How the Primal Blueprint Helped Me End My Struggle With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

by Mark Sisson Mark's Daily Apple

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It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

In 2000, after an exhaustive round of tests, I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Basically, I had deep and never-ending fatigue with no identifiable cause. Not knowing I had any other choice, I resigned myself to a life limited by my illness. I had to weigh each activity against how long it would take me to recover from it. Something seemingly simple, like taking a hike, could result in days of recovery time. I went from a highly active person who loved hiking and tennis to someone who had to take a nap after weeding for a half hour. In a nutshell, it sucked.

For nine years I let myself accept that my life would have to suck. Then, in 2009, I came across information from a doctor in the UK who specializes in treating CFS. She had a detailed supplement plan…and she also highly recommended eating Primally to feed our mitochondria. Everything she said made perfect sense to me, so I set about following her plan. I started taking the numerous supplements, and I gave Primal eating a try. Unfortunately, I didn’t educate myself properly about how to eat Primally, so I just gave up the bad stuff and didn’t replace it with the good stuff I was missing. Needless to say, my Primal eating ended quickly. I had crazy cravings for bread, and because I hadn’t paid attention to how my new way of eating was making me feel, I simply gave up the Primal eating. I did keep on the supplements, though, and they helped enormously! I went from not knowing if I could get out of bed in the morning to at least being able to get up without wondering if I was really sick or just having CFS issues.

Jump forward almost three years – this past March. I embarked on a food elimination plan for 28 days, just to see what would happen. After about two and a half weeks, I noticed a HUGE difference in how I felt. I actually had – gasp! – ENERGY. The brain-fog vanished. I could concentrate on tasks for long periods of time. When I got home from work, I didn’t collapse into a puddle of exhaustion on the couch. What could possibly be in my diet to have caused me to suffer from chronic fatigue for so many years?

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