Hi Mark,
I’ve been Primal for about two weeks.
In that time, I’ve learned more about how my body works, how ill-informed doctors can be, and how important movement is to health than in all my 38 years combined. This is both mind-blowing and humbling for me.
I’ve always lived in my head. I never had much use for my body, because I was a chubby kid and I became a more-than-chubby adult. I ignored warnings about high-sugar food, went on every diet known to man at the time (from the 600-calorie-per-day no-fat diet to Weight Watchers to the Water Diet, where you ate… wait for it… water and nothing but), you name it, I’ve probably tried it. Exercise hurt and made me sweaty, which meant I had to shower, which meant getting undressed and looking at my body, which I didn’t like doing. It was just easier not to exercise. I hid in books and, later, computers and the Internet. By trade, I’m working on being a sociologist and a statistician – lots of head-work, but not much field-work. (I used to say that that was the advantage of sociology over anthropology: you don’t have to go out into the fields to do your field-work.)
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Where to begin? My earliest memories of food and health started, of course, with family. I remember that my mother was never happy with her weight and was always on some sort of diet. As a little girl, I remember the Slim Fast shakes, the diet pills that would “puff up” in your stomach, leaving no room for food (genius, I thought, as a 6 year old), and the food restriction. Meanwhile, my sister, my father and I would feast on fish sticks, rice a roni, and vitamin D milk. This had little impact on me as a child, but stayed with me through adulthood.
I was never overweight. I was always thin and had muscularity thanks to genetics. Without lifting a finger, I had biceps that wowed the other kids at school. I took up athletics, and ran track, played volleyball, and played as kids do. I ate what was put in front of me and always cleaned my plate. Weight wasn’t so much a concern of mine, but it was always there, lurking in the back of my mind, memories of my mother and her struggles.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
My journey started with a diagnosis of Diabetes (type II) on November 17th, 2008. I had some blood work done and the #’s looked like this:
cholesterol 377
trigs 1864 (not a typo)
hdl 28
ldl could not be calculated due to high trigs
hba1c 11.3
My doctor couldn’t even put a sentence together to explain how unreal these numbers were. So of course the doctor just wanted to medicate the crap out of me and told me to get used to it because I would be on medication for the rest of my life. I left the office feeling as if my life was basically over. I felt immediate depression set in.
When I awoke the next morning I decided that I was going to try to figure out how to beat this or at least live a productive life with diabetes. On to the internet to solve my problems. I was lucky enough to wander upon Dr Eades site and started to identify with what he was writing about in his blog. I was also learning about why my body was reacting the way it was and there were actually people who were able to get healthy again. Well one site led to another and I was convinced on what I had to do.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Mark, I just got back from my endocrinology appointment when I saw the latest contest.
I’m no picture of health yet but things are looking a heck of a lot better than they did before I started on Primal Blueprint.
I’ll start at the beginning. Six months ago my type II Diabetes was completely out of control, I’ll admit I wasn’t taking the best care of myself -moving, starting up a new research lab, you know “life” had gotten in the way of finding time to eat right and exercise. On top of that I was taking medication for high blood pressure and a birth control pill that made me even more insulin resistant and making it so that none of my oral medications for the diabetes worked anymore. In short, I felt like crap and looked it too.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
I’ve been a distance runner who fights my weight for the past 24+ years. I started running to lose weight in 1985, when I weighed 180. Right now, I’m in the mid-190s. Funny how that worked (not).
Two-plus years ago, I started lifting, which helped with fat loss. Some of the time. As long as I was very careful about what I ate.
In the past few weeks, I think I may have finally found the answer. I’ve made a number of changes:
Posted By: Mark Sisson
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