#its a traditional apple cake and i think it looks pretty good despite not loving the texture of cooked apples

[hale-of-stiles-heart]

mistletoe woes

I finally managed to rewrite the rough draft I finished last week (which feels like forever ago tbh) so voila! For the sentence starter: “Is that mistletoe?” (Also on ao3!)

With the winter holidays quickly approaching, Principal Nezu had quite magnanimously agreed to grant the students of UA a week-long break so that they could return to their homes and spend Christmas with their families.

The unexpected announcement had come as a shock to many who had simply assumed that their hero training would continue through the holidays. It was UA, after all, and it wasn't like pro heroes could expect to have holidays off.

But all the students were ecstatic despite their surprise, none more so than the students of Class A. With the year they'd had so far, a nice break was exactly what they needed.

But that wasn't all they needed, according to one Ashido Mina. Mere moments after Principal Nezu's announcement, she had made one of her own, insisting that they have a party to celebrate the holidays together.

She had claimed that in addition to just being fun, it would do good for class morale. That had instantly intrigued Iida.

As class representative, he was constantly in search of different ways to engage the class in group bonding activities. At the mere suggestion of a class party, he had started babbling to himself about the logistics and estimated costs of a party for twenty people, more if anyone decided to invite their friends from other classes.

As though some kind of weird domino effect had been initiated, Midoriya had joined in on the absentminded muttering, rubbing his chin and scrunching his face up in thought. He and Iida had awkwardly migrated to one of the common room couches, sitting side by side while talking to themselves.

While they had discussed things with themselves, the rest of the class had erupted into conversations of their own. Without bothering to wait for Iida to approve it ("It's not like he's our dad," Kaminari had helpfully pointed out) they had begun talking about the party like an inevitability rather than a hypothetical scenario.

Jiro, Tokoyami, and Kaminari had immediately started talking about music, already brimming with ideas for playlists. Jiro and Tokoyami wanted to keep it rather varied with songs from multiple genres in order to cater to everyone's unique tastes while Kaminari had insisted that they play mostly Christmas music.

Fortunately, Sero had stepped in and very diplomatically suggested that they make a compromise. Carefully defusing the situation like it was a hostage scenario not a simple argument over music, he had pointed out that they could do both, additionally suggesting that they include Christmas cover songs from a variety of different genres.

Meanwhile, Yaoyorozu, Hagakure, and Aoyama had immediately launched into a lively conversation about decorations. In a matter of minutes, they had sketched out plans for everything decoration-related, from what specific decorations they wanted to where they would go and how much everything would cost.

Though rather down-to-earth and modest to a fault, Yaoyorozu was still a rich girl at heart and had excitedly squealed at just the prospect of a shopping spree. The others had eagerly agreed, already discussing what they should wear for the party.

On the other side of the room, Sato had started talking to Shoji and Koda about cooking for the party, claiming it would be a good opportunity to practice cooking in larger batches. He had then rattled off a handful of desserts that would be a good fit for a Christmas party, listing off cheesecake, chocolate cake, sugar cookies, and Dutch apple pie.

Koda and Shoji had nearly drooled all over themselves just at the mere mention of the promised desserts. Not that they could be held accountable, Sato's baking was ridiculously good. If he ever decided not to become a pro hero, he could have his own cooking show, no problem.

The rest of the class had divided themselves up into small groups to talk about other party-related things from balloons and banners to if and how they should rearrange the furniture for the party. They discussed outfits and party themes and color schemes and anything else they could possibly think of.

Uraraka and Tsu ended up talking about how they would get supplies for the party. Ultimately, they concluded that they would have to go to Mr. Aizawa and the principal for permission to leave campus and go shopping.

Eventually, Yaoyorozu had taken over party planning responsibilities. Mentioning the previous times she had helped to organize parties (typically with her parents for various charity events) she had promptly started delegating different duties to her classmates.

Uraraka, Tsu, Sato, Koda, Shoji, Aoyama, and Hagakure were tasked with going to the mall to collect the necessary supplies for the party. These supplies ranged from everything between Christmas decorations to food supplies to new clothes.

Fortunately, Yaoyorozu had thought to provide them with an extremely detailed list. She had also let them borrow some cash, just the sight of which had nearly given Uraraka a nosebleed.

Jiro, Kaminari, Tokoyami, Ashido, and Sero had been put in charge of the music, left to work out the kinks with their party playlists amongst themselves. Luckily, they all got along exceedingly well so there was no real hardship there.

The rest of the class was charged with assisting the others with cooking, cleaning, and decorating. This so-called 'reserve' team consisted of Ojiro, Midoriya, Iida, Todoroki, Kirishima, and (begrudgingly) Mineta.

Yaoyorozu had quite wisely decided not to assign Bakugo to any group. She was well aware that the hot-headed teen would rather explode his own face than listen to someone else's instructions.

Speaking of the explosive blond, he had left the common room almost immediately after the announcement of the party. Rolling his eyes, he had turned on his heel to stomp up the stairs to return to his room, scoffing about how fucking stupid they all were.

But it was no matter. Barely a week later, the promised Christmas party was in full swing.

All of Class A was in attendance in addition to a handful of students from other classes. Tetsutetsu and Kendo from Class B were there, invited by Kirishima and Yaoyorozu, respectively. They were excitedly telling anyone who would listen about their most recent date.

Shinso Hitoshi from Class C and Hatsume Mei from the Support class had also been invited, both of them mingling with the rest of the students in attendance. Shinso was leaning against a wall, looking as bored as ever while talking to Uraraka and Jiro; meanwhile, Hatsume was pestering Iida.

The entire ground floor of the Class A building had been converted into a veritable winter wonderland thanks to Yaoyorozu's ingenuity and Aoyama's sense of style. Green and red decorations filled the common room and kitchen, complemented by hints of gold, silver, and white.

Faux pine garlands were hung on the walls alongside wreaths and stockings. All of which were dusted with fake snow and decorated with plastic gold bells and red velvet bows.

White fairy lights, shaped like snowflakes and stars, were strung up around the common room. They cast the large room in a dim, intimate, almost dreamy light.

In one corner, by the large television, there was an artificial Christmas tree wrapped in shiny red tinsel and decorated with gold and silver ornaments. An illuminated star rested atop the tree, glowing a bright white.

The coffee table in the center of the common room had transformed into a small buffet table hosting various appetizers, all of which had been carefully made with love by Sato. There were glazed meatballs, cheese plates, beef sliders, cheese tartlets, sashimi, korokke, gyoza, and kushiyaki.

The kitchen counters were loaded with even more food, crockpots and serving trays full of entrees nestled beside plates of desserts that looked pretty enough to be on the covers of baking magazines. Sato had made as much food as he possibly could, from main dishes like gyukatsu and miso salmon to cherry cheesecake and homemade manju.

And between the kitchen and the common room was Kirishima's favorite part of the party.

Hung from the wide wall opening that led into the kitchen, nestled in a bit of gilded garland, was a bough of mistletoe. It was tied up with a strip of pretty red ribbon, its leaves a bright shade of green and its berries as white as snow.

It had been Hagakure's idea. The hopeless romantic that she was, she had insisted that it was a necessary holiday tradition despite Iida's many protests about it being nothing but trouble and Mineta's utterly creepy enthusiasm about it.

Ultimately, she had put it up with the help of Uraraka while Iida was busy lecturing Kaminari about daring to suggest they have Yaoyorozu make them some alcohol for the party. It was another useless argument from Iida considering Yaoyorozu had already revealed a few bottles of wine she had created, claiming that her parents always let her enjoy a glass or two of Cabernet Sauvignon during the holidays.

Anyhow, that single scandalous bunch of mistletoe provided a unique opportunity for Kirishima. An opportunity for him to finally, finally, finally kiss Bakugo.

His ridiculous, thoroughly embarrassing, super mega gay crush on Bakugo the that had probably started way back at the beginning of the semester if he was being totally honest with himself had quickly blossomed into something so deeply rooted within his chest that he wasn't even sure if he could still just call it a crush.

It was more like infatuation. Or captivation. Or enamorment. Or, as Kaminari often liked to call it, self-destructive puppy love.

Either way, Kirishima's whatever-you-want-to-call-it on Bakugo was getting worse each and every day. To the point that he was finding it increasingly difficult to restrain himself from flat out ruining their friendship by confessing his feelings out of the blue one day or stopping one of their study sessions to grab Bakugo and finally kiss his stupidly handsome face.

Somehow, whether it was due to his own self-restraint or his old bad habit of freezing up when he should be launching into action rearing its ugly, inconvenient head, Kirishima hadn't done that. Instead, he had tried his hardest to hide his painfully obvious crush on his best friend.

Clearly, it hadn't worked very well since Kaminari, who could admittedly be rather dense sometimes, had picked up on it almost immediately. Before that, Sero had realized it and sworn his undying loyalty to Kirishima, promising to help him pick up the pieces if Bakugo wound up breaking his heart; whether it was intentional or not.

But now Kirishima was sick and tired of pining. He was going to finally make a move, consequences be damned. If only Bakugo would walk into the damn kitchen.

For the past forty five minutes or so, after shooing Mineta away from the mistletoe with a kick to the back of the head, Kirishima had been lingering on the threshold between the kitchen and the common room. Nursing a red plastic cup of Sato's homemade eggnog, he kept his eyes trained on Bakugo.

The blond had reluctantly made an appearance at the party, essentially dragged out of his room by Sero and Jiro, both of whom had insisted that he only had to stay for two hours and then he could return to his room to brood or do whatever the hell it was he did when he was alone.

For whatever reason, Bakugo had agreed with minimal (for him, anyway) arguing rather than blowing up the entire party like most of the class expected him to. No matter the reason, Kirishima was grateful. Even if Bakugo hadn't moved from his spot on the other side of the common room for the past hour.

In typical Bakugo fashion, he hadn't bothered to dress up for the festive event. At least, not like everybody else had.

Nearly everyone had worn some sort of Christmas or winter-related clothing from ugly holiday sweaters to funny holiday t-shirts to the classic red Santa hats that Yaoyorozu had handed out at the beginning of the party. For example, Shinso was wearing a deep red sweater decorated with cats and the words 'Meowy Christmas’, while Yaoyorozu was wearing a more traditional Fair Isle sweater.

Predictably, Midoriya head donned a green Christmas sweater a few shades darker than his hair, emblazoned with a cross-stitched image of All Might in a Santa hat. Kaminari had managed to find a Pikachu Christmas sweater that, to his intense delight, actually lit up when a button within the sleeve was pressed.

And Kirishima himself had decided to wear the novelty sweater his moms had given the previous year. Bright red to match his hair, it featured a great white shark rising out of the waves, a Santa hat on its head as it flashed its sharp teeth.

In stark contrast, Bakugo was dressed relatively casual. He was wearing a deep red t-shirt under an unbuttoned black dress shirt and what had to be the tightest pair of jeans he owned. They were worlds away from his usual baggy pants, briefly making Kirishima wonder if they were new.

Whether or not they were, they were unbelievably unfair. Hell, his whole entire outfit was unfair. Kirishima was way too gay for this. Especially the way the t-shirt showed off just a hint of Bakugo's collarbone.

Again, getting back to the point, Kirishima was lingering beneath the mistletoe, eyes on Bakugo, just waiting for him to walk into the kitchen for a snack or a refill on his drink. For the past sixty-something minutes, he had been drinking the same cup of eggnog.

Was he even drinking it? There was no way Bakugo was that slow of a drinker, right?

Regardless, Kirishima had been left waiting for what seemed like an eternity, impatiently watching Bakugo out of the corner of his eye. He only left his spot to move aside whenever anyone else strolled into the kitchen.

He would smile politely at them and move out of their way to avoid any embarrassing incidents. The last thing he wanted was to kiss a straight guy or, worse, a girl.

Not that there was anything wrong with a little platonic kissing between friends. But Kirishima was too busy waiting for a certain blond hothead to cross his path to think about kissing his other friends.

Kirishima was too caught up in these thoughts to notice that someone had wandered under the mistletoe with him. It was only when someone let out a loud wolf whistle and someone else joined in with a suggestive hoot that he finally realized it.

Shaking himself, he blinked a few times, belatedly adjusting to the sight of the person standing before him. To his immense disappointment, it wasn't Bakugo.

Instead, it was Class A's resident pretty boy: Todoroki.

Todoroki himself looked extremely confused, looking back over his shoulder at Kaminari who was whistling and Ashido who was cheering a bit too enthusiastically. Frowning to himself, he glanced between Kirishima and the others then back again.

Letting out a small chuckle at the look of pure perplexment on poor Todoroki's face, Kirishima took pity on him and pointed upward. Todoroki followed the path of Kirishima's finger, craning his neck to look up at the instantly recognizable, parasitic plant dangling above them.

"Is that mistletoe?" Todoroki asked no one in particular, his voice devoid of any inflection whatsoever. After a moment, he looked back at Kirishima, raising his brows in a silent question.

Biting down on a smile in an unsuccessful attempt to stop it completely, Kirishima just nodded. Smile widening at Todoroki's suddenly flustered appearance, a violent blush spreading across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, Kirishima shrugged and, as casually as he could, said, "So, what d'ya say? For tradition's sake?"

He offered Todoroki what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He was just about to assure Todoroki that he was in no way obligated to actually kiss him when the other boy gave one single definitive nod of his head.

Kirishima just shrugged again. It was just a kiss. Just a quick, harmless peck on the lips.

Todoroki definitely wasn't Bakugo but it wasn't like it would be terrible. It could be much worse. He could have gotten stuck under the mistletoe with Mineta.

Puckering his lips a bit, he closed his eyes and leaned in towards Todoroki, blindly aiming for the other boy's lips. He could feel Todoroki's breath on his lips when suddenly there was a dull smacking sound and something hard and solid whacked into the side of his chin.

Kirishima's eyes snapped open in time for him to see Bakugo roughly shouldering Todoroki out of his way, face twisted up in an angry scowl. Shoving Todoroki side, he growled, "Get the fuck outta my way, dumbass fucking candy cane."

In the following ten seconds or so, Kirishima processed quite a lot. One, Bakugo had decided to push Todoroki out of his way instead of just walking around him like a normal person. Two, he had just used a holiday-themed insult in place of his usual jab of 'half and half bastard'.

Third (and perhaps most importantly), Bakugo was now standing under the mistletoe with him. And fourth and finally, he wasn't moving.

Standing off to the side, Todoroki awkwardly lingered, glancing between Kirishima and Bakugo. When Bakugo noticed that Todoroki was still there, he turned to snap at him, practically snarling, "Fuck off, IcyHot."

Shaking his head at Bakugo's rather brusque dismissal, Todoroki turned and continued into the kitchen, refilling his plastic cup with eggnog. Without so much as another glance at Bakugo or Kirishima, he returned to the common room where Kaminari and Ashido were now eagerly gaping at their two friends beneath the mistletoe.

"Fuckin' loser," Bakugo scoffed, downing the last bit of his drink before crushing the plastic cup in his hand and tossing it into the nearby trash can. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he turned back to Kirishima.

Kirishima swallowed heavily, stealing a not-so-subtle peek up at the mistletoe overhead. Meeting Bakugo's eyes, he pointed upward again, barely managing to shakily point out, "Uh, dude, you realize you're under the mistletoe with me now, right?"

Bakugo just snorted. "So fucking what?"

Without any further, he fisted a hand in the front of Kirishima's sweater to tug him into a kiss that he would think about all throughout their holiday break.

Send me Kiribaku prompts!

#kiribaku #kiribaku fic #my fic #amber writes #christmas #christmas fic #jealous!bakugo #getting together #mistletoe #bnha

[birdshirt1-blog]

Jöro, Sheffield

Before it comes to the stage of trying the food at Jöro, you'd be forgiven for assuming that a certain Place In Copenhagen features as a significant influence on the way they go about things here in Sheffield. There's the name, of course - Old Norse for 'earth' and pronounced 'yoro' which as a nice ring to it and looks suitably Nordic written down with its umlaut. And then there's the building itself - is there anything more thrustingly modern than a converted shipping container? It's beautifully done, too, without a bad table in the house, each well-spaced and sensitively lit, bringing to mind the industrial aesthetic of another Copenhagen institution Amass. So far, so familiar.

And yet to dismiss Jöro as a Yorkshire Noma is to do it a great disservice. And not only because I thought Noma was far too pleased with its mastery of odd techniques to remember to actually give people a good time (I had a far more enjoyable lunch at Jöro), but because really, superficialities aside, Jöro is very much its own animal, taking just as many cues from Asian, and even traditional Yorkshire, cuisine than anything Scandi.

There's also the question of cost. Our evening began with an apology from front of house - one of the courses out of the tasting menu wasn't available, so instead of the usual 8 for £45, they could offer us 7 for £40. By anyone's standards, a 7-course tasting menu for £40, with a matching wine/cocktail option for an extra £35, is still an utter bargain, and would have been worth the trip up to Sheffield even if the kitchen had been less than competent and the advertised 7 courses been the sum total of the food offered.

Of course, this being Yorkshire where the compulsion to overfeed runs deep in genetic makeup of its people (I should know, my grandmother's family owned a fish and chip shop in Wombwell), Jöro aren't about to let you get away with just eating seven courses. Fully three sets of nibbles preceded the "first" course, a lovely linseed cracker dotted with blobs of cream cheese and beetroot...

...a mouthful of warm black pudding topped with apple sauce, rich and comforting...

...and a completely stunning duck croquette, managing to pack more flavour into this tiny cube of breaded, fried meat than almost any similar nibble I've had the good fortune to try for as long as I can remember. With a deep, almost sour game flavour and perhaps a touch of something alcoholic, it was a seriously impressive bit of work.

First course proper was a pretty 'tomato tartare' showcasing powerful San Marzano tomatoes and fresh summer herbs to great effect. Matched with this was Jöro's take on a Bloody Mary, a tomato consommé and vodka mixture that had an even more overwhelmingly "tomatoey" hit than the food. I don't care how jaded or cynical you try to be, there is no way a glass of clear liquid tasting like the world's finest Bloody Mary isn't going to make you gasp. It certainly did me.

Given that everything else from the kitchens at Jöro was so accomplished, it was very odd - not to mention a bit of a surprise - that the bread was so disappointing. Pappy and dry, it wasn't stale as such - at least I don't think that was the issue - it was just nowhere near as good as it should have been. There must be better bakeries out there - I've heard good things about Forge on Abbeydale Rd - so let's hope the house bread offering gets a makeover some time soon.

Anyway we were soon back on track with the scallops. With neat discs of seafood dressed speckled with vibrant parsley oil, and sprinkled with horseradish and samphire, it was as pretty as it was deceptively complex, all the various summer herbs and dressings combining in such a way as to not have any one stand out but allowing the scallop - cured in elderflower vinegar, which just removed the 'flabbiness' of raw scallop without destroying the freshness - to still be the main flavour.

Similarly barbecued pork neck glazed in some kind of sweet/sour, umami-rich Japanese dressing, its intense flavours cooled by pressed cucumber and texture added with toasted cashews. Japanese flavours featured in several of the courses at Jöro, and although jumping around global cuisines runs the risk of being confusing or disjointed, the sensitive and only occasional use of things like yuzu or dashi at Jöro makes perfect sense. It's also worth pointing out that the wine that this course came matched with, a Riesling I think, very cleverly matched the sugar levels in the pork with just the right amount of sweetness, producing a clean, crisp effect that was quite something.

In this broccoli dish, the vegetable blackened and smokey from the grill, paired with a blob of irresistibly addictive black garlic paste and topped with a generous dusting of very good Vacche Rosse Parmesan. By this point, you'll probably guess, we were having a blast. Inventive, exciting cooking like this, presented with flair and skill by an extremely competent front of house team, doesn't along very often, but the knowledge we were going to be sent home stuffed, drunk and happy for around £70 a head made the whole atmosphere even more giddy. As I scooped up the last of the black garlic I began making plans to rent a flat in Kelham Island and spend long, lazy days in the Fat Cat pub drinking pints of £3.40 local ales.

Next a huge, plump duck breast glazed with local heather honey, with a brilliantly sharp and complex wild blackcurrant sauce, beetroot and al-dente hispi cabbage. If I'm going to be brutal, perhaps not the most flavoursome bird I've ever been asked to eat, but cooked absolutely beautifully and so made up for a little depth of flavour with an utterly charming texture. After the dish was finished, the sauces and oils left on the plate - deep vermilion reds of fruits and meat juices, and emerald green cabbage oils, made the plate resemble a work of modern art.

Pre-dessert (yes, that's the fourth additional 'course' so far for our £40) was a smooth sour cream ice cream topped with summer berries, like a kind of fancy Müller fruit corner. Lovely tableware it came in too, a kind of rough stone bowl softened with frost.

First dessert proper was a brown butter and muscovado parfait on top of what they coyly referred to as 'parkin', a Yorkshire cake that's a kind of soft flapjack. The parfait itself, and the neat spheres of sake-soaked apple on top, were hugely enjoyable and worth the price of admission, but unfortunately the 'parkin' beneath, perhaps because they'd decided to tone down the strong ginger element usually present in parkin, was a bit bland, and the soft texture didn't really sit well. Still, full marks for invention and local colour.

"Yorkshire strawberries and raspberries" turned out to be an incredibly light yoghurt mousse of some kind, studded with dried and frozen fruit and spiked with yuzu. Light, refreshing and summery, it dissolved in the mouth like dairy candy floss, and was another great example of Jöro's mastery of technique. Also, being so insubstantial it was, despite our almost completely sated appetites, incredibly easy to eat, a very welcome thing indeed at this point in the meal.

Incredibly, Jöro decided to gift us with yet one more final flourish - petits fours of summer fruit marshmallows, and very lovely things they were too.

But that, eventually, sadly, was it. The bill, as I keep banging on about, came to £143 total, which included more than enough booze - but the Yorkshire generosity didn't even end at the glasses of Picpoul which our sommellier filled up to about the level of a half pint with a cheeky grin. No, Jöro had one final flourish of northern hospitality up its sleeve - no service charge. So we worked out the usual London % and left it in cash, because they'd earned every last bloody penny.

I don't want to focus too much on the bill though, because I don't want to give the impression that my enjoyment of lunch at Jöro was largely due to the fact I knew I was getting a bargain in contrast to what similar meals would have cost down in Shoreditch or Marylebone. Yes, Jöro is insanely good value - a good 30% less than what they could still charge with a straight face and far less you'd spend at far lesser restaurants, even in Sheffield. But the most important thing about Jöro, in fact the only important thing all said and done, is that they serve some of the finest food in the country, in one of the finest cities in the country, and there's absolutely no way you could eat here and not have the time of your life. So let's just leave it at that.

9/10

Source: http://cheesenbiscuits.blogspot.com/2018/07/joro-sheffield.html

[subtletie]

moon: what is your astrological sign? - Aquarius Sun, Taurus Moon. Wouldn’t seem like it, since T moons are generally known for emotional stability while I am quite the opposite. This is likely due to my other, more problematic aspects coming into play. gingerbread: your moral alignment - Neutral. I have no significant inclinations towards good or evil. I am generally passive, though I will, more often than not, prefer to benefit myself at the expense of others when I gather the courage to do so. birdseed: family or friends? Neither, I tend to abhor both. On the odd occasion, I feel grandiose love and affection for some of them, but more often than not, it tends to fade back into resentment. sheets: your sexual orientation Mostly straight, though I appreciate beauty in every gender. I’m female, and I am (unfortunately) attracted to males (considering how awful they can be). warm milk: when do you usually fall asleep? Depends. If I’m exhausted, it can be as early as 7 pm, but usually no later than midnight. pot of honey: your gender identity. Cisgender Female. snow: what is your favorite time of year and why? I don’t think I have a favorite time of year anymore. I used to love the fall and Halloween. yarn: what are your most enjoyable hobbies? I don’t particularly enjoy much nowadays. If you count binge-eating as an enjoyable activity for a fraction of the time, I guess that would be it. bicycle: what are you talented at? Nothing in particular. Forcing myself to be academically responsible, perhaps, although my intellect has dulled greatly in the past few years. folktale: what stories remind you of your childhood? I would read plenty of fairytales as a child. There will always be a place in my heart for the Warrior Cats Series and some Disney. woods: where do you feel at peace? Like the name of this very prompt, the woods truly do make me feel at ease. Beautiful places generally produce a calming effect within me. chicken feet: what is your emotional “flaw”? I have many. Notoriously, I cannot repress negative thoughts or emotions all that well. If I feel sad, angry or hurt I let it be known. I can (rarely) go off on the person who hurt me, or let it all spill while talking to someone. I also react angrily towards the people who surround me. Dark emotions tend to eat me up inside and it burns to keep them there. This is likely a byproduct of repressing emotions throughout my younger years, which gradually lead me to become depressed. Due to the fact that I don’t want to be as sad as I used to be, I feel the need to let my demons escape through speech and writing. red cheeks: what makes you nervous? Many, many things. I am quite easily disturbed in terms of nervousness or anxiety. Speaking to someone new, eye contact with someone I am not comfortable with, talking about certain subjects, when someone notices that I become nervous or am acting strangely because I am anxious, feeling judged, etc. sunflower: what do you love and cherish? I don’t think I truly love anything. My feelings of “love” tend to be intermittent and obsessive. Let’s say, food during binges, liking someone new only for that feeling to falter as soon as they do something “wrong”, that feeling when I look at my body after slimming down, myself when I think I look pretty, and the list goes on. Perhaps my laptop would be the sole exception to this rule, as I appreciate it more so than any other living thing. bells: what sounds are your favorite or calm you the most? Rainfall, without a doubt. The Cello fragment in one of my favorite songs, Midnight in a Perfect World, though I’m not sure if I should count this in, since it makes me feel rather nostalgic, above all things. turnip: what is a food you could eat everyday? So many things. Mostly Italian food though, it’s amazing. spit: do you get jealous easily? Yes. mushroom: list unique things you like about yourself. On those rare days in which I have the audacity to be vain: I like my long, curled eyelashes, my softly chiseled cupid’s bow, the golden flecks which dapple my otherwise ordinary brown eyes, my soft porcelain skin when it’s not scratched and damaged, the dimples beneath my ass,  the delicate collarbones and the curve of my waist. I seem to love a lot about myself despite loathing my appearance the vast majority of the time. cupboard: a good childhood memory eyebags: what do you think makes a person attractive? Physically, Mentally or Emotionally? These are the major aspects I take into account for attractiveness. Physically, I can be flexible, I can overlook this aspect when someone is incredibly attractive, both mentally and emotionally. I like traditionally masculine features, strong jawline, chiseled cheekbones, but I can appreciate a softer appearance as well. Mostly, the eyes do it for me. I love people with an intense, emotional gaze. I like lightly muscular bodies or those on the slimmer side. I prefer people who are at least 4 inches taller than me (I’m 5′3), they make me feel safer for some reason. I prefer shorter hair over longer, and I tend to appreciate formal attire over casual, too. I have a bit of an aversion towards reddish hair, though I could definitely get over this. (I used to like someone who had ginger hair and things didn’t end well). Mentally, someone who is inquisitive and thoughtful. Someone who knows when to pay attention to detail, is mature, level-headed, perceptive, passionate, assertive, patient, sweet and understanding. Preferably, someone who brings out the best in me. Emotionally, they should be kind, gentle, a balance between sentimentality and sobriety. A person who knows how to both support and motivate others and isn’t afraid to say what they’re feeling.                                                                                  fallen log: something you’ve gotten over that you never thought you would. I’ve never gotten over anything. Any trauma that has ever made its way into my life still churns within, gradually corroding my insides. Physically? I don’t know if I would say I never thought I’d heal, but I feared I’d never recover when I had Tuberculosis.                                                                                                    dagger: your worst fear I’ve always felt it’s “bad luck” to talk about your worst fear. Mentioning it helps it materialize, and therefore, more likely to occur. whisper: do you have any secrets? Well, I used to masturbate tons before I got a UTI which pretty much wrecked me, since it hit me while I had a weakened immune system due to my being underweight. I masturbated thinking of a guy I really liked who I also remain somewhat close to.                                            wild boar: which person do you feel closest to? I would have to say my mother. There is too much she doesn’t understand or care about, so I can’t truly say that she and I are truly close. I tell her a lot, mostly because I have nobody else to, but she is like a child in may ways and this frustrates me. Ideally, I would want to be closest to someone who could provide me with levelheaded insight about how to become a better person and how to deal with the more difficult aspects of life.

sweet: what candies or cakes are you fond of? I love, love, love apple pie. Chocolate fudge brownies are also amazing. footprints: do you remember your past lives? I don’t think I believe in past lives. If I did have one, however, I was likely an unfulfilled, unhappy soul just like I am now. Something tells me the person that I used to be was even more wretched than the one I am now. fur: name an animal you feel connected to. None at the time. Ages ago, I felt a connection to Tigers, but it’s all a farce. Allow me to explain. My concept of what a Tiger represents relates to everything that I wish I was, rather than what I truly am. I doubt this could be called a connection, but it’s the best I’ve got. In my mind, a Tiger would be powerful, leader like, assertive, confident, charismatic and bold. I am weakened, passive, lacking both passion and focus, preferring to revel in thought rather than action, insecure and absolutely self defeating. vodka: do you drink? No. I have an addictive personality, I’m afraid I’ll end up adding another self-destructive habit to my current repertoire. sour cherry: an obscure tradition from your family? None that I know of. pine needles: what is your favorite scent? I have a few. Lavender, roses and vanilla, just to name some of them. heart-shaped: do you believe in love? are you in love? I believe that love is fleeting. I’m talking about romantic love, when everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. I do not know whether or not I am truly capable of feeling love, though I do believe that other people might. My feelings of “love” are dauntingly obsessive, based on the perpetual idealization of the object of my affection. Needless to say, this is an undeniably unhealthy way to feel this “love” which is spoken of. In its better form, love can mean caring for someone even more than you care about yourself, wanting and supporting their wellbeing, teamwork, solidarity, intimacy, and making each other better people all around. A true balance would be the perfect love in my eyes. This is when two people complement each other, counteracting each others’ weaknesses and building up strengths. I was in “love” (read: obsessive idealization) with a “friend” a while ago. He does NOT feel the same way, this I know and I thought we could get along without there being any kind of romantic involvement. Boy, was I wrong. I started to feel things for him after us not talking for quite some time. He also has a girlfriend and I absolutely do not want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me, and me only. I also wouldn’t feel at ease with myself knowing I helped rupture a relationship. It’s complicated and I’ve decided not to speak to him anymore. home: where do you dream of living? In a beautiful little town, within a one-story home that is both quaint and spacious with a feline friend or two. The walls are made of wood and sunlight flows in mingled with fresh air each morning. There’s an ocean view from my bedroom window and I don’t have to drive any sort of vehicle to move about. Alternatively, I could live in a bustling city in a medium sized apartment within a building with gorgeously traditional design. The city I live in is culturally rich, dappled with lovely little cafes all over. It’s a place where I can take nightly walks while feeling safe and where I never run out of things to discover and explore. I can visit museums and watch musicals tirelessly. I can work up the courage to talk to strangers every once in a while, making friends here and there. I can waste my endless supply of time whilst losing myself inside of labyrinthine little bookstores. spice: list your favorite herbs I don’t know, don’t think I’ve got any that are explicitly favorites. mud: something you’re insecure about but trying to love. My breasts, since they’re quite small. The fact that my legs are thick, despite the me being relatively slim. tobacco: do you have any addictions? Binge eating. sock: how would you describe your clothing taste? Mostly feminine, but casual. cuckoo clock: are you a morning, a noon, or an evening person? I used to be a morning person, evening now. wooden fence: a favorite memory. Going to the beach with my parents after school back when I was in elementary. I remember wearing my uniform and pulling up my pants so that I could play in the ocean waves. As dying sunlight stroked my face a salty breeze would tousle my gold flecked hair. The ocean waves were crisply cold and shallow as a stark contrast to idyllic warmth of that afternoon. My dad would smile and play with me along the shore while my mother sat by and watched us rejoice from afar.

Writing this really helped clear my head. March 24th, 2018.

#answer

[watsonrodriquezie]

Finally Getting Lean and Feeling Excellent!

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. In fact, I have a contest going right now. So if you have a story to share, no matter how big or how small, you’ll be in the running to win a big prize. Read more here.

Big-boned. That’s what I told myself I was when I was growing up. I put down to genetics a tendency to gain fat with unnerving ease but what else could I blame? Armed with the conventional wisdom of Australia in the 1980s and 90s, we were simply fed the way we were taught to eat: some meat and vegetables but otherwise plenty of white bread, cereals, skimmed milk, margarine, and other ‘healthy carbs’ like potatoes and pasta. Having something of a sweet tooth myself, I was no stranger to unloading a tablespoon of sugar into my bowl of Weetbix or Rice Bubbles. I didn’t like water (admittedly, the tap water in Adelaide is still the worst I’ve tasted to this day) so anytime I drank fluids, they were enhanced with the sugary goodness of cordial. I often got sick when I was young, generally in the form of lingering colds, but my stomach often played up, too; nausea was a given for me for long periods of time, and if there was a stomach bug going around, I’d be the first to get it. (It would later turn out via a blood test in my 20s that I was borderline coeliac so I’d be surprised if that isn’t connected!). I was a reasonably active child, spending a lot of time on my BMX at the bike track, out waterskiing on the river, swimming in our pool, rowing, and playing weekly games of hockey, so I’m lucky not to have been really seriously out of shape. I was most definitely very soft around the edges though.

It was around the time I left school in 2000 at the age of 18 that friends and I started to take an interest in lifting weights, but we really had no idea what we were doing at that stage, especially as far as nutrition was concerned. We were far more likely to be downing post-training beers than anything remotely helpful like a protein shake or, god forbid, actual food. For the next couple of years I left the weights, and my only exercise was the daily 30-minute ride to and from my job at an award-winning bakery. I can only thank having youth on my side for the fact that the unfathomable number of pies, sausage rolls, cakes, buns and Red Bulls I consumed didn’t go straight to my fat stores and stay there!

The next decade or so contained a variety of approaches to training, nutrition and wellbeing, some more successful or long-lasting than others. I discovered my love of a style of kung fu which I’ve now kept up for 13 years; I dabbled in Ori Hoffmeckler’s Warrior Diet for a few months; I fell in love with kettlebell training and have grown a pretty nice collection of them which I use religiously; I fell out of love with a vegetarian-pasta-obsessed girlfriend (this stuff contained pasta, tinned tomatoes, a couple of carrots and some celery – talk about a malnourished period of my life!); whey protein took its place in my diet and, like an epiphany, crystallized for me the importance protein plays in the healthy functioning of the body; I completed a personal training qualification but ended up not working as a PT after learning the statistic about the very high number of PTs who contract vocal nodules – I was (and still am) a classical singer who relied on his vocal health!

I’d always admired Arnold Schwarzenegger (his dedication and his physique, anyway) so at the time I was doing the PT course, I started training with traditional weights again to get as big and strong as I possibly could. And I did. I got very big and very strong. And fat. I got so fat you could barely tell I’d gained a notable amount of muscle too. Conventional Lifting Wisdom, as I was interpreting it, had been telling me to eat as much as I could fit in my belly, multiple times a day. I was loading up on fantastic meat (my sister managed one of the best butcher shops in Australia), but I was also gorging on peanut butter right out of the jar just to keep my calories up. I really ran with the concept and completely overshot the mark, going from 77kgs to 94kgs (169lbs to 207lbs) at a height of just shy of 6ft in a matter of months, and I did not look or feel healthy or especially happy by this point. It was a real eye-opener in terms of my caloric requirements, too – I’d significantly overestimated how much energy I was burning and how much of which foods I needed to eat for recovery. I have no regrets because self-experimentation has taught me a lot, but I realise in hindsight that this phase may well have created the insulin resistance that stayed with me for quite a few of the ensuing years.

Six months later. New wonderful girlfriend (soon-to-be-wonderful-wife), moved to a smaller place that didn’t fit my weights gear (power cage, Olympic bar and the rest) which was a real problem for my lifting as the introvert in me makes me very much a solo trainee – I’m completely self-conscious in a gym, and I need silence to train effectively – so I got lazy and happy. I was still using my kettlebells every so often and training kung fu but not with the dedication I had been. I lost some fat, but I also lost some muscle so for the next couple of years I was strong but kind of out of shape again with my training in flux without a clear goal. In 2011 we moved our whole lives over to the UK to try our hands at fully freelance classical music careers (my wife is a violinist). Things began well but building a freelance career where you don’t know anyone inevitably means pinching pennies so our eating suffered somewhat. It was never hideous but it was definitely still conventional in the sense that we didn’t really think much about what we ate. Lots of carbs but lots of fat to go with it, plus healthy volumes of heavy British ales. I kept up the kung fu and I bought some cheap kettle bells, but my commitment was somewhat intermittent given our entire living space was one room for two years. Still didn’t look great at somewhere between 87kg and 91kg (190-200lbs). For most of this time though, because we were poor, we walked a hell of a lot to avoid paying for transport!

Still in the UK and careers going from strength to strength, we had our first beautiful boy, Tobias, in 2015 and despite ramping up my training and healthier eating in the months beforehand, I REALLY let myself go once he appeared in our lives. I was sleep-deprived so I constantly fell for comfort foods and beer and wine, and within nine months I was up to 95kg (209lbs). I’d never been heavier or felt worse. They say it takes 28 days to build a habit and three days to break one and during this period, any time I tried to train, I couldn’t create enough momentum to take me to the next session; I couldn’t get anywhere near enough to the ‘28 days’ to establish the pattern I needed to be consistent again. Of course, I was weaker and more unfit than I had been and I found this very depressing so I coped by avoiding it altogether – and I’d always hated avoidance as a coping tactic. I was becoming someone whose choices I couldn’t respect and that was heartbreaking to me. I’d always been confident but that was now diminishing to the point that friends and colleagues commented on it. I even started to get ever-increasing bouts of performance anxiety on stage – scary stuff because I’d seen it end careers. The final straw was a photo that was taken of a group of friends and me on a visit back home to Australia; despite knowing inside that I’d gained a lot of fat, it was seeing my body stretching my t-shirt in all directions and having the photo shared far and wide that was my ‘ugh’ moment.

Enter Primal. I stumbled on Mark’s Daily Apple after looking at hunter-gatherer-related pages (I’d always had a thirst for knowledge about prehistoric peoples) and, like so many others who write these stories, I was instantly dumbstruck by the sense in everything I read. I’d heard bits and pieces about Paleo and a lower carb lifestyle (I tried the Ketogenic Diet in early 2014 with mixed success) but not like this. I ordered The Primal Blueprint days later and finally I saw what I needed presented in a way that used science, logic and common sense without the sensationalism you see surrounding other ‘diets’. This was so much more than a simple diet; as I saw it, it took care of everything that makes the human body and mind thrive, and with countless studies to back it up.

I wasn’t a super high-carb eater so I didn’t suffer terribly from the ‘carb flu’ the way some do when I dropped the last vestiges of a grainy diet (oats and sandwiches and the like) and upped the fat from sources like avocado, eggs, nuts, bacon, fish, heavy cream in coffee, and more olive oil, but still, the weight just flew off – in a matter of a few weeks I was down 6kg. I’m sure some of that was water but I felt so much better too: I was already getting sick far less often, I was sleeping better, my energy was balanced and I wasn’t getting as hungry. I attempted my first 24 hour fast on a major concert day (much to the bewilderment of my colleagues) and I barely noticed on stage that I hadn’t eaten all day. One of the other great benefits of all this for me has been the ease with which I can retain muscle while eating little enough to lose the fat off the top. 13 months on, I’m down 15.5kg (34lbs) and I can see my abs for the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE – and I still have most of the muscle I worked so hard for.

Day-to-day, I tend to cycle through the regular components of my diet according to what I’m in the mood for. Every morning I have the juice of half a lemon in hot water before anything else. If I’m having breakfast (I often fast till lunch), I’ll either have a protein shake or some full-fat natural Greek yoghurt and some ricotta with berries, a couple of Brazil nuts and milled flax, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, plus a double espresso with a splash of heavy cream. Lunch is generally a big tin of salmon (bones included, though I take the skin out – I’ve been squeamish about fish skin since I worked in a seafood factory at the age of 19) mixed with a bit of yoghurt, capers, cucumber, lemon juice, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and seaweed salt. Dinners are a mix! It’s always meat and vegetables in some combination (curry, tagine, roast, summer salad, etc), generally without much in the way of carbs. Lamb shanks are my all-time favourite meal, however they’re prepared, and I’ll have some potato with them. I’ll have a spoon or two of rice with a curry.

Post-training I’ll always have a protein shake with creatine and a spoonful of blackstrap molasses or an occasional banana. I was eating a lot of eggs but I’ve largely dropped them of late due to some bloating – which I hope passes as they’re so convenient and tasty! I could certainly improve on my base level Primal diet, though. I really need to eat more vegetables throughout the day, and I need to eat more collagen due to my taste for muscle meat. That said, every day I feel I learn more about how I can best make it work for me so food decisions become easier and more instinctive.

My training schedule varies according to how I feel, but my average week will contain four or five days with some form of training. These will either be heavy kettlebell work (overhead mostly – clean and presses, snatches, and some rows and swings), or weighted dips, chin-ups, pistols and Turkish Get-ups, or a 15-minute farmers’ walk with my heaviest ‘bells, kung fu training, or (lately) some sprints. None of these sessions will exceed an hour – I’m generally done between 30 and 45 minutes. I’ll also knock out a set of pushups or chin-ups or dips when I’m near my doorway chin-up bar or a pair of kitchen chairs!

I travel a lot for work, often for a couple of weeks at a time staying in various hotels touring around the USA. Lots of the tour days will contain two flights (when I’m already jetlagged and having to be out of bed by 5 a.m. after a late concert the night before), and this can add a little guesswork into the equation as far as not knowing what type of meal an airport will have or a promoter will provide – I’ll sometimes simply have to be a little less strict. Same thing with frequent 24-hour trips to spots all over Europe like that great Mecca of beer, Belgium. I’m extremely lucky to have a career that takes me to these wonderful places – as a great food and drink lover, I feel I owe it to myself to make the most of what these cultures have to offer so I might indulge a little. In any case, as long as I get back in the saddle on my return, nothing negative lasts very long at all. The 80/20 principle works very well for me – I’ve proven to myself that loosening the reins every so often doesn’t have to end the game for me, at least once my body and I knew the ropes. I’ve learned that I can get away with a couple of beers here, some wine and chocolate there, or an almond croissant on a special morning out with my wife and son. I don’t always feel great afterwards but it’s good for the soul.

If there’s hope I have to offer to anyone in particular who is contemplating taking the plunge, it’s to new parents. Our respective families live on the other side of the world, so we’re essentially raising our son alone – life is therefore far from easy, and a day’s planned physical activity can often go out the window at a moment’s notice – but the Primal approach is so adaptable that it needn’t ever be derailed. If Tobias woke early from his nap, my kettlebell session would be halved; if I was completely destroyed by a night with him refusing to sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time, I did a handful of chin-ups and chair dips and called it a day on training till I’d caught up a bit; if I was stressed by his unwillingness to play on his own for an entire day and felt like falling into a packet of sweet biscuits or chips, I was thankfully armed with the knowledge that I was just going to feel awful afterwards. And if I did succumb? I’d appreciate the moment for what it was and move on because I’d be back to craving what my body now instinctively knew what was good for it. This is all still relevant, but now that Tobias is nearly two, the challenge has changed a bit. Now he insists on lifting kettlebells with me (well, he deadlifts the 8kg one at least!), he gets me to help him with dips, he planks with me, he copies one-arm push-ups, and he now enjoys using a foam roller to work out all that tension created by the incredibly demanding situation of being a 23-month-old with his every whim taken care of.

As an aside, growing up in Australia, we took the sun for granted so we never considered taking vitamin D supplements – we simply didn’t need to – but it took me five years here in the UK to realise that it’s a really good idea in winter! Two months ago I was feeling especially drained, I had a constant headache, my sleep was sporadic, I was getting sick a lot again, and my fat loss had stalled. I re-read Mark’s article about vitamin D and checked all my symptoms against a few other websites and realised that was it. I’m now taking 5,000-10,000IU a day and all of the symptoms have gone, including my fat loss plateau – and that’s the only thing I’ve changed. If you’re not getting much sun for a long period of time, it’s definitely worth checking your vitamin D levels.

So that’s my Primal journey so far! I have to commend and thank my wife, Julia. Despite some reluctance at the beginning – she was raised with a more progressive and holistic attitude towards food, and as a result hasn’t struggled with the same fat gain or health issues – she is completely onboard and has been really supportive with all this (useful because she loves cooking and does nearly all of it). I’m also very glad to be able to give our boy the healthy head start not many get at the same age. We’re expecting our second baby in a couple of months so we’ll be back to square one with the sleep issues, but I now know I don’t have to drop everything as a result!

I have so much gratitude to Mark for the wealth of reliable and verifiable information he makes available in a world which is only just starting to shift in the right direction. He’s had the most profound influence on our health and well-being that it’s hard to know where to begin. So thank you, Mark!

Tom

[fishermariawo]

Finally Getting Lean and Feeling Excellent!

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. In fact, I have a contest going right now. So if you have a story to share, no matter how big or how small, you’ll be in the running to win a big prize. Read more here.

Big-boned. That’s what I told myself I was when I was growing up. I put down to genetics a tendency to gain fat with unnerving ease but what else could I blame? Armed with the conventional wisdom of Australia in the 1980s and 90s, we were simply fed the way we were taught to eat: some meat and vegetables but otherwise plenty of white bread, cereals, skimmed milk, margarine, and other ‘healthy carbs’ like potatoes and pasta. Having something of a sweet tooth myself, I was no stranger to unloading a tablespoon of sugar into my bowl of Weetbix or Rice Bubbles. I didn’t like water (admittedly, the tap water in Adelaide is still the worst I’ve tasted to this day) so anytime I drank fluids, they were enhanced with the sugary goodness of cordial. I often got sick when I was young, generally in the form of lingering colds, but my stomach often played up, too; nausea was a given for me for long periods of time, and if there was a stomach bug going around, I’d be the first to get it. (It would later turn out via a blood test in my 20s that I was borderline coeliac so I’d be surprised if that isn’t connected!). I was a reasonably active child, spending a lot of time on my BMX at the bike track, out waterskiing on the river, swimming in our pool, rowing, and playing weekly games of hockey, so I’m lucky not to have been really seriously out of shape. I was most definitely very soft around the edges though.

It was around the time I left school in 2000 at the age of 18 that friends and I started to take an interest in lifting weights, but we really had no idea what we were doing at that stage, especially as far as nutrition was concerned. We were far more likely to be downing post-training beers than anything remotely helpful like a protein shake or, god forbid, actual food. For the next couple of years I left the weights, and my only exercise was the daily 30-minute ride to and from my job at an award-winning bakery. I can only thank having youth on my side for the fact that the unfathomable number of pies, sausage rolls, cakes, buns and Red Bulls I consumed didn’t go straight to my fat stores and stay there!

The next decade or so contained a variety of approaches to training, nutrition and wellbeing, some more successful or long-lasting than others. I discovered my love of a style of kung fu which I’ve now kept up for 13 years; I dabbled in Ori Hoffmeckler’s Warrior Diet for a few months; I fell in love with kettlebell training and have grown a pretty nice collection of them which I use religiously; I fell out of love with a vegetarian-pasta-obsessed girlfriend (this stuff contained pasta, tinned tomatoes, a couple of carrots and some celery – talk about a malnourished period of my life!); whey protein took its place in my diet and, like an epiphany, crystallized for me the importance protein plays in the healthy functioning of the body; I completed a personal training qualification but ended up not working as a PT after learning the statistic about the very high number of PTs who contract vocal nodules – I was (and still am) a classical singer who relied on his vocal health!

I’d always admired Arnold Schwarzenegger (his dedication and his physique, anyway) so at the time I was doing the PT course, I started training with traditional weights again to get as big and strong as I possibly could. And I did. I got very big and very strong. And fat. I got so fat you could barely tell I’d gained a notable amount of muscle too. Conventional Lifting Wisdom, as I was interpreting it, had been telling me to eat as much as I could fit in my belly, multiple times a day. I was loading up on fantastic meat (my sister managed one of the best butcher shops in Australia), but I was also gorging on peanut butter right out of the jar just to keep my calories up. I really ran with the concept and completely overshot the mark, going from 77kgs to 94kgs (169lbs to 207lbs) at a height of just shy of 6ft in a matter of months, and I did not look or feel healthy or especially happy by this point. It was a real eye-opener in terms of my caloric requirements, too – I’d significantly overestimated how much energy I was burning and how much of which foods I needed to eat for recovery. I have no regrets because self-experimentation has taught me a lot, but I realise in hindsight that this phase may well have created the insulin resistance that stayed with me for quite a few of the ensuing years.

Six months later. New wonderful girlfriend (soon-to-be-wonderful-wife), moved to a smaller place that didn’t fit my weights gear (power cage, Olympic bar and the rest) which was a real problem for my lifting as the introvert in me makes me very much a solo trainee – I’m completely self-conscious in a gym, and I need silence to train effectively – so I got lazy and happy. I was still using my kettlebells every so often and training kung fu but not with the dedication I had been. I lost some fat, but I also lost some muscle so for the next couple of years I was strong but kind of out of shape again with my training in flux without a clear goal. In 2011 we moved our whole lives over to the UK to try our hands at fully freelance classical music careers (my wife is a violinist). Things began well but building a freelance career where you don’t know anyone inevitably means pinching pennies so our eating suffered somewhat. It was never hideous but it was definitely still conventional in the sense that we didn’t really think much about what we ate. Lots of carbs but lots of fat to go with it, plus healthy volumes of heavy British ales. I kept up the kung fu and I bought some cheap kettle bells, but my commitment was somewhat intermittent given our entire living space was one room for two years. Still didn’t look great at somewhere between 87kg and 91kg (190-200lbs). For most of this time though, because we were poor, we walked a hell of a lot to avoid paying for transport!

Still in the UK and careers going from strength to strength, we had our first beautiful boy, Tobias, in 2015 and despite ramping up my training and healthier eating in the months beforehand, I REALLY let myself go once he appeared in our lives. I was sleep-deprived so I constantly fell for comfort foods and beer and wine, and within nine months I was up to 95kg (209lbs). I’d never been heavier or felt worse. They say it takes 28 days to build a habit and three days to break one and during this period, any time I tried to train, I couldn’t create enough momentum to take me to the next session; I couldn’t get anywhere near enough to the ‘28 days’ to establish the pattern I needed to be consistent again. Of course, I was weaker and more unfit than I had been and I found this very depressing so I coped by avoiding it altogether – and I’d always hated avoidance as a coping tactic. I was becoming someone whose choices I couldn’t respect and that was heartbreaking to me. I’d always been confident but that was now diminishing to the point that friends and colleagues commented on it. I even started to get ever-increasing bouts of performance anxiety on stage – scary stuff because I’d seen it end careers. The final straw was a photo that was taken of a group of friends and me on a visit back home to Australia; despite knowing inside that I’d gained a lot of fat, it was seeing my body stretching my t-shirt in all directions and having the photo shared far and wide that was my ‘ugh’ moment.

Enter Primal. I stumbled on Mark’s Daily Apple after looking at hunter-gatherer-related pages (I’d always had a thirst for knowledge about prehistoric peoples) and, like so many others who write these stories, I was instantly dumbstruck by the sense in everything I read. I’d heard bits and pieces about Paleo and a lower carb lifestyle (I tried the Ketogenic Diet in early 2014 with mixed success) but not like this. I ordered The Primal Blueprint days later and finally I saw what I needed presented in a way that used science, logic and common sense without the sensationalism you see surrounding other ‘diets’. This was so much more than a simple diet; as I saw it, it took care of everything that makes the human body and mind thrive, and with countless studies to back it up.

I wasn’t a super high-carb eater so I didn’t suffer terribly from the ‘carb flu’ the way some do when I dropped the last vestiges of a grainy diet (oats and sandwiches and the like) and upped the fat from sources like avocado, eggs, nuts, bacon, fish, heavy cream in coffee, and more olive oil, but still, the weight just flew off – in a matter of a few weeks I was down 6kg. I’m sure some of that was water but I felt so much better too: I was already getting sick far less often, I was sleeping better, my energy was balanced and I wasn’t getting as hungry. I attempted my first 24 hour fast on a major concert day (much to the bewilderment of my colleagues) and I barely noticed on stage that I hadn’t eaten all day. One of the other great benefits of all this for me has been the ease with which I can retain muscle while eating little enough to lose the fat off the top. 13 months on, I’m down 15.5kg (34lbs) and I can see my abs for the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE – and I still have most of the muscle I worked so hard for.

Day-to-day, I tend to cycle through the regular components of my diet according to what I’m in the mood for. Every morning I have the juice of half a lemon in hot water before anything else. If I’m having breakfast (I often fast till lunch), I’ll either have a protein shake or some full-fat natural Greek yoghurt and some ricotta with berries, a couple of Brazil nuts and milled flax, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, plus a double espresso with a splash of heavy cream. Lunch is generally a big tin of salmon (bones included, though I take the skin out – I’ve been squeamish about fish skin since I worked in a seafood factory at the age of 19) mixed with a bit of yoghurt, capers, cucumber, lemon juice, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and seaweed salt. Dinners are a mix! It’s always meat and vegetables in some combination (curry, tagine, roast, summer salad, etc), generally without much in the way of carbs. Lamb shanks are my all-time favourite meal, however they’re prepared, and I’ll have some potato with them. I’ll have a spoon or two of rice with a curry.

Post-training I’ll always have a protein shake with creatine and a spoonful of blackstrap molasses or an occasional banana. I was eating a lot of eggs but I’ve largely dropped them of late due to some bloating – which I hope passes as they’re so convenient and tasty! I could certainly improve on my base level Primal diet, though. I really need to eat more vegetables throughout the day, and I need to eat more collagen due to my taste for muscle meat. That said, every day I feel I learn more about how I can best make it work for me so food decisions become easier and more instinctive.

My training schedule varies according to how I feel, but my average week will contain four or five days with some form of training. These will either be heavy kettlebell work (overhead mostly – clean and presses, snatches, and some rows and swings), or weighted dips, chin-ups, pistols and Turkish Get-ups, or a 15-minute farmers’ walk with my heaviest ‘bells, kung fu training, or (lately) some sprints. None of these sessions will exceed an hour – I’m generally done between 30 and 45 minutes. I’ll also knock out a set of pushups or chin-ups or dips when I’m near my doorway chin-up bar or a pair of kitchen chairs!

I travel a lot for work, often for a couple of weeks at a time staying in various hotels touring around the USA. Lots of the tour days will contain two flights (when I’m already jetlagged and having to be out of bed by 5 a.m. after a late concert the night before), and this can add a little guesswork into the equation as far as not knowing what type of meal an airport will have or a promoter will provide – I’ll sometimes simply have to be a little less strict. Same thing with frequent 24-hour trips to spots all over Europe like that great Mecca of beer, Belgium. I’m extremely lucky to have a career that takes me to these wonderful places – as a great food and drink lover, I feel I owe it to myself to make the most of what these cultures have to offer so I might indulge a little. In any case, as long as I get back in the saddle on my return, nothing negative lasts very long at all. The 80/20 principle works very well for me – I’ve proven to myself that loosening the reins every so often doesn’t have to end the game for me, at least once my body and I knew the ropes. I’ve learned that I can get away with a couple of beers here, some wine and chocolate there, or an almond croissant on a special morning out with my wife and son. I don’t always feel great afterwards but it’s good for the soul.

If there’s hope I have to offer to anyone in particular who is contemplating taking the plunge, it’s to new parents. Our respective families live on the other side of the world, so we’re essentially raising our son alone – life is therefore far from easy, and a day’s planned physical activity can often go out the window at a moment’s notice – but the Primal approach is so adaptable that it needn’t ever be derailed. If Tobias woke early from his nap, my kettlebell session would be halved; if I was completely destroyed by a night with him refusing to sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time, I did a handful of chin-ups and chair dips and called it a day on training till I’d caught up a bit; if I was stressed by his unwillingness to play on his own for an entire day and felt like falling into a packet of sweet biscuits or chips, I was thankfully armed with the knowledge that I was just going to feel awful afterwards. And if I did succumb? I’d appreciate the moment for what it was and move on because I’d be back to craving what my body now instinctively knew what was good for it. This is all still relevant, but now that Tobias is nearly two, the challenge has changed a bit. Now he insists on lifting kettlebells with me (well, he deadlifts the 8kg one at least!), he gets me to help him with dips, he planks with me, he copies one-arm push-ups, and he now enjoys using a foam roller to work out all that tension created by the incredibly demanding situation of being a 23-month-old with his every whim taken care of.

As an aside, growing up in Australia, we took the sun for granted so we never considered taking vitamin D supplements – we simply didn’t need to – but it took me five years here in the UK to realise that it’s a really good idea in winter! Two months ago I was feeling especially drained, I had a constant headache, my sleep was sporadic, I was getting sick a lot again, and my fat loss had stalled. I re-read Mark’s article about vitamin D and checked all my symptoms against a few other websites and realised that was it. I’m now taking 5,000-10,000IU a day and all of the symptoms have gone, including my fat loss plateau – and that’s the only thing I’ve changed. If you’re not getting much sun for a long period of time, it’s definitely worth checking your vitamin D levels.

So that’s my Primal journey so far! I have to commend and thank my wife, Julia. Despite some reluctance at the beginning – she was raised with a more progressive and holistic attitude towards food, and as a result hasn’t struggled with the same fat gain or health issues – she is completely onboard and has been really supportive with all this (useful because she loves cooking and does nearly all of it). I’m also very glad to be able to give our boy the healthy head start not many get at the same age. We’re expecting our second baby in a couple of months so we’ll be back to square one with the sleep issues, but I now know I don’t have to drop everything as a result!

I have so much gratitude to Mark for the wealth of reliable and verifiable information he makes available in a world which is only just starting to shift in the right direction. He’s had the most profound influence on our health and well-being that it’s hard to know where to begin. So thank you, Mark!

Tom

[milenasanchezmk]

Finally Getting Lean and Feeling Excellent!

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. In fact, I have a contest going right now. So if you have a story to share, no matter how big or how small, you’ll be in the running to win a big prize. Read more here.

Big-boned. That’s what I told myself I was when I was growing up. I put down to genetics a tendency to gain fat with unnerving ease but what else could I blame? Armed with the conventional wisdom of Australia in the 1980s and 90s, we were simply fed the way we were taught to eat: some meat and vegetables but otherwise plenty of white bread, cereals, skimmed milk, margarine, and other ‘healthy carbs’ like potatoes and pasta. Having something of a sweet tooth myself, I was no stranger to unloading a tablespoon of sugar into my bowl of Weetbix or Rice Bubbles. I didn’t like water (admittedly, the tap water in Adelaide is still the worst I’ve tasted to this day) so anytime I drank fluids, they were enhanced with the sugary goodness of cordial. I often got sick when I was young, generally in the form of lingering colds, but my stomach often played up, too; nausea was a given for me for long periods of time, and if there was a stomach bug going around, I’d be the first to get it. (It would later turn out via a blood test in my 20s that I was borderline coeliac so I’d be surprised if that isn’t connected!). I was a reasonably active child, spending a lot of time on my BMX at the bike track, out waterskiing on the river, swimming in our pool, rowing, and playing weekly games of hockey, so I’m lucky not to have been really seriously out of shape. I was most definitely very soft around the edges though.

It was around the time I left school in 2000 at the age of 18 that friends and I started to take an interest in lifting weights, but we really had no idea what we were doing at that stage, especially as far as nutrition was concerned. We were far more likely to be downing post-training beers than anything remotely helpful like a protein shake or, god forbid, actual food. For the next couple of years I left the weights, and my only exercise was the daily 30-minute ride to and from my job at an award-winning bakery. I can only thank having youth on my side for the fact that the unfathomable number of pies, sausage rolls, cakes, buns and Red Bulls I consumed didn’t go straight to my fat stores and stay there!

The next decade or so contained a variety of approaches to training, nutrition and wellbeing, some more successful or long-lasting than others. I discovered my love of a style of kung fu which I’ve now kept up for 13 years; I dabbled in Ori Hoffmeckler’s Warrior Diet for a few months; I fell in love with kettlebell training and have grown a pretty nice collection of them which I use religiously; I fell out of love with a vegetarian-pasta-obsessed girlfriend (this stuff contained pasta, tinned tomatoes, a couple of carrots and some celery – talk about a malnourished period of my life!); whey protein took its place in my diet and, like an epiphany, crystallized for me the importance protein plays in the healthy functioning of the body; I completed a personal training qualification but ended up not working as a PT after learning the statistic about the very high number of PTs who contract vocal nodules – I was (and still am) a classical singer who relied on his vocal health!

I’d always admired Arnold Schwarzenegger (his dedication and his physique, anyway) so at the time I was doing the PT course, I started training with traditional weights again to get as big and strong as I possibly could. And I did. I got very big and very strong. And fat. I got so fat you could barely tell I’d gained a notable amount of muscle too. Conventional Lifting Wisdom, as I was interpreting it, had been telling me to eat as much as I could fit in my belly, multiple times a day. I was loading up on fantastic meat (my sister managed one of the best butcher shops in Australia), but I was also gorging on peanut butter right out of the jar just to keep my calories up. I really ran with the concept and completely overshot the mark, going from 77kgs to 94kgs (169lbs to 207lbs) at a height of just shy of 6ft in a matter of months, and I did not look or feel healthy or especially happy by this point. It was a real eye-opener in terms of my caloric requirements, too – I’d significantly overestimated how much energy I was burning and how much of which foods I needed to eat for recovery. I have no regrets because self-experimentation has taught me a lot, but I realise in hindsight that this phase may well have created the insulin resistance that stayed with me for quite a few of the ensuing years.

Six months later. New wonderful girlfriend (soon-to-be-wonderful-wife), moved to a smaller place that didn’t fit my weights gear (power cage, Olympic bar and the rest) which was a real problem for my lifting as the introvert in me makes me very much a solo trainee – I’m completely self-conscious in a gym, and I need silence to train effectively – so I got lazy and happy. I was still using my kettlebells every so often and training kung fu but not with the dedication I had been. I lost some fat, but I also lost some muscle so for the next couple of years I was strong but kind of out of shape again with my training in flux without a clear goal. In 2011 we moved our whole lives over to the UK to try our hands at fully freelance classical music careers (my wife is a violinist). Things began well but building a freelance career where you don’t know anyone inevitably means pinching pennies so our eating suffered somewhat. It was never hideous but it was definitely still conventional in the sense that we didn’t really think much about what we ate. Lots of carbs but lots of fat to go with it, plus healthy volumes of heavy British ales. I kept up the kung fu and I bought some cheap kettle bells, but my commitment was somewhat intermittent given our entire living space was one room for two years. Still didn’t look great at somewhere between 87kg and 91kg (190-200lbs). For most of this time though, because we were poor, we walked a hell of a lot to avoid paying for transport!

Still in the UK and careers going from strength to strength, we had our first beautiful boy, Tobias, in 2015 and despite ramping up my training and healthier eating in the months beforehand, I REALLY let myself go once he appeared in our lives. I was sleep-deprived so I constantly fell for comfort foods and beer and wine, and within nine months I was up to 95kg (209lbs). I’d never been heavier or felt worse. They say it takes 28 days to build a habit and three days to break one and during this period, any time I tried to train, I couldn’t create enough momentum to take me to the next session; I couldn’t get anywhere near enough to the ‘28 days’ to establish the pattern I needed to be consistent again. Of course, I was weaker and more unfit than I had been and I found this very depressing so I coped by avoiding it altogether – and I’d always hated avoidance as a coping tactic. I was becoming someone whose choices I couldn’t respect and that was heartbreaking to me. I’d always been confident but that was now diminishing to the point that friends and colleagues commented on it. I even started to get ever-increasing bouts of performance anxiety on stage – scary stuff because I’d seen it end careers. The final straw was a photo that was taken of a group of friends and me on a visit back home to Australia; despite knowing inside that I’d gained a lot of fat, it was seeing my body stretching my t-shirt in all directions and having the photo shared far and wide that was my ‘ugh’ moment.

Enter Primal. I stumbled on Mark’s Daily Apple after looking at hunter-gatherer-related pages (I’d always had a thirst for knowledge about prehistoric peoples) and, like so many others who write these stories, I was instantly dumbstruck by the sense in everything I read. I’d heard bits and pieces about Paleo and a lower carb lifestyle (I tried the Ketogenic Diet in early 2014 with mixed success) but not like this. I ordered The Primal Blueprint days later and finally I saw what I needed presented in a way that used science, logic and common sense without the sensationalism you see surrounding other ‘diets’. This was so much more than a simple diet; as I saw it, it took care of everything that makes the human body and mind thrive, and with countless studies to back it up.

I wasn’t a super high-carb eater so I didn’t suffer terribly from the ‘carb flu’ the way some do when I dropped the last vestiges of a grainy diet (oats and sandwiches and the like) and upped the fat from sources like avocado, eggs, nuts, bacon, fish, heavy cream in coffee, and more olive oil, but still, the weight just flew off – in a matter of a few weeks I was down 6kg. I’m sure some of that was water but I felt so much better too: I was already getting sick far less often, I was sleeping better, my energy was balanced and I wasn’t getting as hungry. I attempted my first 24 hour fast on a major concert day (much to the bewilderment of my colleagues) and I barely noticed on stage that I hadn’t eaten all day. One of the other great benefits of all this for me has been the ease with which I can retain muscle while eating little enough to lose the fat off the top. 13 months on, I’m down 15.5kg (34lbs) and I can see my abs for the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE – and I still have most of the muscle I worked so hard for.

Day-to-day, I tend to cycle through the regular components of my diet according to what I’m in the mood for. Every morning I have the juice of half a lemon in hot water before anything else. If I’m having breakfast (I often fast till lunch), I’ll either have a protein shake or some full-fat natural Greek yoghurt and some ricotta with berries, a couple of Brazil nuts and milled flax, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, plus a double espresso with a splash of heavy cream. Lunch is generally a big tin of salmon (bones included, though I take the skin out – I’ve been squeamish about fish skin since I worked in a seafood factory at the age of 19) mixed with a bit of yoghurt, capers, cucumber, lemon juice, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and seaweed salt. Dinners are a mix! It’s always meat and vegetables in some combination (curry, tagine, roast, summer salad, etc), generally without much in the way of carbs. Lamb shanks are my all-time favourite meal, however they’re prepared, and I’ll have some potato with them. I’ll have a spoon or two of rice with a curry.

Post-training I’ll always have a protein shake with creatine and a spoonful of blackstrap molasses or an occasional banana. I was eating a lot of eggs but I’ve largely dropped them of late due to some bloating – which I hope passes as they’re so convenient and tasty! I could certainly improve on my base level Primal diet, though. I really need to eat more vegetables throughout the day, and I need to eat more collagen due to my taste for muscle meat. That said, every day I feel I learn more about how I can best make it work for me so food decisions become easier and more instinctive.

My training schedule varies according to how I feel, but my average week will contain four or five days with some form of training. These will either be heavy kettlebell work (overhead mostly – clean and presses, snatches, and some rows and swings), or weighted dips, chin-ups, pistols and Turkish Get-ups, or a 15-minute farmers’ walk with my heaviest ‘bells, kung fu training, or (lately) some sprints. None of these sessions will exceed an hour – I’m generally done between 30 and 45 minutes. I’ll also knock out a set of pushups or chin-ups or dips when I’m near my doorway chin-up bar or a pair of kitchen chairs!

I travel a lot for work, often for a couple of weeks at a time staying in various hotels touring around the USA. Lots of the tour days will contain two flights (when I’m already jetlagged and having to be out of bed by 5 a.m. after a late concert the night before), and this can add a little guesswork into the equation as far as not knowing what type of meal an airport will have or a promoter will provide – I’ll sometimes simply have to be a little less strict. Same thing with frequent 24-hour trips to spots all over Europe like that great Mecca of beer, Belgium. I’m extremely lucky to have a career that takes me to these wonderful places – as a great food and drink lover, I feel I owe it to myself to make the most of what these cultures have to offer so I might indulge a little. In any case, as long as I get back in the saddle on my return, nothing negative lasts very long at all. The 80/20 principle works very well for me – I’ve proven to myself that loosening the reins every so often doesn’t have to end the game for me, at least once my body and I knew the ropes. I’ve learned that I can get away with a couple of beers here, some wine and chocolate there, or an almond croissant on a special morning out with my wife and son. I don’t always feel great afterwards but it’s good for the soul.

If there’s hope I have to offer to anyone in particular who is contemplating taking the plunge, it’s to new parents. Our respective families live on the other side of the world, so we’re essentially raising our son alone – life is therefore far from easy, and a day’s planned physical activity can often go out the window at a moment’s notice – but the Primal approach is so adaptable that it needn’t ever be derailed. If Tobias woke early from his nap, my kettlebell session would be halved; if I was completely destroyed by a night with him refusing to sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time, I did a handful of chin-ups and chair dips and called it a day on training till I’d caught up a bit; if I was stressed by his unwillingness to play on his own for an entire day and felt like falling into a packet of sweet biscuits or chips, I was thankfully armed with the knowledge that I was just going to feel awful afterwards. And if I did succumb? I’d appreciate the moment for what it was and move on because I’d be back to craving what my body now instinctively knew what was good for it. This is all still relevant, but now that Tobias is nearly two, the challenge has changed a bit. Now he insists on lifting kettlebells with me (well, he deadlifts the 8kg one at least!), he gets me to help him with dips, he planks with me, he copies one-arm push-ups, and he now enjoys using a foam roller to work out all that tension created by the incredibly demanding situation of being a 23-month-old with his every whim taken care of.

As an aside, growing up in Australia, we took the sun for granted so we never considered taking vitamin D supplements – we simply didn’t need to – but it took me five years here in the UK to realise that it’s a really good idea in winter! Two months ago I was feeling especially drained, I had a constant headache, my sleep was sporadic, I was getting sick a lot again, and my fat loss had stalled. I re-read Mark’s article about vitamin D and checked all my symptoms against a few other websites and realised that was it. I’m now taking 5,000-10,000IU a day and all of the symptoms have gone, including my fat loss plateau – and that’s the only thing I’ve changed. If you’re not getting much sun for a long period of time, it’s definitely worth checking your vitamin D levels.

So that’s my Primal journey so far! I have to commend and thank my wife, Julia. Despite some reluctance at the beginning – she was raised with a more progressive and holistic attitude towards food, and as a result hasn’t struggled with the same fat gain or health issues – she is completely onboard and has been really supportive with all this (useful because she loves cooking and does nearly all of it). I’m also very glad to be able to give our boy the healthy head start not many get at the same age. We’re expecting our second baby in a couple of months so we’ll be back to square one with the sleep issues, but I now know I don’t have to drop everything as a result!

I have so much gratitude to Mark for the wealth of reliable and verifiable information he makes available in a world which is only just starting to shift in the right direction. He’s had the most profound influence on our health and well-being that it’s hard to know where to begin. So thank you, Mark!

Tom

[cristinajourdanqp]

Finally Getting Lean and Feeling Excellent!

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. In fact, I have a contest going right now. So if you have a story to share, no matter how big or how small, you’ll be in the running to win a big prize. Read more here.

Big-boned. That’s what I told myself I was when I was growing up. I put down to genetics a tendency to gain fat with unnerving ease but what else could I blame? Armed with the conventional wisdom of Australia in the 1980s and 90s, we were simply fed the way we were taught to eat: some meat and vegetables but otherwise plenty of white bread, cereals, skimmed milk, margarine, and other ‘healthy carbs’ like potatoes and pasta. Having something of a sweet tooth myself, I was no stranger to unloading a tablespoon of sugar into my bowl of Weetbix or Rice Bubbles. I didn’t like water (admittedly, the tap water in Adelaide is still the worst I’ve tasted to this day) so anytime I drank fluids, they were enhanced with the sugary goodness of cordial. I often got sick when I was young, generally in the form of lingering colds, but my stomach often played up, too; nausea was a given for me for long periods of time, and if there was a stomach bug going around, I’d be the first to get it. (It would later turn out via a blood test in my 20s that I was borderline coeliac so I’d be surprised if that isn’t connected!). I was a reasonably active child, spending a lot of time on my BMX at the bike track, out waterskiing on the river, swimming in our pool, rowing, and playing weekly games of hockey, so I’m lucky not to have been really seriously out of shape. I was most definitely very soft around the edges though.

It was around the time I left school in 2000 at the age of 18 that friends and I started to take an interest in lifting weights, but we really had no idea what we were doing at that stage, especially as far as nutrition was concerned. We were far more likely to be downing post-training beers than anything remotely helpful like a protein shake or, god forbid, actual food. For the next couple of years I left the weights, and my only exercise was the daily 30-minute ride to and from my job at an award-winning bakery. I can only thank having youth on my side for the fact that the unfathomable number of pies, sausage rolls, cakes, buns and Red Bulls I consumed didn’t go straight to my fat stores and stay there!

The next decade or so contained a variety of approaches to training, nutrition and wellbeing, some more successful or long-lasting than others. I discovered my love of a style of kung fu which I’ve now kept up for 13 years; I dabbled in Ori Hoffmeckler’s Warrior Diet for a few months; I fell in love with kettlebell training and have grown a pretty nice collection of them which I use religiously; I fell out of love with a vegetarian-pasta-obsessed girlfriend (this stuff contained pasta, tinned tomatoes, a couple of carrots and some celery – talk about a malnourished period of my life!); whey protein took its place in my diet and, like an epiphany, crystallized for me the importance protein plays in the healthy functioning of the body; I completed a personal training qualification but ended up not working as a PT after learning the statistic about the very high number of PTs who contract vocal nodules – I was (and still am) a classical singer who relied on his vocal health!

I’d always admired Arnold Schwarzenegger (his dedication and his physique, anyway) so at the time I was doing the PT course, I started training with traditional weights again to get as big and strong as I possibly could. And I did. I got very big and very strong. And fat. I got so fat you could barely tell I’d gained a notable amount of muscle too. Conventional Lifting Wisdom, as I was interpreting it, had been telling me to eat as much as I could fit in my belly, multiple times a day. I was loading up on fantastic meat (my sister managed one of the best butcher shops in Australia), but I was also gorging on peanut butter right out of the jar just to keep my calories up. I really ran with the concept and completely overshot the mark, going from 77kgs to 94kgs (169lbs to 207lbs) at a height of just shy of 6ft in a matter of months, and I did not look or feel healthy or especially happy by this point. It was a real eye-opener in terms of my caloric requirements, too – I’d significantly overestimated how much energy I was burning and how much of which foods I needed to eat for recovery. I have no regrets because self-experimentation has taught me a lot, but I realise in hindsight that this phase may well have created the insulin resistance that stayed with me for quite a few of the ensuing years.

Six months later. New wonderful girlfriend (soon-to-be-wonderful-wife), moved to a smaller place that didn’t fit my weights gear (power cage, Olympic bar and the rest) which was a real problem for my lifting as the introvert in me makes me very much a solo trainee – I’m completely self-conscious in a gym, and I need silence to train effectively – so I got lazy and happy. I was still using my kettlebells every so often and training kung fu but not with the dedication I had been. I lost some fat, but I also lost some muscle so for the next couple of years I was strong but kind of out of shape again with my training in flux without a clear goal. In 2011 we moved our whole lives over to the UK to try our hands at fully freelance classical music careers (my wife is a violinist). Things began well but building a freelance career where you don’t know anyone inevitably means pinching pennies so our eating suffered somewhat. It was never hideous but it was definitely still conventional in the sense that we didn’t really think much about what we ate. Lots of carbs but lots of fat to go with it, plus healthy volumes of heavy British ales. I kept up the kung fu and I bought some cheap kettle bells, but my commitment was somewhat intermittent given our entire living space was one room for two years. Still didn’t look great at somewhere between 87kg and 91kg (190-200lbs). For most of this time though, because we were poor, we walked a hell of a lot to avoid paying for transport!

Still in the UK and careers going from strength to strength, we had our first beautiful boy, Tobias, in 2015 and despite ramping up my training and healthier eating in the months beforehand, I REALLY let myself go once he appeared in our lives. I was sleep-deprived so I constantly fell for comfort foods and beer and wine, and within nine months I was up to 95kg (209lbs). I’d never been heavier or felt worse. They say it takes 28 days to build a habit and three days to break one and during this period, any time I tried to train, I couldn’t create enough momentum to take me to the next session; I couldn’t get anywhere near enough to the ‘28 days’ to establish the pattern I needed to be consistent again. Of course, I was weaker and more unfit than I had been and I found this very depressing so I coped by avoiding it altogether – and I’d always hated avoidance as a coping tactic. I was becoming someone whose choices I couldn’t respect and that was heartbreaking to me. I’d always been confident but that was now diminishing to the point that friends and colleagues commented on it. I even started to get ever-increasing bouts of performance anxiety on stage – scary stuff because I’d seen it end careers. The final straw was a photo that was taken of a group of friends and me on a visit back home to Australia; despite knowing inside that I’d gained a lot of fat, it was seeing my body stretching my t-shirt in all directions and having the photo shared far and wide that was my ‘ugh’ moment.

Enter Primal. I stumbled on Mark’s Daily Apple after looking at hunter-gatherer-related pages (I’d always had a thirst for knowledge about prehistoric peoples) and, like so many others who write these stories, I was instantly dumbstruck by the sense in everything I read. I’d heard bits and pieces about Paleo and a lower carb lifestyle (I tried the Ketogenic Diet in early 2014 with mixed success) but not like this. I ordered The Primal Blueprint days later and finally I saw what I needed presented in a way that used science, logic and common sense without the sensationalism you see surrounding other ‘diets’. This was so much more than a simple diet; as I saw it, it took care of everything that makes the human body and mind thrive, and with countless studies to back it up.

I wasn’t a super high-carb eater so I didn’t suffer terribly from the ‘carb flu’ the way some do when I dropped the last vestiges of a grainy diet (oats and sandwiches and the like) and upped the fat from sources like avocado, eggs, nuts, bacon, fish, heavy cream in coffee, and more olive oil, but still, the weight just flew off – in a matter of a few weeks I was down 6kg. I’m sure some of that was water but I felt so much better too: I was already getting sick far less often, I was sleeping better, my energy was balanced and I wasn’t getting as hungry. I attempted my first 24 hour fast on a major concert day (much to the bewilderment of my colleagues) and I barely noticed on stage that I hadn’t eaten all day. One of the other great benefits of all this for me has been the ease with which I can retain muscle while eating little enough to lose the fat off the top. 13 months on, I’m down 15.5kg (34lbs) and I can see my abs for the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE – and I still have most of the muscle I worked so hard for.

Day-to-day, I tend to cycle through the regular components of my diet according to what I’m in the mood for. Every morning I have the juice of half a lemon in hot water before anything else. If I’m having breakfast (I often fast till lunch), I’ll either have a protein shake or some full-fat natural Greek yoghurt and some ricotta with berries, a couple of Brazil nuts and milled flax, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, plus a double espresso with a splash of heavy cream. Lunch is generally a big tin of salmon (bones included, though I take the skin out – I’ve been squeamish about fish skin since I worked in a seafood factory at the age of 19) mixed with a bit of yoghurt, capers, cucumber, lemon juice, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and seaweed salt. Dinners are a mix! It’s always meat and vegetables in some combination (curry, tagine, roast, summer salad, etc), generally without much in the way of carbs. Lamb shanks are my all-time favourite meal, however they’re prepared, and I’ll have some potato with them. I’ll have a spoon or two of rice with a curry.

Post-training I’ll always have a protein shake with creatine and a spoonful of blackstrap molasses or an occasional banana. I was eating a lot of eggs but I’ve largely dropped them of late due to some bloating – which I hope passes as they’re so convenient and tasty! I could certainly improve on my base level Primal diet, though. I really need to eat more vegetables throughout the day, and I need to eat more collagen due to my taste for muscle meat. That said, every day I feel I learn more about how I can best make it work for me so food decisions become easier and more instinctive.

My training schedule varies according to how I feel, but my average week will contain four or five days with some form of training. These will either be heavy kettlebell work (overhead mostly – clean and presses, snatches, and some rows and swings), or weighted dips, chin-ups, pistols and Turkish Get-ups, or a 15-minute farmers’ walk with my heaviest ‘bells, kung fu training, or (lately) some sprints. None of these sessions will exceed an hour – I’m generally done between 30 and 45 minutes. I’ll also knock out a set of pushups or chin-ups or dips when I’m near my doorway chin-up bar or a pair of kitchen chairs!

I travel a lot for work, often for a couple of weeks at a time staying in various hotels touring around the USA. Lots of the tour days will contain two flights (when I’m already jetlagged and having to be out of bed by 5 a.m. after a late concert the night before), and this can add a little guesswork into the equation as far as not knowing what type of meal an airport will have or a promoter will provide – I’ll sometimes simply have to be a little less strict. Same thing with frequent 24-hour trips to spots all over Europe like that great Mecca of beer, Belgium. I’m extremely lucky to have a career that takes me to these wonderful places – as a great food and drink lover, I feel I owe it to myself to make the most of what these cultures have to offer so I might indulge a little. In any case, as long as I get back in the saddle on my return, nothing negative lasts very long at all. The 80/20 principle works very well for me – I’ve proven to myself that loosening the reins every so often doesn’t have to end the game for me, at least once my body and I knew the ropes. I’ve learned that I can get away with a couple of beers here, some wine and chocolate there, or an almond croissant on a special morning out with my wife and son. I don’t always feel great afterwards but it’s good for the soul.

If there’s hope I have to offer to anyone in particular who is contemplating taking the plunge, it’s to new parents. Our respective families live on the other side of the world, so we’re essentially raising our son alone – life is therefore far from easy, and a day’s planned physical activity can often go out the window at a moment’s notice – but the Primal approach is so adaptable that it needn’t ever be derailed. If Tobias woke early from his nap, my kettlebell session would be halved; if I was completely destroyed by a night with him refusing to sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time, I did a handful of chin-ups and chair dips and called it a day on training till I’d caught up a bit; if I was stressed by his unwillingness to play on his own for an entire day and felt like falling into a packet of sweet biscuits or chips, I was thankfully armed with the knowledge that I was just going to feel awful afterwards. And if I did succumb? I’d appreciate the moment for what it was and move on because I’d be back to craving what my body now instinctively knew what was good for it. This is all still relevant, but now that Tobias is nearly two, the challenge has changed a bit. Now he insists on lifting kettlebells with me (well, he deadlifts the 8kg one at least!), he gets me to help him with dips, he planks with me, he copies one-arm push-ups, and he now enjoys using a foam roller to work out all that tension created by the incredibly demanding situation of being a 23-month-old with his every whim taken care of.

As an aside, growing up in Australia, we took the sun for granted so we never considered taking vitamin D supplements – we simply didn’t need to – but it took me five years here in the UK to realise that it’s a really good idea in winter! Two months ago I was feeling especially drained, I had a constant headache, my sleep was sporadic, I was getting sick a lot again, and my fat loss had stalled. I re-read Mark’s article about vitamin D and checked all my symptoms against a few other websites and realised that was it. I’m now taking 5,000-10,000IU a day and all of the symptoms have gone, including my fat loss plateau – and that’s the only thing I’ve changed. If you’re not getting much sun for a long period of time, it’s definitely worth checking your vitamin D levels.

So that’s my Primal journey so far! I have to commend and thank my wife, Julia. Despite some reluctance at the beginning – she was raised with a more progressive and holistic attitude towards food, and as a result hasn’t struggled with the same fat gain or health issues – she is completely onboard and has been really supportive with all this (useful because she loves cooking and does nearly all of it). I’m also very glad to be able to give our boy the healthy head start not many get at the same age. We’re expecting our second baby in a couple of months so we’ll be back to square one with the sleep issues, but I now know I don’t have to drop everything as a result!

I have so much gratitude to Mark for the wealth of reliable and verifiable information he makes available in a world which is only just starting to shift in the right direction. He’s had the most profound influence on our health and well-being that it’s hard to know where to begin. So thank you, Mark!

Tom