It Starts with Food: Book Giveaway and Interview

Utah transplants Dallas and Melissa Hartwig have just released their first book titled, It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways, which advocates a 30-day nutritional reset designed to transform your life and health. I met Dallas and Melissa at a Lululemon book signing at Trolley Square and invited them to contribute to our blog and share this exciting program with all of you.

This interview with Dallas and Melissa explains the Whole30® program and what you can gain from implementing the program into your life. Interested in winning a free copy of It Starts with Food? Leave a comment about why you want to try the Whole30® program, and we'll select one lucky winner to get a copy of the book.

1. What is the “Whole9”, and how did it come to be?

Whole9 is our business name – and our website. The “9” in “Whole9” comes from the nine factors we evaluate when working with our consulting clients. While we think nutrition is foundational for good health, it’s not the only important component! Our 9 also includes exercise, sleep, stress management, active recovery, injury rehabilitation, personal growth, fun and play, and temperance. (Is that nine? They’re like the seven dwarves…we often forget one.) When working with clients, we evaluate and triage all of these factors, and create a multi-factorial plan to help them achieve their health and fitness goals.

We developed this model while training clients in our gym, and while Dallas was working with his physical therapy patients. These folks were coming to us specifically for fitness training or injury rehabilitation, but it became progressively clearer to us that addressing their dietary habits, sleep quality, stress management, and other factors was not only helpful, but necessary in order for them to achieve their goals.



2. Why did you call your book It Starts With Food?

While all of our nine factors are critical for optimal health, we think nutrition is the foundation of any good health and fitness program. It’s also the factor over which you have the most control–you can’t always sleep as much as you want to, or have less stress in your life, but you can always control the food you put in your mouth. That makes food vitally important to your good health.

While brainstorming titles, we kept coming around to this concept of food being foundational, primary. And after rejecting countless proposed titles, we realized It Starts With Food captured our philosophy perfectly. Whether the “it” is disease prevention or disease progression; creating metabolic dysfunction or restoring a healthy metabolism; a decline in health biomarkers or an improvement in biohealth markers…it all starts with food.

We think the title is one of the reasons our book is doing so well – It Starts With Food is clearly not another quick-fix “diet” book, yet it’s been #1 on Amazon’s nutrition list (and in the top 25 book on all of Amazon) since its release!

3. What is your Whole30® program, and does this program play a role in It Starts with Food?

Our Whole30® program, created in 2009, is a short-term nutritional “reset” designed to teach you how the food you’ve been eating has been impacting your health and quality of life. Thousands of people have used the program to change their relationship with food, break unhealthy food-related habits and addictions, and reduce or eliminate the symptoms of a huge number of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions – everything from asthma to allergies, diabetes to infertility, depression to fibromyalgia.

While the Whole30 chapter is the centerpiece of It Starts With Food, it’s only one component of our overall program, and of the message we share in the book. Our Good Food recommendations are built on a three-pronged approach: science, our experience, and self-experimentation. The Whole30 fulfills the third piece, but the first half of the book is devoted to explaining the science behind the program, and sharing recommendations born of the vast experience we’ve accumulated with our clients and Whole30 participants.

While we do outline the Whole30 in detail in It Starts With Food, the second half of the book is devoted to taking the lessons you’ve learned during your own Whole30 program and using them to create new, sustainable habits. After all, what good is a 30-day program if you arrive at Day 31 not knowing how to maintain your new, healthy habits? We outline our plan for “riding your own bike”: making good choices out there in the real world, in a variety of situations, and what to do when you (inevitably) fall down. We even have a section on talking to friends and family about the changes you’ve been making, and how to handle criticism or skepticism.

4. Is your program appropriate for vegetarians or vegans?

We’ve spent a lot of time helping vegetarians and vegans apply our dietary principles within the constructs of their own self-prescribed limitations. This is an area of special interest for us, as Dallas spent the first 20 years of his life vegetarian, and his Mom successfully transitioned from a vegetarian diet to following our recommendations to include moderate amounts of high-quality protein in her meals about year ago. (Resistant to the idea of eating meat for quite some time, she is now our biggest fan, preaching the benefits of the Whole30 everywhere she goes!)

We’ve written several articles on our blog aimed at the vegetarian and vegan community, and recently recorded a podcast for the Paleo Summit outlining our full recommendations for how to optimize any diet, even if it does not include any animal protein sources. We also devoted a section of It Starts With Food on how to implement our recommendations around a vegetarian/vegan model.

The response we’ve had from the vegetarian/vegan community has been overwhelmingly positive. People have been so grateful for these recommendations. We try to emphasize the things we have in common, rather than focus on our differences. We believe that regardless of your self-imposed limitations, even vegetarians and vegans can implement pieces of our healthy eating framework and see improvements in health and quality of life.

5. What’s next for the Whole9 team?

I’d love to say that after almost a year of non-stop stress and work on the book, we’re taking a break, but we continue to push ahead with new projects. (We’re suckers for punishment…and helping people.)

We’ve got an exciting Whole30 project in the works, set to roll out in July, and a new e-book in development. We’ve got a few book signings coming up in Toronto, Boston, and Hoboken, NJ, and we’ll be in Europe for six weeks this fall, connecting with our overseas readers, signing books, and holding a series of seminars in Iceland, Sweden, and Denmark.

And yes, we’re already talking about our next book!

For more information about the book, visit official It Starts With Food page on the Whole9 site for an excerpt from the book, reviews, ordering information, and special ISWF bonus material.

Order It Starts With Food on BarnesandNoble.com or Amazon.com, or pick up a copy at your local bookstore for instant gratification.

Join our next official Whole30® program, launching August 1st! Get more information here. And be sure to check out our new Whole30 forum.

Don't forget to post a comment about why you want to win a copy of It Start with Food. We'll pick one winner to receive a free copy! Enter by July 3rd to qualify.