Ordinarily I would do my Monday Morning Quarterbacking today, but since it is DAY ONE of my Whole 30 experiment, I’m changing it up a bit. Instead of looking at what went right or wrong this weekend (because honestly, who does everything right on holiday weekends??), I’m going to focus on my first day of Whole 30 and how I appear to have failed miserably at prepping for it.

Admittedly, this half-Jew with no children took part in some serious Easter celebrating yesterday. While I only had two small pieces of candy all day (That’s actually a total lie – You’ll see later…) I did eat Easter brunch and Easter dinner and I didn’t hold back on the ham or the bacon or the lasagna.

That’s right. I said it. LASAGNA, bitches. And it was delicious.

Moving on.

Here we are at Day 1. I’ve read a lot about how I can expect the next week to play out. According to the book, today I should feel ready to conquer the world. By this weekend, I should hate anyone and everything in sight. Apologies to The Husband in advance.

I expected the first week to have a lot of trial and error. But less than a day into it, I’m noticing a lot of errors. I’m chalking it up to one more benefit for people to read my blog: so they will learn from my mistakes.

Back to all the Eastering on Sunday. Because most of the day was spent with family, my meal prep game wasn’t at its strongest. My goal was to get enough done that I could make it through Day 1 with minimal challenges. I started with breakfast.

Breakfasts are always the hardest meal for me, since I’m up at O’Dark Thirty to work out before having to be at work by 8 am. To prepare for this morning, I spent some time last night chopping veggies that I can keep in a container in the fridge and take out only what I need to mix in with some scrambled eggs. Five-minute breakfast. There you go. Easy-peasey, right?

Wrong.

Yes, I did enough prep to make a simple, fast breakfast. But, I used only two eggs and ended up hungry by the time I got to work. I brought a banana as an emergency afternoon snack, but ended up having to eat it mid-morning. By 11 am, I was counting the minutes until noon so I could eat my lunch. Lesson learned: Tomorrow, I’m going to try three eggs and/or adding some sweet potato to fill me up early in the day so I’m not ravenous and eat all my food before noon.

For lunch, I usually take leftovers from whatever dinner we had the night before. Because that wasn’t really an option for today, I knew I had to come up with something easy. I used the protein salad recipe from the Whole 30 cookbook to make a little tuna salad to bring to work. That meant taking time Sunday night to make the infamous Whole 30 Basic Mayo recipe. Everyone I know who has done Whole 30 has sworn by it, and now I know what they’re talking about.  I don’t think I’ll ever go back to store-bought mayo again.

A few tips for anyone wanting to give it a whirl: I mistakenly started to blend the ingredients in a mini food processor that’s really more like a chopper. WRONG. You have to drizzle olive oil into it slowly, while it’s blending, so make sure you’re using a food processor or KitchenAid mixer that you can leave open on top and pour the oil in. I had to transfer my mayo base to a mixing bowl midway through. Also, the book says you can use an immersion blender while you’re adding the oil. Don’t. Seriously, just don’t. I learned the hard way that it’s near impossible to hold the immersion blender with one hand and do a good job of mixing everything while slowly pouring olive oil with the other. Even with The Husband as my handy sous chef, it was hard to do. Use a standing mixer – you’ll have a much easier time.

Making the mayo was the hardest part of meal prep last night. Once that was done, I was able to mix the tuna salad and package up veggies for our lunches in plenty of time to sit down and watch Madame Secretary while enjoying my last York Peppermint Patties I’ll eat for the next 30 days.  (Told you I ate more than just two pieces of Easter candy.)

Maybe my favorite part of Day 1 – and so far, the only thing I seem to have done right – is when my boss brought in leftovers and set a bag full of goodies on my desk. Desserts and pizza. No joke. I brought it downstairs to the kitchen, ignored how magical that pizza smelled, and ran back to my desk and started eating my tuna salad. Suck it, pizza.

If anyone else is starting up Whole 30 or looking for some meal inspiration, I’ll be posting recipes and tips and stories about what I’m sure will be many more kitchen mishaps so you can learn from my mistakes. Like my immersion blender blunder. My shoulder is still sore.

Note: This is a re-post from the Tumblr version of this blog. It originally ran on March 28, 2016.