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!
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.
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!
I’m 33 and haven’t felt better in my whole life since converting to the Primal lifestyle. I’ve been living pretty Primal for the past four months now… prior to that I was still maintaining a healthy lifestyle according to “conventional wisdom” and was in decent shape. But back in March, 2009, my wife was diagnosed with Celiac Disease and forced her to eliminate all gluten from her diet… I wanted to support her as much as possible and so our entire house became gluten-free,… however, I was still eating whole wheat bread when away from our house. Then two months later a friend of ours introduced us to MDA and I recognized Mark from the P90x dvds… Reading on made me realize the health benefits and it helped me turn the switch on in my brain to go Primal…
I was initially contemplating whether I should, or even needed to switch to the Primal way. I mean, I had lost over 50 lbs on conventional wisdom and thought I was pretty healthy overall… my cholesterol was down,.. my excercise routines were good and I ate small meals six times a day. So I was pondering whether I should give it a try or not, but I took the plunge since it wouldn’t be too much different than living gluten-free. Ever since starting to go Primal, I’ve been able to eat about 80%- 90% Primal ever since, and I must say that it was actually easier eating the Primal way than trying to eat small meals six times a day. I used to have to worry so much about what I was going to eat and to pack my food everywhere I went… it just just plain ole stressful and tiring.
Read MoreFor anyone that is now familiar with The Primal Blueprint, you’ll recognize both of the characters to the right. It’s our lovable Primal role model, Grok, and his modern antithesis – your average overweight and over-stressed American – Mr. Korg. (A quick aside: When I read “Grok” I hear it said in my head like “Grok On!!!” But, for some odd reason, when I read “Mr. Korg” I hear it said in the voice of Eeyore.)
In short, my goal with this site and the PB is to help people go from looking and feeling like Korg to looking and feeling like Grok. This is why I am always so thrilled to hear success stories: triumphant tales of people taking control of their health and lives.
I recently received a success story from reader Sterling. It’s the sort of response to the Primal Blueprint that makes all the effort worth it.
Check out the before and after pics and read Sterling’s personal account of transformation below.
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.
Read MoreI got this message from a reader who has been following our site for some time and decided to incorporate my Primal Blueprint ® lifestyle tactics into his life. Photos, results and advice follow…
Hello Mark,
I have been following your blog for quite a while now, and am very grateful for all the information you share over here. I have changed my lifestyle significantly over the last 8 months or so, under the influence of the information on this site, and based on the Evolutionary Fitness ideas of Arthur de Vany (through whom I heard of you).
I have a question about gene expression and the ribbed look. I will get to in just a moment, but first I need to share a bit about the context I am coming from.
Read More
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