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!
Hi Mark, I’ve been following your blog for a little over a month now, love it and looking forward to the book! My husband and I went paleo/primal on January 26 of this year on the advice of his sister, a pharmacist. In the first month, I dropped 10 pounds with no problem, down from starting weight of 168 to 158. (I’m 5’ 8” by the way.) As of March 1, I started working out doing three days of walking/running intervals and basic strength training on the other two days, with weekends off. Since then I’ve gained back four pounds and have been hovering there ever since. I may lose a pound one day, but gain it back the next, giving me a net overall loss of roughly six pounds.
I’ve been really good with the food. No problems getting enough protein, eating lots of raw & cooked veggies, no fruit, only olive, coconut oils to cook with and butter for fat and flavor. A typical day’s menu looks like this: 2-3 scrambled eggs, 1 cup mostly decaf coffee with coconut milk for breakfast; a salad with 4-5 oz. meat; homemade olive oil & vinegar dressing for lunch; a handful of almonds around 3; 4-5 oz. meat and raw or steamed veggies for dinner. I’ll admit I will have an occasional bowl of popcorn one night on the weekends, that is my one downfall.
Read MoreIt’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 a healthy high school sports career (swimming, water polo, and cross-training), I went off to college and found that, like many people, I had a much harder time exercising without a tight practice schedule and all the camaraderie that goes with being part of a team. I made occasional forays to the gym and played some pickup ball now and then, but by 21 or 22, I was caught in the perfect storm of a backwards sleep schedule, way too many available calories, and a general lack of discipline (I was a largely self-supervising researcher at the time, and it turned out I was not a very strict boss!).
The “before” photo was taken during a family trip to Big Sur in 2003, and it definitely embarrassed me into action (that, and being invited for a run by the cute girl in my creative writing class). Having found the motivation I was looking for, I started running, first 1-2 miles, then 3-4, then 5, 6, 7, and immediately took off weight. I also began to get much more serious about vegetables, and took advantage of the local fish market to get hefty servings of Omega-3s. However, I was still stuck in some of the classic fallacies of modern diet and exercise: thinking that more distance meant better health, and that caloric balance was a simple, zero-sum game – i.e., eat all the pasta you want as long as you run it off. This continued for a few years.
Read MoreIt’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!
Hello Mark, I thought I would finally make good on my promise to send you some pics and a more understandable story for my Primal testimonial.
Let me start this with a disclaimer: I am no Supermike or Mark, but I have made advances in the last couple months that are amazing to me and have no doubt that my health and wellness will only continue to improve on The Primal Blueprint. I am no doctor, nor do I claim to be a fitness guru or sexy model icon. 😉
That being said, here is my story:
As a kid, I was always very active and fit. I ran 5k’s, won several triathlons and was a successful tennis and soccer player. I got into lifting weights when I left for college and would have considered myself in very decent shape at a very muscular 6?4? 245 pounds and about 12-15% body fat. I then moved to Southern Cali at ages 19 and 20 and lived successfully as a personal trainer. After 9/11 happened, I joined the Army doing what I thought was my patriotic duty. While training in the Army, I got very very sick with a laundry list of ailments including pneumonia. I was medically discharged from the army at a very sickly 188 pounds. For a couple years after this, I played around in film and television and worked as a bouncer in bars – also working the occasional odd job. Finally fed up with living check to check, starving and being permanently flat broke… I decided to join the corporate world.
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