#100 Movement and Primal Play Method with Darryl Edwards

Darryl Edwards (0:00)

If lifestyle is medicine, which I know we believe, what dose do we take? You know, how often do we take this? Are there any shortcuts? You know, when will I expect to see a result?

How hard do I have to work to achieve a result? How can I make this something that becomes part of my life?

Einstein said that play is the highest form of research. You're more creative, you're more likely to ask questions, you're less likely to accept the status quo, you're constantly thinking about how the world could be different. When you're in that state, that flow-based state, there is something like 50% of genes that are expressed through physical activity. There's an epigenetic change just based on the fact that play is involved.

Siim Land (0:47)

Body, mind, empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:49)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:55)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:56)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:00)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Darryl Edwards. Darryl is a movement coach, natural lifestyle educator, nutritionist, and creator of the Primal Play Method. He's an author, speaker, and owner of the website primalplay.com.

Darryl, welcome to the show.

Darryl Edwards (1:19)

Hi, thanks very much for the invitation.

Siim Land (1:22)

Yeah, can we like, let's maybe start off by you giving a brief kind of back story about what you do and how did you end up here?

Darryl Edwards (1:31)

Okay, yeah, so as soon as it starts, best to start with my background. So I used to work within investment banking as a technologist. So I was a computer programmer, a solutions architect, and I built systems to make banks lots of money. And the benefit of that was, it was very lucrative career, but I was working pretty much every hour available. So 16, 18 hour days were normal, seven days a week, and I suffered the consequences in terms of my health.

So financially, very wealthy, but very poor in terms of my health. And that was manifested by being diagnosed as a pre-diabetic.

I had elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, and I was also very hypertensive, so had very high blood pressure. And the recommendation by my doctor at the time was to take statins for my cholesterol issues, just to take beta blockers for my blood pressure, and to take metformin for my blood glucose control. So I was really concerned at having that cocktail of medication at a relatively young age, and felt as if that was going to be for me until the end of my days. What about the side effects? Why do I need to be on these meds for the rest of my life? Well, Darryl, if you don't take these meds, you're likely to get worse, and that means you could die a lot younger than you should. So when you're faced with that, and you feel like you have no options at all, you know, I was at a loss, to be honest, until I recognized that at least one of those issues, the high blood pressure, I could probably manage myself. So I read, remember reading some research that high blood pressure could be controlled through physical activity, and I was very, very sedentary. I was pretty much sitting at my desk, almost sleeping at my desk. I mean, that was my life. So I thought, well, let me try doing some exercise, and let's see if I can at least change that.

But not only did they that change, but also my blood glucose, I was known like a pre-diabetic after exercising. And so I started to see some health benefits without taking medication. And that led me to further research, and that made me to start thinking about what should I do in terms of my diet to support my physical activity. So that was the beginning of that transformation from poor health to better health. And after several years working within banking and recognizing that my passion had changed, that I wanted to help people navigate dealing with chronic lifestyle disease, I wanted to be better educated and better informed. And I wanted to pass on this information to then to become my clients, for those individuals to become my clients. I realized I needed a shift. And that shift became me starting to blog as the fitness explorer.

And I wanted to document how I was getting on on that journey.

And then thinking, let me find a way of making movement more fun. So exercise is something that was very difficult for me to maintain a love affair with. So play and natural primal movement was my way of making it more exciting, making it more childlike, making it more interesting. And so that was a eureka moment where I said, now I know what my destiny is within the health landscape. It's primal play.