I Decided to Do Something About It

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Updated on September 8, 2013

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint success story. Many thanks to Albert for sharing his inspirational account of how he grabbed control of his health and lost nearly 100 pounds at an early age.

If you have your own success story you would like to share 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. Thanks for reading!

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Hey Mark,

All my life I had been a “chubby” boy, was happy, had friends and all but I knew something wasn’t right when I couldn’t run a set of stairs or catching the bus was a complete struggle…. I always had an emotional relationship with food and whenever I felt depressed or down I would reach for coke, chocolate, ice cream…..you get the picture.

One cold Monday morning while getting ready to go to work I looked in the mirror and the guy looking back wasn’t happy….it wasn’t me, I had topped at 270 lbs at age 21 and was heading towards diseases, joint pains and a sure early death.

I decided to do something about it, joined a gym and started swimming because it was the only thing that I liked back then (I’m originally from Spain and we enjoy the beach as much as we can!). Asked for advice from trainers at my gym and all of them suggested the same thing, increase cardio, eat whole grains, lean meats, egg whites, the whole thing….

While I lost some weight doing so, I was also feeling bloated, heavy and tired everyday, coffee became my best friend and I was simply struggling to get on with my life. I was counting every single calorie (taking in 1800 a day religiously) and macro nutrients (typical 40/40/20 kind of diet). Around May my weight was around 240 lbs and while I was pleased with the progress it didn’t seem to be realistic given the effort and the amount of work I was putting in…. I became obsessed with food and diet and would never go out with friends because I couldn’t eat anything that wasn’t cooked at my kitchen. You can imagine what happened, lost motivation, depressed, no social life, and the worst COMPLETELY obsessed with food.

I made the worst mistake of my life by decreasing my overall calories to 1500 a day (still on a 40/40/20 split) and my metabolism just couldn’t take it anymore, I was holding water weight and possibly had adrenal fatigue due to all the stimulants (fat burners, coffee, you name it…) and the overtraining.

Finally through a friend found open skies, he told me about dropping all grains and sugars and trying to eat more veggies and protein at every meal, he also suggested I googled “The Paleo Diet” and “Primal Blueprint”…..

That’s where my life began to make sense, I dropped down to 175 lbs by mid-July and measured my body fat at 10%, yes I had lost a lot of muscle mass during my stupid “healthy diet” trial but Primal eating, weight lifting and HIIT was getting me where I wanted to be….

Until today, I’m studying to be a Personal Trainer, currently looking to run my own business (a restaurant based in Primal eating) and willing to spread the word about these newly found lifestyle that matches my genes and makes life so much simpler, tastier and rewarding!

I just wanted to say thank you to you, to all the people that research about paleo lifestyle and to my family for all the support they’ve given me.

Grok On!

Albert