History

Certainly, many people have had much harder lives than mine. But this page outlines a brief history of how I got to this point, and provides some context to understand my recent endeavors.

Background: Setting course for slowly unfolding disaster

I'm 6'2" and 41 years old, and I've been tall all my life. I've been thin most of my life, too. Everyone always talked about my notoriously high metabolism, how I ate whatever I wanted, and I ate constantly, and yet was thin as a rail. For the first 30 years I never did weigh over 160, and I wore 30x34 pants all my adult life. I grew up eating loaves of Italian or French bread with dinner, loads of pasta, pancakes, waffles, pizza, cereal, whole food, junk food, etc... just like most everyone I knew.

I started working when I was 15, worked all through high school and college, and that meant a lot of late night work hours. I took the catch phrase "do the Dew" to heart. Back in the 90's, we drank Jolt and Mountain Dew and Monster energy drinks like life depended on it. When I moved out on my own, and my 2-3 cases of 24 cans of Dew per week got too expensive, I ditched to the store brand... Mountain Lightning or whatever the stores had. The store brand was, sickeningly, even higher in carbs and caffeine than the name brand... gotta compete somehow, I suppose. Especially in the hot summer months, I drank that stuff to excess... sometimes even 4 or 5 cases a week. I had literally no idea how many calories or carbs this was, or what effect that might have eventually. I knew soda was bad in general, bad for teeth, high in sugar, and that I should stop. But I didn't care, really. I was hooked hard, for a good 15-20 years.

Around 2004-2008 I started to notice that I was hypoglycemic often, and ignorantly treated my blood sugar crashes with a quick trip to Casey's (gas station) for more Dew and a candy bar. Finally around 2010-11 I decided to quit the soda... for the expense and hoping that cutting caffeine would cure my hypoglycemia, which was at times pretty severe. The day I quit soda was pretty harsh. Ordinarily I'd have downed a can before 9am. So, by afternoon that day I had a migraine and wild cravings. All I thought about was soda, all day and night. The migraine persisted the entire second day, and continued clear through to the 3rd day. I was at my desk at work, my coworker was out to lunch, when I began to feel faint. My vision got dark, I felt that clammy cold sweat on my face and had enough time to wonder if I was in serious trouble. Next thing I knew, it was about 25min later... I'd passed out on my keyboard, with key impressions in my face. The migraine subsided over the next two hours. Those three days were awful enough, and the passing out scared me enough, to get serious about it. I've not drank soda regularly since then, only infrequent indulgences at restaurants. The hypoglycemia became less frequent, but a blood sugar crash was always waiting to happen anytime I went more than a few hours between meals or labored too hard. So I made sure to eat frequently, all the time.

I had also begun smoking when I moved out on my own. My ex-wife smoked Camel Lights and pretty soon... so did I. Over the years I smoked Camels, GPC, USA Gold, Marlboro, and my (most expensive) favorite... American Spirit. It was never the nicotine to me, I just really like smoking. Young and stupid, there's something attractive about the rebelliousness of it... pissing people off, ignoring their admonitions that its terrible for you. And I loved actually packing a new box, taking one out, the smell of the tobacco, the feel of the first drag. I loved hanging out with other smokers, chatting, identifying as a Smoker. Not just any smoker, but a crazy hardcore smoker. The guy that would smoke in -15 degree 25mph wind and sleet. It was cool being that guy. At least, I thought so for a long time.

Realizations: Everything is not alright

Sometime shortly after turning 30, as is pretty commonly the case for men with my body type, my infamous metabolism started fizzling out. It is an imperceptibly slow process, no red flags or warning signs. I recall marveling one night, sitting in a sweat lodge ceremony, that my belly didn't look as flat as it used to. A few years later I'd taken to buying 32x34 pants, and they were getting uncomfortably tight. So I bought a batch of 34x34 jeans for the first time in my life, but I still didn't think much of it. I didn't own a scale and hadn't weighed myself since my mid 20's. It was an honest shock to me, one holiday at my dad's house, I stepped on his bathroom scale and noted that it said over 245 pounds (fully dressed with shoes). Right then, I knew I was in trouble... even if my shoes and clothes were 10 pounds or so, and the scale wasn't terribly accurate, I was still 50 pounds overweight. We got a digital scale and I was indeed 238.6 pounds.

The few people I shared that fact with tended to scoff, "you don't look fat at all dude, wtf are you worrying about?!". And so, that's true. With my height and frame, I can hide being significantly overweight pretty well. And so many people are far heavier than I was. But skinny fat is still fat, and especially as it tends to be abdominal fat, it is a serious health problem. My face was fat and round, as was my midsection... but most people didn't notice. Or they were in similar/worse shape so they just don't say anything.

On the inside, however, everything was on the verge of a crisis level avalanche of problems.

When you're young, your organs have a vast amount of reserve capacity. That is, they're capable of doing tens (even hundreds) of times more work than your body requires at that point. If you don't abuse this, and you take good care of yourself, they'll still have capacity to support you in good health in your old age. Like most people these days, I was unwittingly burning through the organ reserve like a wildfire. Where I had worked labor intensive jobs as a youth, now I was a sedentary desk jockey. The only physical activity I did was maintaining my 4 acre country property and 115 year old money pit house... and that was a real struggle for me at times. Decades of massive sugar intake and chronically elevated blood glucose rendered me prediabetic. Insulin resistant, hypoglycemic, peripheral nerve pain, lethargic, tired all the time, poor circulation, heat and cold intolerance, etc. It still isn't easy to admit to myself, and especially to you, dear reader, the details of the condition I was in.

Let's take a minute to get into the ugly details. I thought I got sick frequently, but the truth was that I was sick continuously. My immune system was so battered and reacting to everything that my sinuses were never clear, my mucous (snot!) was never actually clear. It had been that way for so long that I didn't realize anymore that it was abnormal. I got severe athletes foot frequently/continuously, no amount of spray or powder could control it. My teeth were crumbling and I had several root canals and a very painful extraction. I didn't even know I had a mild candida infection for years (didn't know what it was)... my tongue was always mildly tinted white with bacteria growth, which happens when you drink/eat sugar around the clock for decades.

I'd smoked so much that I wheezed when I breathed deeply and had very low lung capacity. The nicotine made my heart race and beat irregularly, which also scared me. Even as I still kept wanting to smoke, I was growing increasingly fearful about the effect it was having on me... it was getting too obvious to ignore. But, I didn't even know who I was, if not a Smoker. I'd carried a lighter on me at all times for 17 years, with a pack never too far away. I was seriously, honestly, afraid to change.

Reckoning day: Time to move on

We camped at a cabin in the early months of 2013, the cabin was a good long uphill trip from the parking lot. I recall feeling like my heart would explode any moment as I struggled to carry our gear up the path to the cabin, something I used to do with ease. I couldn't keep pace with my friend, who blasted up the hill carrying a similar load. I began to admit, that weekend, that this was not a simple matter of getting older. As we hiked and chopped wood and so forth that weekend, I couldn't stop fixating on the obvious fact. I was in worse shape than I wanted to admit to myself. Worse shape than I even knew.

A few months later, I'd bought two packs of American Spirit (at over $8 each) for a weekend trip to a friend's house in Indiana. I smoked one pack and then gave my buddy the other pack saying, "if I ever ask for this back, or you ever see or hear about me smoking again... I want you to kick my ass!" Being an honorable Viking and good friend, he happily vowed to beat me half to death if I ever did. I haven't smoked since. No patches, gums, or 12 step programs. Just the promise of swift violence and a desire to not die at a young age.

That's not entirely true, there was something more to my quitting smoking - something mental. Initially spurred by my fiancee's struggles with hypothyroidism, and her doctor's prolonged inability to help her, I'd been reading about endocrinology for a few years already. That had expanded to researching all manner of diets and fads that promised to help one quickly shed the weight and get fit and live happily ever after. Most of that stuff was bunk, obviously. But one day I came across Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson, and his blog site, Mark's Daily Apple (MDA). In the months between the cabin and the Viking vow of pain, I'd been studying voraciously. I've got a touch of Asperger's and OCD... I latch onto key subjects and can't stop learning about them until no detail remains unexplained.

Go Primal. Live an active healthy life. Seriously.

I had summarily written off the nascent Paleo movement because it seemed like a derivative of the Atkins diet, and I'd read something somewhere long ago that I figured discredited the whole thing. So I nearly dismissed Primal as well. But as weeks went by and I'd spent hundreds of hours absorbing the info on the blog, the forums, the testimonials, and.... the linked studies, my opinions changed. I'd never seen a blog with so many studies and actual science backing it up anywhere. I've always been a science geek, electronics, chemistry, physics especially. Biochem was never my specialty... I wasn't interested. But I'd never thought of biochem in this context, in the real world and applicable to the way you live your life kind of science before.

Finally, a sustainable new direction

The MDA site blew my mind. It had a simple, approachable, logical set of things you should eat and do if you want to maximize health and fitness with moderate effort. Let me just focus on how rare that is, for a "diet" to be logical. Most diets I've ever encountered work by arbitrarily restricting one thing or another, no real sense to it... and certainly they offer no explanation how their plan will actually fix the problems that ail you. So this was strange new territory.

Curiously, there was only a short paragraph or two on negative behaviors such as smoking, drinking, drugs, etc. There was no discussion about quitting methods. It was treated as a simple prerequisite, like: if you're doing these things, just stop. And it moved right along to the things you need to start doing.

That really was key to my quitting smoking. Just as I had suddenly quit soda, I just suddenly stopped smoking. My buddy's threat of pain was a great reinforcement, but the key to smiting an addiction is almost disappointingly simple. You need to WANT something bigger than the addiction, more than the addiction. As soon as I started looking at smoking as an obstacle that was blocking me from getting started on Primal, my desire to smoke evaporated. I didn't resent quitting or feel nostalgic, and it wasn't my identity anymore. It was in the way. I wanted to be someone else, someone fit and fast and strong.

That's not to say the first 30-60 days weren't hard. Of course, the chemical addiction is real and takes 3 weeks to wane. The mechanical habit of smoking is severe, I kept mindlessly reaching for the lighter or pack for months. Smokers (addicts in general) are brilliant rationalizers... "I just need my after dinner smoke, one while I'm driving, one while I wait at the auto mechanic shop...", etc. Those rationalizations become triggers, that still make you wanna smoke for months or years after you quit. And then after a year or so, I realized for the first time that smelling smoke had become repulsive, just as it was before I was a smoker. Second hand smoke once again smelled foul, tobacco smells sweet but indifferent, and I doubt I could withstand a drag or two without coughing up a storm.

17 years, surely in excess of 120k cigarettes, well over $30k spent, and it was suddenly over. Some times I still can't believe I did it. I'd tried to quit a dozen times, but they all failed. Most were "group quit" attempts... I went along with other people trying to quit, but hadn't honestly made the decision for myself. Within a few weeks I began to resent being pushed into quitting and started again. This time worked because I had decided to become someone else, on my own, and I had to quit to get started on that. In the back of my mind was also the fact that we'd decided to start trying to have kids... and I wanted to actually be alive for that. And be fit and able to enjoy activities with my kids. And that happened... our little girl was born in Feb 2014. One year after I quit smoking.


Most ex-smokers will tell you, when you quit, you start eating. You're used to fidgeting with the smokes all the time, and without constant infusions of the appetite suppressor nicotine, you find yourself eating all the time. Where I had started losing some weight after discovering my all time high 238.6 at my dad's house, by eating out less and trying to not eat entire quarts of Extreme Moose Tracks ice cream, it was now creeping up again.

Recovering: It takes years to fix decades of damage

One of my favorite things about smoking actually became the impetus for all this goddam running that I do nowadays. How's that for irony? I've been a programmer and database engineer for decades. A common occurrence among programmers is to fixate on a complex problem so tightly that you cannot broaden your view enough to see the solution. I would go out for a smoke, and 99 times in 100, by the time I got that thing lit and took a drag, my mind relaxed and I saw the bigger picture. Before it was half smoked, the entire solution struck me like lightning, a nicotine induced epiphany - I often joked! I would urgently suck down the rest of the cigarette and brisk walk back to my desk to crazily type out the solution before the details faded from memory. I also liked getting out of the office every 90-120 min, just to see the sky and loosen up a bit. So when I stopped smoking, I was honestly a bit worried about just sitting at my desk for 8 hours straight every day. So I went outside anyways. One of the major tenants of being Primal is to move often at a slow pace. So I walked around our building, which is a small city block, 0.19 miles specifically. 3-5 smoke breaks a day suddenly became 3 to 5 one-fifth of a mile walks. Getting a mile of slow walking a day was doing more for my health than I ever could have guessed.

In a few weeks I decided to walk around the neighborhood around work, its full of cool old houses. Then I realized there was a large cemetery six blocks away, full of massive towering oak trees and 1800's headstones. It is beautifully kept and almost nobody is ever there except the groundskeepers. And a walk from work to the far side of the cemetery is one mile. It is not without some humiliation that I tell you, it was a chore to walk there and back during an hour lunch break, at first. But I kept doing it until it was easier. I got an app on my phone, View Ranger, that GPS recorded the walks so I could see some inspiring numbers.... weekly totals, monthly totals. Statistics are motivating. Holy shit, the monthly total was like 50 miles! Most people I knew began commenting that I was insane, walking that much. Who does that?? Sometimes I wondered if they were right, but I began wondering why everyone else walks so damn little.

Throughout this time, we vastly overhauled our diet. Fast food, sit downs, and junk were becoming rare treats. Primal food was taking over, we started finding local grassfed beef and dairy. I threw away all the seed and vegetable and canola oils. I learned to love the strange but exciting Coconut oil, and how amazing things taste cooked in saturated fat!

I quit buying salad dressings, because there are NO commercially produced dressings that are good for you. We learned to make our own oil and vinegar with seasonings, that tastes better than anything I've had elsewhere. I discovered balsamic vinegar. We started making salads. Not the depressing chunk of iceberg with 1000 Island poured over it, but a Big Ass Salad, as Mark Sisson calls it. An assortment of dark greens, veggies, boiled eggs, meat, and homemade dressing.

I went from getting 80% (or more) of my calories from carbs, 10% from protein, 10% fat, to a completely new to me 5% carbs, 70% fat, 25% protein. My sense of taste and smell improved drastically from not smoking and from not eating food additives (that are designed to overpower your senses). Far from being a restrictive diet, I was eating like a King. Instead of driving around town after work looking for a place to eat the same overpriced unhealthy food I'd become completely bored with, I was excited to come home and discover fascinating new ways to eat amazing foods. My allergies receded. I realized I could eat mushrooms without getting sick, honey too, and very slowly started experimenting with tiny amounts of crab and lobster, to which I'd had terrible allergic reactions.

We bought a Weider cable machine (weightlifting rig) off Craigslist for $80. A few months later I scored an entire Marcy smith rack with Olympic bar and 300# of plate weights for $100. I started focusing on the big three lifts: squats, deadlifts, and benches. Full body movements, using as many muscle groups as possible. Heavy weight, slow lift and even slower to let the weight back down, few reps and small sets. I had never been able to build or retain muscle bulk. But now, getting an ample daily intake of nutrients and protein that I had been grossly deficient of for so many years, it started. I measured my calves, quads, arms, torso, and waist every Sunday. Slow steady gains in size, massive continuous gains in strength and endurance.

Finally, the f@#*ing running!

That walk to the park was now a pretty regular 3-4 miles a day, 5-6 days per week. One day, I wondered if I couldn't just run the mile from work to the cemetery. LMAO, no, I could not. The first 0.4 miles is gently downhill, and by the time I got that far my heart rate was maxed out and I wanted to lay down and gasp til the burning in my lungs went away. I went back and re-read loads of MDA articles. There are things called intervals and fartleks and sprints, who knew? So I began a weekly sprint set, miserable as it was at first. And I tried gently interval running that mile. A few months later I made my first nonstop mile run for the first time since my late teens. A few months later I managed a 12 minute mile, then 11min, ticking down to my biggest, most outlandish goal.... an 8 minute mile. It seemed so completely implausible when I first imagined running an 8:00 mile.  And it wasn't comfortable... it hurt all over. But that was an amazing moment in my life. It triggered some old, nearly forgotten memories.

One of my favorite things to do as a youth, in my Boy Scout troop's frequent camping trips, was to run through the woods as fast as I could. Being tall and wiry strong, and little care or understanding of the danger involved, I ran through steep downhills, briers, and dense woods faster than my buddies. I couldn't get enough of the exhilarating feeling, wind and leaves in my face, branches and thorns ripping at my legs, jumping creeks, leaving the other kids far behind me. Getting lost and wandering through unknown trails until I found my way again. Deep down, those memories were a driving force through all these lunch break walks and runs. I wanted to get in shape to run the woods like a wolf again. That's what I imagined myself, as a boy. A wild wolf, strong and fast and able to wind through the forest at ridiculous speed over great distance.

By September 2014 I'd grown tired of the limitations of the View Ranger app, and "Map My Walk" (MMW) had become popular. I made the switch and started keeping serious track of my walks and runs. A feature of MMW is their regularly ongoing Challenges. Each one is different, but typically its "run so many miles" or "do so many workouts" in a 30 or 60 day period, see how you stack up against the thousands of other users in the system. That changed everything. A long dormant urge and sense of competitiveness erupted, just from having a no-risk way of seeing how I compare to others (versus actually running with other people, that would be embarassing!) And somehow I was actually in the top 20% of one of them... very inspiring.

Winter came along, and my entire life, that's been a problem. I've always hated the cold. Being tall and skinny, everyone agreed, I simply had no insulation and too much surface area, so I was always freezing. Indeed, from late September thru May, I almost always wore a long sleeve shirt, a flannel long sleeve, and a jacket on top of that when going outside. Still, I'd be cold in 2 minutes at 30 degrees. When it was really cold, 10 or lower, I'd be instantly bone cold, violently shivering. It could take hours to warm up and feel normal again. The nicotine and poor circulation surely worsened that, all those years. I wanted to keep running, but I was seriously afraid of having to be miles away from home or work in that weather. But there was a new challenge that November, the Winter Warrior. Warrior, you say? My manhood feels challenged... I accept!

So there I was, sun rising later and setting earlier every day, temps falling, winds rising. I ran anyways. One night, after my daughter had gone to sleep and I slipped out to run around the neighborhood. It was 11pm, I was hoping and praying nobody would think me a burglar, and suddenly I realized that I was Hot. I wasn't running overly fast, in fact the majority of my training runs are necessarily very slow. But I was so warm I had to carry the jacket and was still sweating. As time went on, and I completed that challenge, I realized that my cold sensitivity was greatly reduced. Running or not, I could easily withstand calm 30 degree days in a tshirt for quite a long time. In fact, I intentionally started running shirtless... just shorts and shoes, as long as the temp was 20-40 and not too windy, and it feels completely amazing. And I ran even on the very worst days of the winter, one that stands out was -19 wind chill and -8 actual, very gusty wind, sleet and snow. I ran 5 miles for lunch break that day, with plain Asics running shoes, work jeans, a t-shirt and my lightweight windbreaker and a headband to protect my ears. That was tough. Mostly from the wind and sleet, which feels like its cutting you when your skin is very cold. But I was not cold, no shivering, no urgent need to get back inside. Instead, I began growing full of a deep sense of calm and power. Knowing firsthand that I can endure any conditions, with or without proper gear or clothing and actually thriving like that... truly enjoying and seeing the beauty in a brutal winter storm, that is a part of life many people are missing and sadly have never known. But it changed my life. The wolf in me was growing.

I really started to dedicate myself to studying the fine details of human metabolism, nutrition, and everything related to those. And that's a LOT.

Running in an empty cemetery is one thing, public races are another!

My buddy that helped me quit smoking was also a frequent 5k and other race runner. I had idle curiosities about such things, I'd never run one before, and did not figure I really could. But suddenly, here I was running my own little 5k's every day as training. People were noticing and telling me I was nuts, but I started wondering if that nutty thing was for anyone to NOT walk that much every day, at least. My brother-in-law also ran some races, and told me about an 8km (5mile) trail race in Springfield.

A race... that's not on the road or track? I had no idea there was such a thing, I never heard of anyone talking about that before. So with a lot of hesitation, I signed up... several months in advance. I'd been running in Fivefinger toe shoes for months and built up the conditioning to run 5miles in them, so I kept training up with them. I was nervous, but it was much less formal than I expected, which helped. It was a legit chip-timed race, your bib has a chip in it that tells the race computer the exact time you cross the start/finish line. I finished 49th of 226, and missed getting an award for my age group by a few tenths of a second. Seriously frustrating to know if I had run the tiniest bit faster at any point in the race, I'd have gotten an award. But that aside, not too damn shabby considering I couldn't even run a mile at all a year prior.

As you might expect, I started looking for more trail races. And shockingly, there were. There are actual trail running clubs all over Illinois. I had been out to various woods in the area many times and run the trails myself, yet never met any of these people, somehow. I signed up for a similar race at Comlara park, the Fisherman's Trail 5 Mile, and was amazed to see so many people actually running and supporting them. Running on trail! There's actually other people who actually do this same crazy thing I've loved all my life. Professionally even. Then I learned that some people actually run Ultramarathons, which I didn't know was a thing. A year earlier, a friend of ours ran and live-streamed the Boston Marathon. I made fun of it the whole time, saying "who in their right mind goes and runs for like 5 or 6 hours nonstop?!" Yet, just a year later, I found myself running my first "Painful Elimination" race.... for seven hours straight.

This is a particular sort of race, not for speed or time, but for endurance. You must complete a 4.25 mile trail loop every hour, if you're a second late to the finish line you're eliminated. If you get back early, you can use the remaining time to rest or eat, as you choose. I spent the 2 months between signing up for this and race day trying to prepare for it. I ran longer runs, including a few 15 milers. I figured that was probably good enough, but I had no real knowledge or training plan. Just unmitigated determination and sheer ignorance, which is enough to do some pretty amazing things. I ran loop after loop, for what seemed like eternity.

Unlike the road races I had seen, where most runners are obsessed with their time and placing (for an award) to the extent they'd run over you if you were in the throes of a heart attack, these folks are genuinely pretty cool, supportive, and happy to see people aiming for big goals. A couple people were especially helpful, convincing and challenging me to push through the pain and not give up. So I did, and having never run more than 15 miles in a day in my life, I crashed through my 7th loop with a few seconds to spare and ran my first Marathon distance, and first Ultra distance, on a trail no less.

Seconds after crossing the finish line, I stumbled to my lawn chair and sat. The endorphins that had kept me going through the last 4 miles evaporated in just 20 seconds. Searing white hot pain coursed through my shins, my hamstrings (which had never... ever hurt in my entire life), then my body entirely. I pretended to be fine for a few minutes, sipping my homemade sports drink and nodding as people slapped my back with hearty "Great job out there!" congratulations. My sister offered me some ibuprofen and I turned it away, but inside I wanted to get in the fetal position and cry. After 20 minutes I yielded, got 800mg of ibuprofen from her, and washed it down with beer. The searing pain let up over half an hour, and eventually we packed up, heading for Pizza Ranch. I destroyed half a dozen pieces of chicken and most of a pizza and about 3 salad bowls full of ice cream. I felt great, too. Until I got up the next morning and realized my hamstrings were destroyed, I could barely stand. For two weeks I hopped around injured, leaning on walls and desks and rails to keep from falling everywhere I went. It turns out, a few 15 mile runs is NOT adequate preparation for a 30 mile race on that terrain, at that speed. The muscles can deliver, but the connective tissue isn't strong enough for the 50k footsteps and hard landings and twisting and so forth. Pro tip: if you can't do regular 20 mile practice runs with ease, you're not ready!

Hard lesson learned. Talk to other people that do this, read up on it, and actually get properly prepared. But I was hooked nonetheless. I did a couple more 10-17 mile races and lots of practice runs and set out to do all Four of the Ultras in the Central IL Ultra Series. Why did I think I could do all that, having never even seen the race courses? Sheer determination would get me through, I figured. And it did.

No quick fix, but huge cumulative changes

Throughout all of this, so many things changed. I got leaner than I ever have been, from 238 pounds to 182. And that isn't a simple 238-182 = 56 pounds of fat lost. I lost more fat than that, because I also put on many pounds of muscle. My body composition changed. I vastly increased the amount and quality of the mitochondria in my cells, which are the power plants that convert the food you eat into energy the body can use. And that provides me vastly greater strength and endurance as well as cold tolerance.

I was sick several times per year, my whole life. Every season change, I'd get a runny nose that turned into a chest cough, then bronchitis and/or sinus infection, often with strep throat to go with it. My doctor even prescribed antibiotics a few times without even seeing me, figuring I know bronchitis when I have it for the 25th time. In fact, its safe to say, there was hardly ever a period between childhood and my 30's that I ever went 6 months without antiobiotics. Of course, we didn't know much about the gut microbiome back then, the bugs living in your intestines. We didn't know about our symbiotic relationship with them, that they modulate our immune system and much more. Broad spectrum antibiotics kill all of them, good and bad, just the same. Between getting sick every winter and feeling freezing cold all winter long, I got depressed each late fall, clear through till late Spring. My ex-wife told people I had Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), and perhaps it was true.

I haven't been sick since I started this, 5 or 6 years I suppose? No bronchitis, no fevers, no strep, no anything really. I have had a few colds, runny nose and mucous, lasting 1-3 days each... I'm not sure there's any stopping that. But it is hard to overstate the immensity of this change. I haven't even seen a doctor in so long now, I don't actually have a doctor anymore.

So... recap? I was sick, depressed, weak, unhealthy, headed for full on T2 diabetes, malnourished, overweight, ate terrible food, always had indigestion and acid reflux, felt like crap, didn't sleep well, allergies, infections, losing teeth, and had new cavities at every dentist visit.

Now I eat amazing food, in great health, walk 5mi/day, run 20-50 miles a week, run Ultras for fun, and am always energetic and able to do whatever activity I want, whenever opportunity arises. And the running isn't required to get the other benefits, being able to do that is just a perk I personally enjoy. I'm the strongest and fastest I've ever been, and still improving.

I really don't think it an exaggeration to say, going Primal saved my life.