Whole30’s Melissa Hartwig Urban on How Her Diet Plan Became an International Movement

Melissa Hartwig Urban, co-founder and CEO of Whole30, was the first guinea pig for her diet. “I was eating pretty healthy whole foods, I was exercising a ton: but what the Whole30 showed me in that first self-experiment were all the ways that I was using food to comfort, reward and punish myself, and to self-soothe to relieve anxiety,” she said of the origins of her diet plan, which has become a movement. Melissa spoke to Technori on the sidelines of the recent G2 Reach conference, which was held September 11 in Chicago. For the uninitiated, the idea of Whole30 is to break the pattern of unhealthy diet habits by taking on a highly restrictive diet for 30 days: that includes cutting out dairy, sugar and grains, among other ingredients.