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!
After just two months it may be a little soon to be sending you one of these, but I just had to share.
I am a 30 year old police officer in FL. Ever since middle school I have been the fat kid. No matter how hard I tried the conventional way, I could not lose any weight and just kept getting heavier. Even the police academy only helped a little and as soon as it was over, the weight started piling back on (long hours of sitting and fast food). While I knew that I was overweight, I still didn’t worry too much about it because I was always the healthy one in my family. My immediate family is plagued with diabetes, thyroid issues, chronic asthma and allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, IBS… like I said, I was the healthy one.
My department gives us a pretty comprehensive wellness exam every year (blood work, ultrasound of major arteries and organs, stress test, fitness test, etc.). They didn’t have to tell me that I was fat, but last year my blood work really bothered me. My triglycerides were 252 and my HbA1c was 6.0% putting me at an increased risk for diabetes. That one really hit me hard given that I have a grandfather, father, and brother all with diabetes. So I decide to “make a change,” by doing all the crap that didn’t work before… just more of it. I ran more, and lifted more, and ate as much “healthy whole grains” as I could. By the end of January this year (2014) I was at the heaviest I have been in my entire life; 278 lbs.
Around the beginning of February, a friend gave me a workout routine that he used to get ready for SWAT tryouts. It included low-level cardio staying within your target heart range, 3 days of weightlifting and 1 day of sprinting per week. Kind of sounds familiar, right? One line in the routine said something about sprinting being unmatched in terms of weight loss and muscle growth. That piqued my interest because I have always enjoyed sprinting and despised distance running, so I started doing some online research. A quick search brought up an article on some obscure website called Mark’s Daily Apple. I didn’t really care what some random guy had to say about sprinting so I skipped that link until I had read all of the more “official” looking ones. Looking back, I should have gone to MDA first and saved myself a lot of time.
While going through your articles on sprinting, I came across another article that changed my whole outlook on life; The Definitive Guide to Insulin. Given my family history and rising HbA1c this one caught my attention. I read that article while at work on February 13th, 2014 and immediately gave up grains cold turkey. I have never looked back. I then bought your book and have become a faithful follower of MDA.
I still have quite a way to go in my journey to true health but here is what two months of The Primal Blueprint has done for me. I have lost 36 pounds. My body composition has change dramatically. I am wearing clothes that I wore when I was still 20 pounds lighter than I am now. I am happier than I have been in a long time and not as cranky as I was before. I have so much more energy; I’m not tired and dragging all the time.
Like I said, I still have a ways to go to get to my ideal body composition, but the reason I am going ahead and writing to you is because I just went for this year’s wellness exam. After another 9 months of adding to the problem and then only two months of living Primal, the results were incredible. My triglycerides went from 252 to 165 (I know still high but a big step in the right direction). My HbA1c went from 6.0 (I’m sure it was even higher by the time I started) to a normal level of 5.4. NO LONGER AT RISK FOR DIABETES!!! My body fat percentage went from over 30% down to 20%. The fat is disappearing from my fatty liver, and my stress test numbers improved greatly over last year.
I started this experiment on myself because I wanted to be around a long time with my little girl. Not only that, but I wanted to actually be able to play with her and enjoy our time instead of being groggy and cranky. I have since become a strong advocate of the Primal Blueprint and of your site. My partner at work is now doing it with me and I have been preaching it to others too. Now that I have myself on the right track, my next goal is for my family. After reading another book on the effects of modern wheat, I think grains are a huge part of my family’s medical issues. I think I am driving them crazy with MDA links, but now that they are seeing results in me, I think some of them might be coming around.
Thank you, Mark, for fighting against conventional wisdom and sharing your own experiences with the world. I know I would not have been where I am now (and looking forward to tomorrow) without MDA and I’m sure that I’m not the only one.
Robert
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