by
Mark Sisson
Mark’s Daily Apple

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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!

A few years
ago, after watching my weight slowly creep up (along with my age
and my blood pressure) I decided it was time to do something. Something
different. I had struggled with weight issues since the age of 10
or so, and outside of a serious bout of anorexia nervosa, had been
slightly overweight for years. It was one thing to be slightly overweight
and self conscious; however, now it was affecting my health, and
it was clear that it would only get worse over time. Since I have
a MasterÂ’s degree in Nutrition, I knew what conventional advice
would offer me. I also knew it didnÂ’t work. How many times
had I done the numbers in the last 20 years?

LetÂ’s
seeÂ….

Ideal weight
= x
Desired weight loss = current weight – x
(Create a calorie deficit of y + exercise like a maniac) * z weeks
= Perfect Body

Usually for
me, this worked out to needing about 1200-1500 calories a day and
5-6 hours of cardio a week, which should have gotten me to my goal
within z weeks, no problem. This, of course, was 1200 calories carefully
metered out into the following conventional recommendations:

60% carbohydrate,
20% fat, 20% protein.

After all,
we all know that high fat and/or high protein diets are dangerous.
Right?

And so, armed
with my magic numbers, I would set out on my journey, with excellent
resolve and motivation. And yetÂ…week after week after week,
no change. What I DID feel was hungry a lot of the time, grumpy,
deprived, and finally frustrated to the point of saying, well, there
is no point. I have enough education in nutrition and powerful tracking
tools to know that I was actually eating 1200 calories. I would
persist, and try again, and never, never a change.

After over
20 years of self-experimentation, it was so clear that everything
I had learned about planning a healthy diet was not effective for
weight loss for me. I was getting all the vitamins and minerals
and fiber I needed according to the RDAs, but I was not truly healthy.
I was overweight – not obese, but overweight. And my belly
was big. Things were not as they should be. I thought maybe this
is just “how my body is” and I need to accept it. But
I still didnÂ’t believe this to be true.

I started doing
some internet research on alternatives, and ended up reading a few
articles which talked about high fat diets as effective for weight
loss and muscle development. Despite this, when I first started
reading about eating MORE fat and exercising LESS, I was skeptical.
In fact, I stopped my research, dismissed it as a fad, and kept
up my high carb, high cardio ways. (IÂ’m slow to accept changeÂ…)
Finally, one day, I decided to give a different way of eating a
2-week trial. I was terrified I would end up gaining weight, but
the following quote had caught my attention:

“Insanity
is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different
result.”

Now, IÂ’m
not insane, so surely I wouldnÂ’t keep up this dietary nonsense
and expect to lose weight, right? And I started to try something
different.

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the rest of the article

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to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

July 23, 2012

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