John's Story

By January 2010 a decade of poor diet and exercise had caught up with me. I was carrying close to 100 kg on a height of 176 cm making me tip the BMI scale at a tad over 30. I was obese, I snored to the point of sleep apnea, and was tired and lethargic during the day. My clothes no longer fitted and family were constantly nagging me about losing that bulge around my middle. My public service desk job didn't afford much physical activity at work and apart from a bit of walking, I wasn't particularly active away from work. I was also painfully aware that my father had been diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes at around my age (I was 47 year old in 2010) and I felt sure that I was well on the way to doing so as well.

So I decided that I had to reverse direction not only for my own sake but also for my family's. I started out in the traditional fashion of trying to "lose weight and get fitter" by eating less and exercising more. Initially I was only aiming at walking 10,000 steps a day and just eating what I usually ate but just smaller quantities. There were three problems with this strategy: firstly, it was hard to find the time in the day to get to the 10,000 steps - it required over an hour of dedicated walking plus a fair bit of incidental walking during the day;
secondly, I found that by "just eating less" I felt hungry all the time and occasionally gave in my cravings and had extra pasta, or bread, or potatoes or worse; and thirdly, it just didn't work.

I, like many others thought that a calorie was a calorie was a calorie and all I needed to do was to consume less calories in order to lose weight. I needed to start tracking things a bit more closely so I threw out the old mechanical bathroom scales we had which seemed to have an accuracy of +/- 2 kg and bought a new digital bathroom scale. It was February 2010 and the new scales had me at 98.1 kg. I carried on for a while trying to eat less with a moderate level of activity and managed to get down to 95 kg and stayed there.

Late March 2010 I was listening to a podcast interview with Art De Vaney who just sounded amazing. He started talking about "evolutionary fitness" and how we just consume too many refined carbohydrates. He also mentioned a book by Gary Taubes: "Good Calories; Bad Calories" which went into the metabolic aspects of diet in detail. Art also emphasised the need to build up lean muscle mass and how that also played a role in the body's metabolism. I found Art's essay on Evolutionary Fitness on-line and immediately went out and bought two 5 kg weights. Something had clicked and suddenly I had something that made sense and appeared to have good science behind it.

Initially I was shocked by what I heard and read. I could understand that lots of sugar was bad but more saturated fats, more protein, and less carbohydrates - especially refined carbohydrates went against all "common wisdom". But I was getting desperate and the more I looked into it the more evidence began to surface, so I was willing to give it a try for a month or so.

So in April 2010 I started exercising with two 5 kg hand weights and restricting carbohydrates in my diet. I also got Good Calories; Bad Calories out of the library (twice - it's a big book and it took me a while to get through it all!). Without any specific prescribed dietary
plan I increased proteins and fats and green vegetables and decreased refined carbohydrates. It wasn't quite going "cold turkey", but it was close to it. Sugar and other sweets I found were one of the hardest things to give up. That, along with potato chips.

Results were dramatic and almost immediate.

By May I was down to 90 kg. I decided that I really needed to up my activity and increase my muscle mass so I joined the Kingborough Fitness Centre and started work on doing circuits of the weight machines on two or three sessions a week. By the end of June I had reached 85 kg and there I stayed for most of the rest of 2010.

June 2010 was a bad month as my father (76) was hospitalised with a really nasty life threatening infection after a course of chemotherapy for lymphoma. He ended up in intensive care for over a month and had to spend many months after that recovering in rehabilitation before he could go home. It really made me realise the importance of good health - without your health, what do you have? This whole episode gave me strong motivation to lose the excess weight I was carrying and maintain a healthy and active lifestyle. There are a lot of things you can't
control in this life, but weight and fitness and nutrition was something I could have some influence over.

During the first half of 2011 I had discovered that what I had been roughly following was called the "Paleo Diet" or "Paleo Lifestyle" - a variant of the "Low Carb Diet". Other figures in this movement such as Robb Wolf had their own podcasts and books which I looked into and used to fine tune what I was doing and what I was eating. Wolf advocates "grain free; legume free; dairy free" and goes into more depth about the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 saturated fats and other finer points on diet and exercise. I can't say that I follow his advice completely, but nowadays I get fairly close most weeks, although I have the occasional glass of red wine. One of the biggest changes I've made is the massive reduction in eating a lot of prepackaged processed foods. I am forever scrutinising the labeling on food packaging only to discover added sugar, or copious amounts of industrial seed oil, or other nasties.

So now my weight had stabilised at about 82 kg and I was getting a bit bored with the machines. Realising the limitations of the exercise machines but lacking the knowledge and confidence to do much with free weights I needed to head in a new direction. I saw a CrossFit Works flyer on the desk at the Fitness Centre. That rang a bell. Robb Wolf mentioned CrossFit in his podcasts and I had seen it occasionally mentioned here and there amongst the on-line Paleo community. Not really knowing what it was about I went along to an introductory session and now I'm hooked - every class is varied and fun and hard and sometimes quite scary. I know I'm making progress and to make or improve on an Rxd is such a great feeling. After a month and a half of CrossFit I'm now down to 80 kg.

It's all coming together now: the nutrition and the fitness and 18 kg lighter than when I started in January 2010.