Recently by Mark Sisson: Is Wheat Addictive?
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!
A few years ago, after watching my weight slowly creep up (along with my age and my blood pressure) I decided it was time to do something. Something different. I had struggled with weight issues since the age of 10 or so, and outside of a serious bout of anorexia nervosa, had been slightly overweight for years. It was one thing to be slightly overweight and self conscious; however, now it was affecting my health, and it was clear that it would only get worse over time. Since I have a Master’s degree in Nutrition, I knew what conventional advice would offer me. I also knew it didn’t work. How many times had I done the numbers in the last 20 years?
Let’s see….
Ideal weight = x Desired weight loss = current weight – x (Create a calorie deficit of y + exercise like a maniac) * z weeks = Perfect Body
Usually for me, this worked out to needing about 1200-1500 calories a day and 5-6 hours of cardio a week, which should have gotten me to my goal within z weeks, no problem. This, of course, was 1200 calories carefully metered out into the following conventional recommendations:
60% carbohydrate, 20% fat, 20% protein.
After all, we all know that high fat and/or high protein diets are dangerous. Right?
And so, armed with my magic numbers, I would set out on my journey, with excellent resolve and motivation. And yet…week after week after week, no change. What I DID feel was hungry a lot of the time, grumpy, deprived, and finally frustrated to the point of saying, well, there is no point. I have enough education in nutrition and powerful tracking tools to know that I was actually eating 1200 calories. I would persist, and try again, and never, never a change.
After over 20 years of self-experimentation, it was so clear that everything I had learned about planning a healthy diet was not effective for weight loss for me. I was getting all the vitamins and minerals and fiber I needed according to the RDAs, but I was not truly healthy. I was overweight – not obese, but overweight. And my belly was big. Things were not as they should be. I thought maybe this is just “how my body is” and I need to accept it. But I still didn’t believe this to be true.
I started doing some internet research on alternatives, and ended up reading a few articles which talked about high fat diets as effective for weight loss and muscle development. Despite this, when I first started reading about eating MORE fat and exercising LESS, I was skeptical. In fact, I stopped my research, dismissed it as a fad, and kept up my high carb, high cardio ways. (I’m slow to accept change…) Finally, one day, I decided to give a different way of eating a 2-week trial. I was terrified I would end up gaining weight, but the following quote had caught my attention:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
Now, I’m not insane, so surely I wouldn’t keep up this dietary nonsense and expect to lose weight, right? And I started to try something different.
