My adventure with a healthy lifesytle officially started on January 4th, 2011 with some serious doubts about if I could do something this rigorous in the shape that I was in at that point in my life. In my high school and college years I was pretty active playing football, golf, and basketball. I weighed in around 185-205 until my early 20’s and towards the end of my college career. Somehow I started packing on some pounds towards the end of college (pizza and beer could have been a factor as well as those damn Checkers Milkshakes and Fries). Prior to coming to CrossFit I tried a few other exercise programs and tried working out with some friends (who will remain nameless for their own protection). Needless to say that after about 8 years of inactivity I had let myself get to a ripe 271 pounds at about 6’1” tall. I was a fat ass. I think most people were just very kind and would say things to me now like; “I never would have believed you weighed that much” or “I thought you were like 235-245 max!”

I had a friend that convinced me I would like this whole “CrossFit Wilmington” (CFW) deal and how come bruises, scrapes, and some soreness were all fun things, I thought he was off his rocker but, man he was spot on. I remember my first few intro classes with Caleb and going through the activities to find out that for the last 10 minutes I was going to do a “work-out” and thinking he somehow missed the previous 45 minutes of me dying with a piece of PVC pipe. I made it through the intros and I had decided to make this lifestyle change and I committed myself to a year with CFW. I decided that I couldn’t be as focused as I am on being the best in my career and with my family yet decide to not care about my own health and wellbeing and especially not the kind of father I wanted to be to my son (4yrs now) Logan.

I started out doing 3 days of week and continued on at that pace for the first couple of months trying to get into the swing of things. I had a lot of fun learning all of the different movements and finding out just how terrible my range of motion had become. As I made progress I also started convincing other co-workers to come in and try it out as well, apparently Shawn and I put together can be very convincing or just very relentless. For my first couple of months I scaled back what I was eating and cut out sodas, grains and pasta as I had known from a previous weight loss that those would help me get rid of some pounds. I decided in March though that I wanted to learn more about the Paleo lifestyle that a lot of the other people were doing. I really enjoyed the class and got a lot of really useful things out of it that I have implemented into my life now. I won’t claim to be “strict” on Paleo but, I will claim to be about 80% on what I do on a weekly basis.

If we fast forward through all the fun of the summer and the beach wods and me ramping up from 3 days a week to my current 5 days and now I can tell you that some improvements have been made. I started out not being able to jog a full 400 meters and now I have put down a 6:15 mile and a 23:00 5K. I am benching 275 and deadlifting 385 from 185 and 325 respectively. Oh yeah, and that ripe 271 I was in January dropped down to 195 at the end of August (9 months and 76 pounds). I am a much more active person than I have been in a long time as well. I am helping coach my son’s U4 soccer team and have participated in a lot of the fund raising events that CFW has held.

My changes have also been noticed by friends and co-workers alike and I have influenced/inspired a lot of people to make lifestyle changes. I think I can count about 10 people that have joined a CrossFit because of some prodding by me and even more than that have heard about my “crazy lifestyle of eating” as well. I have given out links, books, and blogs to countless people to show them the light of how we should be eating and living to be healthier. Try not to be too big of a zealot on the whole eating thing but, as Tony has said “if you want to see how to get in shape and be healthy, look at the people at CFW”.

One of the most rewarding parts of all to me is that my wife and son couldn’t be prouder of me. I couldn’t have made the lifestyle changes I have made without their support and willingness to let me go and I am grateful for that. During Fight Gone Bad my son was telling everyone that was his daddy out there working out. Because of the changes I have made he now has a role model of someone trying to be healthy and fit and not sedentary and fat. A big thanks to CFW for kicking the CrossFit Kids program back off as well because my little dude couldn’t be more excited than to go to the gym with his dad!

Being around CFW has been a great experience for me and I have enjoyed my times bouncing around the classes, seminars, and events that have happened. I am excited about continuing to grow stronger, leaner, and faster so that I can maybe give some of you all a run for your money one day. A big thank you to all the instructors and members that have been willing to give me advice and push me to work harder over the last 10 months, you all are awesome individuals and I am a better person and influence on others because of you all.

For anyone that is reading this and thinking they can’t do it themselves then my only personal advice is that I am just one in the bucket that have come to CFW and committed myself to make the change. CFW has provided me as well as others the knowledge, instruction and facilities to make our changes possible and at the same time a very enjoyable experience.

To close, I leave you with some anecdotal proof of the changes I have had, here are my before and after pictures and measurements! Now get out there and get after it and remember that the most important thing is to just keep moving and one day you will look back and be able to move a hell of lot more stuff a lot faster.

What was the biggest challenge to adopting a carbohydrate-restricted or paleo diet?
Giving up my comfort foods of pizza and ice cream. 

What advice (if any) would you give to someone interested in trying a carbohydrate-restricted or paleo diet? Were there any obstacles that you overcame that could help future dieters?
Don't over think it. Just take it back to the basics. Meat, Vegetables, Fish, Nuts and Berries. If it doesn't expire in a relatively quick time then it isn't real food. Once you make it through the first week or two of no more breads, pasta, grains, etc. that you will no longer think about them.

After two years, we at the Ancestral Weight Loss Registry (AWLR) are proud of what we’ve become. Over 3,100 people from all 50 states and over 55 countries have registered and shared the tribulations and triumphs populating their noble journey towards health, fueled by fatty meats with a side of buttered broccoli. A physician’s recommended eating strategy that, but for a few years ago, would at the very best be viewed as a data-less void of speculation, and at the worst, labeled utter quackery. Asking an overweight patient to eat foods high in calories does not pass the proverbial eyeball test, defying all common wisdom characterizing weight loss advice to date.

Coming up with a testable hypothesis for why we gain weight and how to lose it undoubtedly involves logic, intuition and researcher experience. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman describes scientific discovery and hypothesis testing:
 

“First we guess it…then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what it would imply. And then we compare those computation results directly to observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with the experiment, it’s wrong. In the simple statement is the key to science”

But what if we didn’t have to guess it? What if we had the capabilities to crowd-source hypothesis creation instead of relying on bias-confounded researcher intuition? This is the motivation for AWLR, and central to its success is you. Primal Blueprint (PB) followers make up 40% of registry members and from the bottom of my heart, I thank those who have registered thus far and urge those who have not to register here today to help make AWLR the largest weight loss registry the world has ever seen.

PB eaters have contributed a tremendous amount of data. The common experiences and behaviors that materialize by straining your conglomerate information through an algorithmic sieve become hypotheses that spawn a reverse engineering problem, beginning with clinical findings and searching for mechanisms of action. One of the most interesting such trends was that related to hunger.

“After going primal, I just didn't get so hungry any more. And when I did feel hunger, it wasn't so pressing, and I could easily ignore it and it would go away for a while.”


“The ease of Primal Blueprint has surprised me the most. Fat tastes delicious, so I eat better-tasting food. I don't go hungry because I simply eat until I'm full instead of counting calories.”

See our testimonials page for hundreds of similar quotes. 95.8% of PB eaters report feeling “rarely or never hungry between meals” and of those who have tried a low fat diet in the past, 91% report feeling less hungry while eating PB. This satiety has led to an average of 33 pounds lost and over 31,000 pounds dropped total.

Could these findings be real? Or are they simply a function of the non-randomized, self-selected data that has accrued? Taking a journey through the medical literature may offer some insight.

They Starved, We Forgot
In 1944, Ancel Keys recruited 36 men into what would be known as the Minnesota starvation experiment, to study the physiologic and psychological effects of prolonged and severe dietary restriction. He documented his findings in a 1400 page tome, and shortly after the experiment began, the men quickly realized how difficult it might be. The predictable signs and symptoms quickly crept in: constant hunger, low body temperature, decreased libido and a total inability to think of anything but food. One subject offered a particularly chilling exposé of what it is like to eat such little food:

"How does it feel to starve? It is something like this: I'm hungry. I'm always hungry - not like the hunger that comes when you miss lunch but a continual cry from the body for food. At times I can almost forget about it but there is nothing that can hold my interest for long. I wait for mealtime. When it comes I eat slowly and make the food last as long as possible. The menu never gets monotonous even if it is the same each day or is of poor quality. It is food and all food tastes good. Even dirty crusts of bread in the street look appetizing and I envy the fat pigeons picking at them.”

So what were they eating? “The major food items served,” described Dr Keys “were whole wheat bread, potatoes, cereals, and considerable amounts of turnips and cabbage. Only token amounts of meats and dairy products were provided,” with an average daily intake of 1570 calories, including about 50 grams of protein and 30 grams of fat.

Fast-forward 70 years
The director of Boston Medical Center’s weight management clinic and obesity consultant for Dr. Oz, Dr. Caroline Apovian describes in an interview how she treats her patients’ weight troubles.

“If somebody came into my clinic who had a BMI of 30—female—I would put them on a 1,200- to 1,500-calorie-a-day diet, and they usually would be eating 2,500. A normal, moderately active female eats 2,000 calories a day, and a male, 2,500.” But wouldn’t this “produce a chronic hunger?” the reporter aptly counters. “It does,” replies Apovian, “and it’s usually a hunger that people cannot tolerate. That is the reason most diet programs fail.”

So how did the ‘starvation diet’ of 1944 become the standard of care today?

Protein, Hunger & Weight Loss

The Fat Trap, a popular New York Times article from 2011 profiles a study by Dr. Joseph Proietto, highlighting the difficulty in losing weight on a low calorie diet. Proietto recruited 50 obese men and women, studying the biological state of the body after weight loss. The patients were given 500 calories of a low fat Optifast shake each day for eight weeks. But after a year, the weight slowly came back and the subjects were haunted by their diet-induced hormonal changes, feeling “far more hungry and preoccupied with food than before they lost the weight.” Researchers also noticed that ghrelin, often dubbed the ‘hunger hormone,’ was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. “What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” Proietto says. “This, I think, explains the high failure rate in obesity treatment.”

However, this weight-loss-induced ghrelin rise is only observed when ketosis is absent. These same researchers three years later sung to a different tune:

 

“Ketogenic low-carbohydrate diets are a popular means of weight loss, and in the short-term, often result in greater weight loss than low-fat diets…it is commonly proposed that ketones suppress appetite, and it has been observed that study participants on ad libitum ketogenic diets spontaneously restrict their energy intake.”

And their randomized trial in the European journal of clinical nutrition confirmed this observation, demonstrating that “in mildly ketotic participants, the increase in the circulating concentration of ghrelin, a potent stimulator of appetite, which otherwise occurs as a result of diet-induced weight loss, was suppressed.”

This anorexic effect secondary to a high protein, high fat diet likely explains why PB eaters are so successful and happy with their new way of eating. It could also explain why in the majority of randomized clinical trials testing such diets, those highest in protein and fat systematically lead to more weight loss. There are at least 14 randomized clinical trials in which the people assigned to a calorie unlimited high protein, high fat diet lose more weight than their low fat, calorie restricted counterparts.

Which begs the question: Where are the randomized clinical trials supporting low fat diets as the standard of care? The studies where a low fat, calorie restricted diet results in more weight loss than a calorie unlimited high fat diet. In fact, we at AWLR were so bewildered by the lack of evidence that we are running the ‘Low Fat Challenge’ for anyone in the world to find such a trial, incentivized by a crowd-funded pot of cash. After nearly a year, hundreds of dollars have been raised with no winner to accept.

My wildest dream would be to make AWLR the largest weight loss registry in the world within the next year, overtaking the National Weight Control Registry that has a 15-year head start. They boast around 10,000 members after approximately 17 years of existence.  At 3,100+ after two years, it is an ambitious but attainable goal; A dream that can only be achieved with your help. It would make a tremendously unbelievable statement to the dietary research community if Paleo and PB was so prominent and demonstrated such incredible improvements in health. If you have not registered yet, please take 10 minutes to do so here. And if you have, sharing this post with the world would make all the difference.

As you are reading these words, there is someone out there who is depressed, unhealthy and overweight. A poor soul being shunned by the medical community due to their “lack of willpower,” who struggles to get by on their 1400 calorie low-fat diet. A beautiful human being with boundless happiness trapped underneath the overwhelming heaviness of constant hunger and a label of ‘BMI > 30’, desperately searching for a real solution. With your help, I hope we can reach them and offer a gentle, heart-felt helping hand.

I am truly excited to announce that our sister site and the company I co-founded with Adam Marcus, Vince Fusaro and Mark Boguski - PhotoCalorie - is officially licensing our software to researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, studying childhood obesity. 

It has been nearly five years of hard work to get to this point.  Starting out in June 2009, all we knew was that the current gold standard of pen and paper food journals was not acceptable for our most pressing health issue. 

We believe we can offer some features that other technologies currently being used cannot, including:

• 60,000 food database all standardized to one portion size for easy search
• Two step search with basic natural language processing
• All photos and nutrition information are transmitted to researcher database in realtime, freeing their precious time from data entry
• Decreasing recall bias by allowing users to take pictures of their meal and enter a description at a later time
• Decreasing portion size misestimations by allowing researchers to literally see what a study subject is eating from their photo and make adjustments accordingly
• E-mail reminders automatically sent to non-compliant subjects when they miss a meal
• Ultimate customizability - we have worked with a few research groups and all had different stipulations for the data collected, the look of the landing page, etc. 

For all related inquiries, see our PhotoCalorie page or email us at [email protected]. 
For everyone else, lets celebrate!

Nothing beats a lazy Saturday afternoon in a coffee shop working on AWLR. We have a few exciting updates approaching and are working diligently to prepare. In the mean time, here are two TED talks you  must watch today.

Diana Nyad: Never, Ever Give Up
The first human to ever swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. After taking a 30 year break from marathon swimming, Diana decided to try again. After 4 failures - due to weather, illness, jellyfish stings - she finally did it on her 5th try. Oh by the way, she is 64 years old. Listen to her inspiring TED talk below.

Shawn Achor: The Happy Secret to Better Work
Shawn Achor is the CEO of Good Thinc Inc, a consulting firm which researches positive outliers to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Really funny and interesting talk.