From Cancer to Health
by
Mark Sisson
Mark’s Daily Apple
Recently
by Mark Sisson: Where
Are They Now?
ItÂ’s
Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal
Blueprint Real Life Story from a MarkÂ’s Daily Apple reader.
If you have your own success story and would like to share it with
me and the MarkÂ’s Daily Apple community please contact me here.
IÂ’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they
keep coming in. Thank you for reading!
Hi Mark,
IÂ’ve been
holding off on writing up any “success story” about myself
even though I have met and even surpassed my weight loss goals with
Primal eating and the Primal
Blueprint Fitness plan.
That is because
this journey, for me, has been much more about regaining and maintaining
my health for life. Looking good in a swimsuit is just a side benefit.
Five years
ago, at the age of 45, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, a fast
growing invasive bugger that surely would have killed me without
medical intervention. Over the course of two and a half years, I
had eight surgeries and six rounds of chemo. That is a lot of time
with a lot of enforced inactivity and the pounds just piled up.
Chemo also does a number on your thyroid function which didnÂ’t
help any.
And then there
is the psychological aspect of being seriously ill. The feeling
of, screw it, IÂ’m going to finish the pizza if I feel like
it. I have cancer. A few extra pounds are the least of my problems.
As it turns
out, those extra pounds were a major problem. When I asked my oncologist
what I should be doing to help prevent a recurrence, his first words
were a no-nonsense, “You need to lose weight. Extra fat cells
are a source of estrogen which can trigger cancers such as this.”
That was the
kick in the pants that I needed to start doing something about the
problem. But where to start?
I had always
been an active, healthy kid and young adult, into surfing, backpacking,
hiking, swimming and even taken a detour into bodybuilding in my
20?s. My diet had always been the health food version of CW, lots
of veggie and tofu stir-fries with brown rice, never the SAD at
all.
A few pounds
had crept up on me as I passed 40, but during my illness I ballooned
up to a size 16 and 210 lbs. I am 5Â’10? but that is still too
big.
Note my chinÂ’s
evil twin and the tank top strap disappearing into squishy stuff.
I tried white
knuckle calorie restriction and got nowhere. A friend had some good
results with Atkins so I started looking into lower carb eating
and came across several interesting articles about ketosis as an
adjunct to cancer treatment.
In addition
to battling cancer, I have also had a seizure disorder since college.
I had also been doing some research into the ketogenic diets that
have worked so well for many with epilepsy.
At Johns Hopkins
they are using something they call the “Modified Atkins Diet”
or MAD in the treatment of epilepsy with excellent results. This
spurred me to look further into Atkins, but I was dismayed by all
the fake ingredients in the bars and shakes you supposedly need
to do their program.
So, both my
cancer research and my epilepsy research were pointing me in the
same general direction as I went looking for an all natural alternative
to Atkins.
On the way
to Primal I stopped off for a while with the book called Diet
Evolution by Dr. Stephen Gundry. Its induction phase is
basically the same as Primal and it worked beautifully. I lost 30
pounds like falling off a log. Gundry explains about neolithic/paleolithic
dietary changes and that made a lot of sense to me. But then Gundry
goes on to “evolve” the diet further back in time so that
you are basically eating like a gorilla, only veggies with a protein
garnish and then he re-introduces grains. At that point it stopped
working, surprise, surprise. ThatÂ’s where he lost me and I
went looking again.
Listen
to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson
July 14, 2012
Copyright
© 2012 Mark’s Daily Apple