Tackling the Primal Blueprint 21-Day Challenge

Over the summer I got plugged into the blog Mark’s Daily Apple, written by Mark Sisson who is advocate of what he refers to as primal living. While it is a diet he also takes a much more macro approach to things, such as getting proper sleep, reducing stress – it isn’t just diet it is also a lifestyle. My big problem is falling off the wagon or getting distracted, which is something that has been going on for the last 2 weeks, so I’m using this as a motivation to get back in the saddle.

I’ve dabbled in this as well as other low carb diets trying to really home in on the ideal one for myself but I’m going to take this challenge head on for 21 days. What I like about this is the idea of an entire lifestyle change because reading a lot of his work has really thrown into sharp relief how utterly screwed up the way I'm living right now is. I don't sleep enough, I'm always stressed out and I imagine the excessive coffee consumption due to lack of sleep probably isn't helping either. Since I'm someone who thrives on structure I need to get into a routine and then a lot of things will just fall into place.

The Plan
Exercise - I'm going to walk every morning for about 40 minutes, which will come out to just below 5 hours a week, falling within the 3-5 hours the plan states. In terms of heavy lifting I'm going to keep it simple and just use weights at the gym here. Lastly when it comes to the once of week of going all out I will do cardio boxing with this simulator I have for my Wii.

Eating - The only real thing I need to fix here is stop eating fast food and stop eating processed stuff. That means of course cooking everything from scratch - something I've done before but as I mentioned before kind of fell off the wagon over the last two weeks.

Sleeping - This one will be tough because my sleep schedule is really screwed up, but I'm going to try to force myself to not sleep at odd hours and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

While this is going on I'll keep you all updated with how this is going and any other interesting things that come up.

I'll end this with a challenge, hold on while I put on my motivational speaker hat. What is something you know you need to change in your life but have been kicking the can down the road? How long do you think you'd have to force yourself to into that change? Give it a try!

Links:
Marks Daily Apple
2012 Primal Blueprint 21 Day Challenge
Primal Blueprint 101