Time for a review–Primal Diet

The New Year traditionally brings with it a period of review, as well as the setting of goals and plans to achieve them.  The beginning of January 2012 marks 6 months of primal living for me, and 1 month of convict conditioning.  So what has that done for me?

2011 kicked off and I wasn’t really that happy with where I was in terms of my health, weight or energy levels.  I had just got back from an awesome trip to the USA, having put on a lot of weight, and despite having lost a lot of weight since the time I had been there last, I had put most of it back on before we got there.  Hence my in-laws had no reason to believe that I had been anything other than a lard ass for all of the intervening time.

I would lose weight without too much trouble, but then turn around and balloon back up again even more effortlessly.

2011 would be different I told myself.  I played around with the diet plans that had worked for me in the past, and while the tracking was going pretty well, the weight loss wasn’t.  It was just one long plateau after the other, or a maddening yo-yo up and down of the same 1-2 kgs.

My wife had enjoyed a lot of success with weight loss prior to our USA trip, doing mostly bodyrock.tv workouts and the couch to 5k running program, along with pretty strict calorie counting.

I decided to start the C25k program.  Of course when one looks at the first weeks of that program, one thinks “pah! is that all?  I can run for longer than that!” 

However I had started and failed at many other programs in the past and so decided to stick to the program exactly as written.  I also stuck to the schedule as stringently as I could, given the constraints of my work schedule.

Speaking of work, the crew started  a weight loss challenge.  As the weight loss challenge was finishing in June, I discovered the primal diet after realising that  conventional wisdom wasn’t working for me.

I lost more in the month after the work competition ended, than I did during the entire 3 month challenge!  According to the scale and the rough estimates provided by a caliper, I have lost 9kg and gone from 18 to 11% body fat in the last 6 months.  What is more is that it hardly feels like I am working, or depriving myself.  Making healthier choices doesn’t mean sacrificing great taste or flavours.