Hello, this is Monica Reinagle. Welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast.

In last week's podcast I talked about the Whole30 Challenge and what I see as the

pros and cons of this very popular program. If you missed that episode you might want to go back and

listen to it now before continuing. In any case, as soon as that episode went live, the

emails and the comments started flooding in. Many of you wrote with your own experiences with

the Whole 30, both positive and negative. But several of you also felt that I had failed to address a key aspect of the Whole 30 approach.

Henry wrote,

You missed the part of the Whole 30 that comes right after the 30 days, which is the systematic reintroduction of the restricted foods back

into your diet.

I did a whole 30 last year and during the reintroduction phase, I realized that nightshades were causing a lot of problems for me that I had previously

been attributing to other things like gluten or not getting enough sleep.

I agree that the diet isn't sustainable and I wouldn't really ever want to

do one again. But I found that the elimination of so many food groups for a period, followed

by reintroducing them one at a time was incredibly illuminating

and has definitely changed the foods I eat on a regular basis.

Sarah, who did the Whole 30 with several of her family members, wrote with a similar experience.

It really bothers me, she wrote, that the most important part of the program,

Mindful Reintroduction, gets ignored. If you go out for pizza and beer on day 31, then you've got nothing out of it except a short-term restriction diet. However, reintroducing wheat, dairy, and alcohol one at a time while paying attention to how your body reacts,

well that's the point.

If we'd gone out for pizza and beer on day 31, we wouldn't know that all three of us apparently

have non-ceiliac wheat sensitivity,

or that my mother has a previously undiagnosed cow's milk allergy.

...