Paleo Challenge Testimony: Seth D.

Paleo Challenge 2010

Have you ever watched a kid play with that toy where they have to put the different shaped blocks into a box of some sort? They sort of know what they have to do. They have to take the little cube and put it into the hole; but for some reason it just does not go in. Maybe they’re trying to put it in the circle instead. They eventually start banging on the box with their fists. This is what weight loss has been like for me.

I’ve always been in decent shape but over the years I just have gotten a little too heavy for my liking. I get shin splints when I run, on top of the fact I just can’t run as fast as I used to because I just feel so heavy. I also have had somewhat higher than normal blood pressure; I’m only thirty for God sakes! My educated young bride insisted that I should probably go to the doctor and possibly even get on medication. Being a pharmacist I just didn’t want to have to go down that road, not yet at least.

I knew that if I lost the weight my blood pressure would come down too. So I just did what I’ve always done, ate less and exercised more. A month went by, the scale must’ve been broken; didn’t move. Seriously. I kept working out like a rat on a wheel at the gym and eating less. I just kept feeling more tired more than anything. This equation had worked before: Calories in minus calories out = weight loss. I’d done this a few times successfully over the last couple years and now it just wasn’t working. Why?

Fast forward past a few more sessions of “banging my fists on the box” and then I stumbled upon CrossFit. A childhood friend sent me a flyer asking for a donation to the wounded warriors project in Fight Gone Bad IV at Albany CrossFit. Having never heard of this I checked it out on the internet and found out there was a CrossFit here in Lexington too. When I came to CrossFit Maximus for the first time I was honestly a little intimidated by the workouts. However, I’ve worked out at every other gym and realized this place was the real deal. The concept was just what I needed. Working out with other people; no stale, boring, routine workouts. This was it.

I met J. Sharp and told her I loved the placed and that my goal was to just lose about 10 pounds. She had mentioned the Paleo and Zone diets in passing to me and asked if I’d ever heard of them. I never had. So I went home and looked up everything I could on the internet about them. I came across a few books to put it mildly. I tended to focus on just two of the books that I found, “The Paleo Diet” by Loren Cordain and “Good Calories Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. Even though they were essentially “diet books” they were two of the most interesting books I’d ever read. The short readers digest version take away message: spikes in insulin caused by refined processed carbohydrates cause people to become fat by inhibiting lipolysis.

Was the answer this simple? I looked up in one of my pharmacy textbooks and I almost feel embarrassed admitting this but I never really put two and two together but as plain as day in the diabetes chapter of the book: Insulin inhibits lipolysis. My “ah ha” moment had arrived. Prevent insulin spikes and you’ll lose weight. So I cut out refined carbs, started eating more vegetables and fruit and came into CrossFit a few days a week; I dropped 18 pounds in two months. So that’s pretty cool but here’s the real kicker, I didn’t have to count any calories and I was never hungry.

Now I realize that probably not everyone will just be able to drop some of their favorite foods as easily as I did, but I guess it comes down to this: How badly do you want to lose weight? Or maybe I should put it like this, once you have the know-how to put the right block in the correct hole, wouldn’t it be silly to keep trying to put the cube in the circle?

Seth D.