of us in her golf cart and waved. She also made us wait in the freezing cold while she tried different hair and fan / wind blowing situations.  Game day. There was a staging area a few miles away that we met at and we were bussed in with police escorts down the 101.  Once at the stadium we hung out with our carts waiting our turn. Everyone was so pumped. As SOON as the second quarter ended it was go time and the adrenaline was pumping. Seriously, that feeling was awesome.  Lucky for us, once we finished building our cart we had wait on the sidelines... right in front.  The energy was intense and I loved every minute of it.  Bigger picture, seeing how everyone worked together flawlessly to create the performance was striking. I’ve never experienced teamwork like this and never thought it would be such an impactful experience.  It was one of the BEST things I’ve ever done as silly as it sounds. Everyone who does it city after city says the same thing.  If you ever have the chance and find the SB in your town, do it. Trust me.
Cool Ranch CHICKPEAS anyone? While some (most) p Cool Ranch CHICKPEAS anyone?  While some (most) people are likely to be shoveling Cool Ranch Doritos down the batch tomorrow... we’ll be whipping up a batch of these Cool Ranch CHICKPEAS!  Yeah, I know. It’s kind of obnoxious because Cool Ranch Doritos are the sh^%. But these at least give you that same zesty flavor and way more than nutrients. I’m kinda obsessed!  Or just eat the Doritos. 🤷🏼‍♀️  While we’re talking chips? What’s your fave? I think mine are the Cool Ranch Doritos.. what can I say...  Now I’m feeling like I sold you on the Doritos rather than the chickpeas! Whoops.  Anyways. Recipe for the CHICKPEAS in my bio.  https://www.thewholesmiths.com/cool-ranch-roasted-chickpeas/

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