It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways [Hardcover]

Melissa Hartwig (Author), Dallas Hartwig (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 12, 2012

Now a New York Times bestseller!

Food can change your life in unexpected ways. It Starts With Food will show you how.

It Starts With Food outlines a clear, balanced, sustainable plan to change the way you eat forever--and transform your life in unexpected ways. Your success story begins with "The Whole30," Dallas and Melissa Hartwig's powerful 30-day nutritional reset.

Since 2009, their underground Whole30 program has quietly led tens of thousands of people to weight loss, improved quality of life and a healthier relationship with food - accompanied by stunning improvements in sleep, energy levels, mood and self-esteem. More significantly, many people have reported the "magical" elimination of a variety of symptoms, diseases and conditions - in just 30 days.

diabetes · high cholesterol · high blood pressure · obesity · acne · eczema · psoriasis · hives asthma · allergies · sinus infections · migraines · acid reflux · celiac disease · Crohn's · IBS bipolar disorder · depression · seasonal affective disorder · eating disorders · ADHD endometriosis · PCOS · infertility · arthritis · Lyme disease · hypothyroidism · fibromyalgia

Now, Dallas and Melissa detail the theories behind the Whole30, summarizing the science in a simple, accessible manner. It Starts With Food shows you how certain foods may be having negative effects on how you look, feel and live - in ways that you'd never associate with your diet. More importantly, they outline their life-long strategy for Eating Good Food in a clear and detailed action plan designed to help you create a healthy metabolism, heal your digestive tract, calm systemic inflammation and put an end to unhealthy cravings, habits, and relationships with food.

Infused with their signature wit, tough love and common sense, It Starts With Food is based on the latest scientific research and real-life experience, and includes success stories, a shopping guide, a meal planning template, a meal plan with creative, delicious recipes, an extensive list of resources, and much more.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Victory Belt Publishing; Hardcover with Jacket edition (June 12, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936608898
• ISBN-13: 978-1936608898
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (585 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Nutrition
  • #14 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Weight Loss
  • #18 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Other Diets

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It Starts With Food addresses the unhealthy relationship many of us have with food, and shows us how getting back to eating what nature intended can heal us not only physically, but psychologically as well." -Shannon Ford, Mrs. United States 2011

"Here is the nutrition book we've been waiting for. It Starts With Food gives us common sense and counseling to help you break through the barriers and figure out your own optimal diet." -Emily Deans, MD, Harvard Medical School

"This book provides the nutritional foundation to help my athletes achieve their performance goals, while guiding my everyday clients towards radically improved health and quality of life." -Eva Twardokens, two-time U.S. Olympian, six-time National Champion, alpine skiing

"Need some tough love cleaning up a lousy diet? Dallas and Melissa Hartwig ask that you enlist in their 30-day boot camp -- and you'll emerge a brand-new person." -The Los Angeles Times

Named one of the Top 50 Health Books by the Huffington Post, September 2012.

From the Back Cover

Imagine yourself healthier than you ever thought possible.  It starts with food.
 
What if you could increase your energy, sleep better, improve your mood  and lose weight - permanently?
 
What if you could break the unhealthy cycle of food cravings, indulgence and guilt - forever?
 
What if you could naturally change your tastes, so the foods you love to eat are the same foods that make you healthier?
 
And what if you could eliminate the symptoms of your medical condition - just by changing the food you put on your plate?

It Starts With Food will prove all of these things are possible - starting with just 30 days.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Victory Belt Publishing; Hardcover with Jacket edition (June 12, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936608898
• ISBN-13: 978-1936608898
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (585 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Nutrition
  • #14 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Weight Loss
  • #18 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Other Diets

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

197 of 208 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The concepts in this book are life-saving (and tasty too)! June 12, 2012

By Thomas E. Denham

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Co-workers would ask me if I had had lunch if I was critical or demanding. They noticed that I was meaner when I was hungry and, unfortunately, I was hungry a lot. Eventually I was eating 6 times per day, but still got hungry. And as I got older, I got heavier. My body fat ballooned up to 37 percent. If you had known me in 1994 when I was competing in a marathon (26.2 mile) race every month, you might not believe it possible, but I gained 55 pounds.

I decided to do something about it in 2008 and joined a CrossFit gym - lifting weights, performing gymnastic moves, and literally standing on my head doing high intensity exercise three times per week. I ran 5 to 10 miles every weekend. I ate better - lots of salmon and veggies from the frozen food case - but after two years of effort, my body fat was still 27 percent. I had lost 20 pounds, but remained pudgy. Then I heard about Dallas and Melissa Hartwig's Whole30 program.

I did my first Whole30 in 2010. About two weeks into the program, I noticed that I was sleeping better. Then I started to set new personal records lifting heavy weights in the gym. I felt great and my energy levels stayed even across the day. I quit being so grumpy! I decided to keep following the Whole30 way of eating. After a few months, my annual blood work showed big improvements: good cholesterol - UP, bad cholesterol - DOWN. And I was losing weight. Nothing dramatic, but typically two pounds per month. The two pounds per month continued 15 months and I lost 30 pounds! I finally stopped losing weight when I was just 10 pounds above my marathon running weight from the 90's. And that 10 pounds was all new muscle!

I first met Dallas and Melissa Hartwig in 2011 when I attended one of their in-person nutrition workshops.... They were just as smart, friendly, and good looking in person as they were online. They are truly inspiring people. And their book - It Starts With Food - is just like them - smart, practical, informative, kind, tough, motivating, inspiring, hopeful...

As someone who has read most of the information on their website and attended their workshops, I expected to be familiar with everything in It Starts With Food, but I was wrong. The discussions of food cravings, the psychology of eating, and much of the science was new to me. And the Hartwigs made the science interesting. I wish my high school and college biology teachers had been as clear and practical as them! The Whole30 program is discussed in the book and the Hartwigs explain how you can do your own Whole30 and start getting the same kind of results I got in mine.

It Starts With Food is an incredible resource for anyone who wants to develop a healthier relationship with food or who just plain needs to because what they are doing now is killing them. Read more ›

408 of 461 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Actually, it is hard June 21, 2012

By Elizabeth Foss

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

One quote that keeps popping up is "this is not hard compared to birthing a baby, quitting heroin, or beating cancer." Actually, it is. I haven't got any experience with heroin, but I had 7 unmedicated births, 2 c-sections, and I beat cancer. Those things are hard, too but that doesn't make this easy. This is hard. It's hard to eat this way in a world that doesn't. It's hard to cook for a big family -- either all eating this way, or them eating this way and me not eating what they're eating. It's hard to stick with it day in and day out. It's not too terribly hard for a few weeks, but it is hard as a lifestyle. I feel anti-social. I know my eating habits put a damper on others' enjoyment when our eating out choices are dictated by my "can'ts." I know I've offended more than one gracious hostess with my polite, "No thank you." And I do miss crafting a perfect loaf of artisan bread or making my grandmother's homemade pasta. I miss tomatoes fresh from the garden with olive oil and fresh mozzarella. I miss handing on food traditions of generations to my own children. I couldn't care less about sugar and I'm not lamenting processed foods at all. They were never in my diet. I'm struggling with the limited choices of real food left for me.

Admittedly, because of autoimmune issues, I'm eating the extreme end of this spectrum, eliminating nightshades, eggs, nuts, and coffee in addition to the other foods. This kind of eating got just a passing mention in the book, yet a large population of readers is reading precisely because they're battling autoimmune disease. Note: this book doesn't recommend giving up coffee even in cases of autoimmune disease, but other research (and my personal experience) does bear that out. And giving up coffee wasn't terribly difficult.... Peppers, curry seasoning, eggplant... those things are missed.

I'm not complaining and I think it's worth it, but I do think that in a future edition, the reader would be better served if there were more practical ways to cope with the everyday challenges of eliminating what is objectively a lot of food choices. For instance, two of the "go-to" recipes call for nuts. That works for some readers, but it doesn't work for the autoimmune folks. So, what's offered as a standby is just one more (two more) thing on the "don't" list.

I still think this is a valuable resource, but for most folks, longterm success with eating this way is going to take more than, "You can do it. It's not as hard as childbirth or cancer." Read more ›

275 of 313 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Do You Dare Take On The Whole30 Challenge For Yourself? June 12, 2012

By Livin' La Vida Low-Carb Man TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Not since Paleo nutritional health stalwart Robb Wolf released his groundbreaking 2010 New York Times bestselling book The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet have I been THIS excited about a nutritional health book. And while the co-authors Dallas and Melissa Hartwig are not necessarily enthusiastic advocates of the low-carb lifestyle that I love and cherish, they are big time believers in another concept I embrace and appreciate-that is, eating real, whole foods that nourish your body so that you can be both optimally healthy and as disease-free as humanly possible. This Paleo power couple has been promoting their unique path to "magical" success with literally thousands of clients who have gone through The Whole30 program since they founded the Whole9 in 2009. And now they stand on the precipice of bringing this simple yet powerful message to a new generation of people who are desperate for answers about how to deal with their obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, hypothyroidism, Celiac disease, infertility and so much more with the release of their extraordinary book entitled It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways.

The positive energy that Dallas and Melissa exude is so utterly contagious within the pages of this book that you'll become super-excited about starting your very own Whole30 journey head first right away. And whether you realize it yet or not, the fact that you are reading reviews like this one means your journey to change is already underway. No matter what your health reasons are for wanting to make a change in your life, it all really does "start with food...." We all make choices every single day about the quality of the foods we are consuming and it comes down to this-either we choose foods that nourish our bodies or we choose foods that damage our bodies. It's as simple as that. Once you realize the validity of this common sense fact, then making the necessary changes that Dallas and Melissa recommend in their book will be a snap. I'm gonna warn you now though: get ready to see some of the most significant physical and mental changes that you've ever experienced in your entire life. That's not sensationalized hyperbole-it's the truth! You'll just have to try it for yourself to join the ever-growing list of people who have restored their health and never looked back again.

If you've never heard of Dallas and Melissa Hartwig before, then they provide their unique story of how they got to this point of writing a book about their work at the beginning. You'll notice that they, like many in the Paleo community, were heavily influenced by their fellow Victory Belt author Robb Wolf who gave them the idea for doing a 30-day elimination diet that has become the basis for The Whole30. And yet they've modernized Paleo to the point of removing the caveman imagery that tends to be associated with this way of eating. As they so succinctly put it, "we are far more concerned with health than we are on history." It's not so much about mimicking the Paleolithic man as it is learning from the lessons that our hunter-gather ancestors taught us to make the best choices in the 21st Century.

And lest you think there's no science behind this nutritional plan, you'd be sorely mistaken. Not only that, Dallas and Melissa also have a wealth of personal experience helping clients seeing them make improvements in their health that defy conventional medical wisdom. And they know that the best way to find out what works for you is by conducting your own experiments on yourself to see what happens. They also recognize that we are all different with a wide variety of physical, emotional and psychological issues to work through that aren't resolved with a cookie-cutter approach. But as the title of their book suggests, food can and should be a powerful starting point for bringing about the positive changes you are looking for no matter who you are and what your personal situation looks like.

It's sad when you have to include a chapter in a book on nutrition defining what "food" is, but in a world where modern pseudo-food-like products such as Twinkies, Doritos and Coca-Cola are the most ubiquitous forms of edible products sold on supermarket shelves it's probably a very good idea. Dallas and Melissa explain the purpose of the various macronutrients found in good food and what role they play in being consumed. As a low-carber, I appreciated the blurb in there acknowledging that there is no dietary requirement for carbohydrates since the body can make them from the protein you consume (through a process in the liver known as gluconeogenesis). WOO HOO! Also, when they refer to fruit they make an excellent point that it "may promote an unhealthy psychological response" for people who haven't yet beaten their sugar addiction and thus should be avoided. When it comes to choosing between a Snickers bar or dried fruit and a nut bar, "your brain doesn't know the difference." YES! They also give credence to the mistaken notion that weight management is a simple math equation of reducing your calories and fat by concluding "if only it were that easy." AMEN!

Major themes covered in It Starts With Food include controlling cravings, learning to recognize satiation, why we eat for pleasure, how stress negatively impacts the body, why eating for you hormones is most important (with some pretty remarkable examples of what a typical good and bad hormonal day actually looks like), the role your gut plays in being healthy, why it is critical to reduce systemic silent inflammation in the body, beating your genetic tendencies towards poor health outcomes, why eliminating sweeteners will make life so much sweeter for you, how alcohol is a worthless substance to your body, reducing the megadoses of omega-6 fats in your body by dropping the seed oils, chunking the grains (even the whole grains!) and legumes because of their woeful nutritional value, doing your due diligence about whether dairy is a problematic food category for you or not, being aware of the symptoms associated with autoimmune diseases, and navigating through the maze of food choices out there to find the best possible foods to feed yourself well with the right meats, veggies, fats (yes, the right kind of fats like animal-based and tropical ones are VERY good for you!), and creating homemade meals your whole family will love and enjoy! This book is quite dense with information, but it's written in an engaging and oftentimes hilarious manner that you'll forget how much you're learning in the midst of all the fun!

Of course, what would the book be without getting into the nitty gritty of The Whole30 program which is what Dallas and Melissa provide towards the end of the book. Once they've laid the groundwork for why you should be following the edicts of their nutritional teachings, it's on to the plan itself. And lest you're wondering if you'll try this for a few days and decide to give up on it like every other health plan you've ever tried before, don't even think about it. This is hard-core, life-changing stuff that demands your full attention for 30 full days without even a smidge of cheating, fudging with the details or making up excuses for why you didn't do it. This is your welcome-to-the-real-world reality check and time to see just how serious you are about your health. When you realize "it's just 30 days" and give it a real go, then you can see just how much The Whole30 can help you overcome a chronic health issue that has perhaps plagued you for far too many years. You won't know unless you try and the plan is outlined for you clearly in black and white with full details on exactly what to do, how to do it, what to expect during the various phases of the 30 days, and evaluating whether you should make it a Whole45 or Whole60 to experience the best results for you (remember that self-experimentation stuff they discuss earlier in the book?). Dallas and Melissa don't coddle you through this because they assume you are all grown adults who can make choices for yourself and dig deep to make this happen. The payoff at the end of this process will make any pain along the way totally worth it!

Once you've completed your Whole30, instructions on how to reintroduce foods one at a time are included along with some strategies about trying to maintain the progress you have made over the long-term. They acknowledge the difficulty it can be trying to live this way in everyday life and that the goal of the program isn't perfection but a compass for making the best choices about how you eat. Building sustainable habits that will stick with you for life is what it's all about. There will be meals or even whole days when you get off of your Whole30 plan but that doesn't mean you've failed. You pick yourself up and get right back at it again confidently knowing what you need to do to continue the success you've already accomplish. Be the example for your friends and family to follow by doing your part to stay true to the principles you've learned in this book.

Towards the back of the book you'll find some critical information for "special populations" such as people with diabetes, autoimmune disease, IBS and IBD, food allergies, vegetarians and vegans, active individuals, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and even your kids. There's also specific information about some supplements that could help you along the way in this journey. Dallas and Melissa Hartwig are a compassionate couple who wish you nothing but the best in your own personal health journey. They believe the concepts they share in It Starts With Food will provide massive improvements in health for the vast majority of people, but they also realize that others will have a more difficult time despite the fact they are 100% compliant with the plan. Looking at every area of your life beyond food like sleep, exercise, stress and more will put you one step closer to finding the answers for yourself. It's a journey to the finish line no matter where you are in this race to health and Dallas and Melissa Hartwig have given you all the tools you need to make it happy. Now it's up to you. Do you dare take on The Whole30 challenge for yourself? Read more ›