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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!
As a chiropractor, I thought I’d been taught everything I needed to know about nutrition. The “studies” prove it, right? Whole grains are king, aren’t they? My vegan nutrition professor who was so incredibly thin couldn’t be wrong. I have a strong background in nutrition, yet as I aged, I felt crappier every year.
After my doctorate program was over, I was left with the gifts of bad eating habits: “healthy” carb-up and caffeine-up through exams, regular sickness, chronic fatigue, migraines and mental fog that made working out like I used to almost impossible. It was a worse version of what I remember feeling as a teenager on the tennis court. Horrible low blood sugar after the first set, poor focus, SUGAR BURNER! Yikes! And I had a doctor for a dad who I still argue with over the new rules that you promote. (His belly and visceral fat has been an issue since he was 40 on his Mediterranean diet).
Something had happened to me in my late twenties. I even went raw vegan for a few months to try and fix it to no effect. I felt lighter and clearer, right before I got worse. After years of worsening symptoms and the introduction of GERD to that list for the first time in my life, I started doing my own research.
The short version is, I had no clue about Primal living, so I conducted my own extensive and unbiased nutritional research. Everything seemed to point to carbohydrate and grain as a significant problem in our culture. (Besides processed foods in general, I have major MSG sensitivity.) The big pill to swallow was the wrongful demonization of fat. But every time I tried to find causal evidence, not just correlative evidence, it didn’t exist. Once I saw the truth, I changed my diet. I lost 23 pounds in two months while adding no fitness of any kind, but for occasional walking with my wife. The results were, in all honesty, so fast to make me giggle hysterically on the scale when I weighed in. My personal experiment was also tracked via blood work. Then, I kept digging and found your book among the rest of the pack once I realized that many others already knew this incredible way of doing things. I personally believe, based on the evidence I’ve seen, your specific approach appears to be the best when examining the entire “paleo” trend as a whole. Your early focus on emphasizing fats is way ahead of its time. Fat can only clog arteries if you have inflammation, and grains and excess glucose are the cause of that for sure. And we are now just scratching the surface on how important a cholesterol of at least 200 is in combating stroke and improving immunity. Also, I probably went too low on the carbs, maxing out at no more than 50 g a day and I now weigh around 190. I think your charts are accurate.
Needless to say, I feel 18 again, never ever have headaches, fatigue, or stomach issues. I haven’t been physically sick at all since switching over, possibly due to the immune benefits of HDL and LDL cholesterol. Some fundamental shift occurred in my body. I don’t even get cold sore viral outbreaks, which were rare, but happened a few times a year. No more.
