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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!
I wanted to share my Primal success story with you, and give you a huge thanks for changing my life forever. Here goes…
When I was in high school I was way too skinny, but man did I have some energy. I could run a few miles playing games, ride my bike around the neighborhood up steep hills, roller blade for an hour, play a basketball game, and climb a tree or two before I’d call it a day. I was a machine. I weighed a nice 120 lbs soaking wet standing at 5? 10?. The doctors always told my mom I was underweight.
During this time my nutrition was awful. I’d routinely eat Chips Ahoy! cookies for breakfast, tons of sugary cereals and snacks, and tons of soda. Despite this disaster of a diet I was extremely active and always skinny, so no one, including myself, was concerned about my nutrition. All was not entirely well though. I had some blood sugar issues. If I didn’t eat every few hours I’d crash hard and in a couple rare occurrences even passed out from the blood sugar drops. I was not diagnosed as anemic, just too skinny, so why not eat some more cookies?
I continued this way through college, but I eventually moved out on my own, got a job as a software engineer and got sedentary. This is when all hell broke loose. No longer did I do any form of exercise unless you count the twitching my fingers did over the keyboard. No longer did I have my parents cooking meals for me, so my diet got even worse. It was bagels and donuts for breakfast, McDonald’s for lunch, and some boxed stove-top meal for dinner. Over 2 years I steadily put on weight at the rate of about 2 lbs a month. I did not have any concerns over this because of how skinny I was. In fact, it was nice to not look so skinny anymore.
How I was not completely sick from my poor diet is still beyond me, but things started to happen that I didn’t like. I started getting pretty severe GERD. I’d wake up multiple times throughout the night and have to eat a bunch of anti-acids to try to get it to stop. A couple of times it got really bad and kept me up all night. Additionally, I was out of shape like never before. The day I decided I needed to make a change was when I realized my heart rate was through the roof from just squatting down to tie my shoe one morning. I weighed myself and found out that my once 120 lb self was now a whopping 187 lbs.
No big deal I thought. I’ll just exercise it all off like the old days. I’ll run and bike a lot and still eat the foods I love and lose weight like a mad man. Easy! I tried to jog a mile the next day, made it about 1/4 mile and had to walk the rest of the way. It took me three weeks to build back up to a full mile. I stayed pretty active for a couple of months which made me more hungry, so I ate more. I made no progress.
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