Flab to Fab in 7 Easy Months

by Mark Sisson Mark's Daily Apple

Recently by Mark Sisson: 17 Reasons You're Not LosingWeight

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!

P.S. This story was titled by the author of the story, Erin.

Dear Mark,

I am so excited to have a story I feel is worth submitting to the Primal Blueprint Real Life Stories. It’s certainly not anything I imagined at the beginning of this journey.

My story began like so many of the other stories I’ve read on Mark’s Daily Apple. Although I was very skinny in my younger years, sometime around puberty I started to pick up “baby fat” even though I’d had none previously. Through college my weight would fluctuate up and down. One year I’d be a size 6, and the next a 10. My eating habits, like most college students, were awful, but I walked almost everywhere I went, and my job working with children kept me on my feet all day, so I always stayed in an “average” range.

In my early 20s, when I stopped living within a mile radius of everywhere important I had to be and started working a job that involved a lot more sitting, I noticed the weight start to creep on again. However, this time it stayed. I wasn’t happy with this new development, and started to make some changes.

Thus began the vicious cycle of Chronic Cardio and CW diet that would inevitably lead to disappointment and giving up, only to try again 6 months later when my pants didn’t fit. I can remember at one point going to two back to back fitness classes three times a week (one strength and one cardio), and spending 60 grueling minutes on the treadmill or elliptical the other four days. I would go home and eat some low fat, whole grain dinner and count my calories like my life depended on it. However, despite all of this work, I could only take off 5-10 lbs and wasn’t seeing the kind of results that would make my effort feel worth it.

In my mid-20s my doctor did some routine blood work and told me I was hypoglycemic. She recommended I check out an insulin resistance diet and make some changes, since the cycle of hypoglycemia can often lead to diabetes. I started to eat more protein and less carbs (I still held tight to the whole grains, I was a self-proclaimed pasta addict), and did actually lose some weight. But life happened and I quickly fell off the wagon.

Somewhere along the line, I resigned myself to “the way things were” and decided I clearly wasn’t blessed with the genes to obtain the body I wanted. Unfortunately, that resignation, combined with taking on an incredibly stressful and demanding job in the summer of 2011, led to a hefty weight gain.

In the spring of 2012 I attended a dog show (I show Australian Shepherds) and was so excited to have a wonderful weekend full of many wins. Winning dogs means taking win pictures. When I pulled up the website to order my win pictures, though, I was horrified at the me that I saw. I mean, yes I had had to buy a new outfit the week before because my usual skirt and jacket suits didn’t fit anymore, but I wasn’t prepared for the image I saw. It was truly a low point for me to have a visual that, at only 26 years old, I was heavy and out of shape.

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