steve pavlina

2011: Don’t Move, Improve

2011: Don’t Move, Improve

Success will come only to those who are willing to have a little blind faith–in themselves, in their art, and in their ability to stand tall and take the world by storm.

Ashley Ambirge, The Middle Finger Project

With 2010 now over, a lot of people have been writing about their meditations on the previous year and what they have planned for the next (examples: Murray, Tristan, Steve Pavlina, Ingrid). I have spent a lot of time reflecting on 2010 myself, because it was a landmark year for me. My daughter was born December 31st, 2009, so 2010 was a full year with her changing dramatically. I had moved to a new city at the end of 2009, too, so 2010 was my first full year here experiencing the (hot) summer weather, exploring the city, adjusting to dealing with agressive idiots and morons. There have been many problems to deal with, too. It’s turning into a laundry list, and I write them here for me to remember in the future, and maybe some will find it unbelievable.

  • January 2010, discovered black mold throughout our basement suite after having only lived there two months. Had to find a new place ASAP because of our newborn.
  • March 2010, a month after living in our new apartment, my vehicle was broken into. Passenger side window smashed, GPS stolen, etc. The incredible thing is we have underground parking. It was someone within our building doing it.
  • April, the transmission on my Jeep starts to act up and not shift properly. Not incredibly expensive to fix since it is just one part, not the entire transmission failing.
  • June, make a road trip to see family with a side trip to see one friend. Said friend keeps delaying when to connect with us, and when we do connect, only has 30 minutes with us. Hotel + ferry + parking + food = $300 for a 30 minute visit.
  • July, the month where I committed to sticking to the Primal Blueprint and setting up this blog. To date, I’ve lost 45 pounds and am under 200 lbs for the first time since University. The blog started off slowly, but I’ve learned a few things and reached 1,000 unique views in the month of December. Never thought I would get to that point after six months, so I’m happy.
  • September, picked up a side gig for a week escorting a meeting group around the city. 70 hours during the week, and it was an absolute gong show of a job.
  • October, mother-in-law lived with us for six weeks. An experience I hope I never have to go through again because it’s incredibly awkward at times – but we do get along so it could have been much, much worse. Also received a notice of a possible eviction from our place, for a few drops of oil in our parking stall of all things. To celebrate our first year in the Okanagan, we spent a few nights at the Sparkling Hill Resort, which I really should write up properly.
  • November, turned 31. All downhill from here, I imagine!
  • December, the most eventful month of the year. Vehicle was stolen this time (parked outside) and driven 5 blocks before being ditched because the transmission acted up on them. $300 for towing, $400 in repairs. I had three job interviews this month. With one of them, I had an offer at the end of it, but was told to wait a few days to think it through. When I called back, someone from another of their hotel’s had applied and they have a policy to hire internally first. That was a real bummer. I was short listed for another position, had a great interview, but never heard back either. Not even a courtesy email. Some people these days. In the last two weeks, there was my girlfriend’s birthday, my daughter’s first Christmas (spent with my girlfriend’s family), and my daughter’s first birthday on New Year’s Eve. It’s quite a whirlwind of a period and I will get to go through it every.single.year.

And that brings us to 2011. After enduring all the changes the past year and making some personal triumphs, how do I keep that up for the next year?

Don’t Move, Improve

It is tempting to move away from some of the problem areas in my life and start over, but I think the better solution is to improve upon the current situations that are problems. Moving away from them is, in a sense, quitting, and quitting is a negative experience in my opinion. Looking ahead to the new year, I am taking a cue from Meryl Evans who writes:

The experts’ suggestions for goal setting and planning overwhelm and paralyze many folks, including me. Rather than commit myself to particular goals at the beginning of the year, I watch my business and professional lives, do a little temperature-taking throughout the year, then make decisions based on what’s actually happening.

Here are my three simple steps:

  1. Figure out your passion.
  2. Create rules to support these passions.
  3. Make decisions based on the first two steps.

For 2011, I want to focus on three items that I know I am and can be passionate about 365 days of the year:

  1. My young family – daughter and girlfriend
  2. My health – mind, body, and spirit
  3. Four Sides blog

The first item is a no brainer. The second, is a common item for most, but I feel as though I’ve made huge strides with it in 2010 and can easily keep it up. I have read The 4 Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss (review part 1, part 2, part 3 is coming), and wish to focus more on body composition than fat loss. As I mentioned before, I have lost over 40 pounds through following The Primal Blueprint, but I want to improve upon these successes and make my body better than before. The diet is the main component of it, and now that my girlfriend is on board with it, I think both of us can go a long way with this.

The Four Sides blog has been growing, but isn’t at the level I would like it at. Here is the traffic summary from the stats provided by Squarespace.

I have discovered that my traffic remains consistent even when I do not post anything, and that my most popular posts are in regards to people/products, and not entirely my own ideas and opinions. Of course, my own ideas posts spark more conversation in the comments. I have been thinking about how to improve upon this mix, and improve the blog, without a major change in course (ie writing about a specific niche). Here are the three rules I want to stick with on this blog:

  1. Write one review (book, blog, product) a week, and one pensée post. Ideally, write at least one 1500 word pensée a month.
  2. Migrate the blog to WordPress when the contract is up in April with Squarespace for better control.
  3. Focus any inspirational reading on certain blogs and magazines to eliminate distractions.

I have decided that my overall motto for the new year is going to be:

Enhance the Personal

I want to make this blog more personal and passionate; make my life more personal and start living and working for my own needs, not to fill someone else’s.

If you have suggestions on how I should be doing things differently on this blog or want to share your own rules you are going to live by this year, please do share them. I have an insatiable curiousity to learn more.

And, because I simply can’t resist sharing this, here is my daughter, reading a book:

A Passionate Voice In Blogging

A Passionate Voice In Blogging

Our passion acts like a compass, pointing the way to the path of growth that will in turn lead us to a life of fulfillment.

Rachelle Fordyce

Two questions have been on my mind the past few nights and I hope to answer one of them now:

  1. How is passion involved in a blog? and
  2. Is passion the equivalent of focus, or something different entirely?

After reading through Rachelle’s post (who is Steve Pavlina‘s girlfriend), I was impressed with her commitment to actively create on a daily basis for 30 days. It is not only a commitment of time (four hours each day), but a journey to fully discover whether she is creating in the best manner possible. It acted as a stomach punch for me. I have known for a while that I have not been as focused with my blog as I would like, and always find myself comparing this site up against some of the major workaholics of the blogosphere (Murray, Steve, Tristan, Matthew, etc). There is no way I can be up in their ranks right now – not with a young baby maturing into a toddler and keeping us preoccupied majority of the time. But that does not mean that I can not find a sliver of time to devote more attention to this blog.

Over at his site, Steve Scott has suggested some jumping off points for blog posts and various styles to incorporate to discover your voice. There are some great suggestions to be found there, but I don’t think it is the right direction for me. I have been writing online for such a long time now (even had a LiveJournal and blogged on MySpace). My style of writing is not going to be changing any time soon. As much as I would like to play with some of the big boys in blogging, I will have to reach their heights on my terms, not their’s.

There are other ways to get to the top.

I have always thought of myself as a bit of an anarchist, but thankfully a relatively sane one. I have always found myself doing things at a different drum beat than the rest. The surprising thing for me was when my mother told me some of the stories of me growing up as a baby – I did not babble, I went straight to talking to simple sentences; I did not crawl, I just got up and started walking one day; I read on my own and did not need constant caring for, etc.  Even now, I do things when I want to do them – and it drives the people around me crazy.

How does that apply to blogging, though?

Look at my previous posts and you will see that I am a firm believer in going against the grain by not having a narrow focus/niche to write about and by getting away from article writing. To me:

Blogging is about releasing your inner voice out into the world.

That’s it. SEO, backlinks, page rank games, all of that can disappear in a heart beat and it wouldn’t matter to me one bit.

Several other blogs have written about how to discover your writing voice in the past, but Lisa Barone recently wrote something that gives the correct recipe in cooking up that voice. She wrote in, “How to Find Yourself On Your Blog“:

A lot of other people will tell you the first rule of blogging is “don’t be boring”, but I think calling it bravery is actually a better term. Writers who are brave take risks with language, they allow themselves to try new things, and they grab a sword when others grab a filter. And you know what your brave voice sounds like. It’s you on Friday night when you’re a little tipsy – either on alcohol, love or life. It’s when you’re YOU without the filter you apply to everyday life in order to look or appear a certain way. Honing in on that ballsier version of yourself is what allows you to create your character and form that naked superhero– which, to me, is one of the most important aspects to blogging.

I think she hit the nail on the head. You will never discover your voice without actually being brave enough to write something that rubs someone the wrong way. Of course, we all aim to please our readers, but I am a firm believer that upsetting someone gets a better, more meaningful response than writing something “soft.”

A wonderful example of this is a production of The Lonesome West that I worked on nearly ten years ago. It’s a controversial play on many levels, but the tipping point for the audience is the suicide letter written and performed as a monologue by Father Welsh. During the intermission, a large portion of the audience would leave the theatre and never return. Most would think this is a bad sign that the play is horrible, but on the contrary, it moved people to respond. It is not a passive play where you sit back and forget about it within minutes of leaving. You react to it and it will sit with you for several days afterwards.

I believe that once you write something that causes someone to react out of the norm, you have discovered your true voice. Everything else you write that does not get a reaction is merely writing for an audience (or search engines). It is not an authentic voice.

After discovering that authentic voice, you have discovered your true passion, but does that mean you have found the focus for your site?

The Dodo Effect: Making Your Readers Win

The Dodo Effect: Making Your Readers Win

“Everybody has won and all must have prizes.”

- Dodo, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I recently read an article found in Harper’s Magazine titled, “The War on Unhappiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking,” by Gary Greenberg (only available to subscribers) that introduced me to the concept of the dodo effect that is found in psychotherapy. The dodo effect says that:

Therapeutic orientation doesn’t matter because all orientations work. The single factor that makes a difference in outcome is faith: the patient must believe in the therapist, and the therapist must believe in his orientation. For therapy to work, both parties must have faith, sometimes against all reason, that their expedition will succeed.

I read this and thought about how writers influence their readers for the better, and what separates the highly successful ones from the rest of us.

What separates writers of influence from newspaper journalists is that these kind of writers believe in their work, as much as, and probably more, than their readers. It goes beyond having a passion about a topic. One must have a passion, live by the rules they set out for their readers, and be able to demonstrate to them that they are living by those rules and that the rules work.

[ The dodo effect is named after the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, who issued a challenge to Alice and her companions after they had gotten wet. In order to dry themselves off, they were to race around the lake until they were dry. No one had bothered to measure how far anyone ran nor how fast, so at the end, they asked the Dodo which of them had won. The Dodo replied, "Everybody has won and all must have prizes." ]

Writer of Influence versus a Hack Writer

To me, the easy way to spot a writer of influence starts with their subject matter. I scan through the front page of the blog and look for the warning signs of someone who does not fully believe in their writing, namely advertising. I am not talking about a few advertisements on the side or at the very bottom of the page, but if a page has ads floating in between paragraphs, then the writer is not 100% dedicated to their content. They are most likely writing with the chains of SEO attached at their ankles and not being themselves in their writing.

Another sign is when it is extremely difficult to find anything else to read beyond what is in front of me. Writers of influence want their content to read, shared, and widely available. When it is hidden from view, that tells me that the content really does not matter to them nearly as much as it should. If you put more than ten minutes into writing something, you should feel proud of it and want it to be shared. If you write something in less than ten minutes, either you are extremely gifted or you are not putting a full effort into writing. Sometimes, you can summarize a topic in under 500 words, but when I see repeated posts in under 500 words about similar subject matter, I have doubts in how invested that writer is with those ideas.

Living by the Rules

Sooner or later, a writer of influence is going to set-up some rules for their readers to abide by that will improve upon their life in some fashion, whether it would be their health, finances, writing, etc. They will have links to “Topic 101,” a FAQ, How-To’s, or write posts with headlines geared towards making a change in your life. I will use Steve Pavlina’s blog as an example since he uses all of these within his post titles. Here are some of his more popular posts:

If you read any of his articles, you will quickly realize that Steve uses a lot of his own life examples to demonstrate the rules he is living by. It is easy to create rules for people to live by, but by providing past experiences of how he made those changes himself, it is a lot easier for people to believe in Steve’s ideas – and make the changes themselves. Steve not only writes about his examples, but shares them in other ways, through video, interviews, a book, forum, and his seminars.

You will find this recipe for other influence writers spread across the web, from Leo Babauta of Zenhabits, Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple, or Merlin Mann of 43 Folders, and more.

The power of influence begins and ends with you. Without you living by your rules, you would have no influence over anyone else. And without you, people would not be able to be influenced by you. To become a writer of influence, we must focus on what we are writing and put all our effort into it to make it believable to everyone who comes across it. We should not be seeking shortcuts to create as much content as possible, but instead focus on quality content that will be meaningful to the readers we want to influence.

Like the Dodo, we want everyone to win.

A Lesson on Blogging: Ramit Sethi and the 4,355 Word Email

A Lesson on Blogging: Ramit Sethi and the 4,355 Word Email

Ramit Sethi is one of my current idols for a few reasons. First off, his book, I Will Teach You to be Rich, has really helped me turn my finances around by changing how I think of them (hint: as little as possible). Second, through his blog and his email lists, he gives solid advice from keeping your finances healthy to helping you focus on earning more and not just saving more. When I see a new blog post or email show up with his name attached to it, I almost always devour it completely.

I had written about Ramit Sethi and how some of his ideas apply to writing, but I thought I would mention him again after what hit my Inbox the other day. It was nothing short of an epic email. 4,355 words, taking a total of six hours to write, and another good 15+ minutes to read through. The other thing is he isn’t publishing it to his blog. You have to sign up for the email list in order to receive it. Because it is only available to email subscribers, and I want people to actually sign up for his list, I won’t get into a lot of detail about the content he included in the email, but instead touch on some ideas that sprung to life after seeing it.

Layers of Content

Ramit Sethi operates his blog, as well as, another site titled Earn 1K, which is a paid course to help you earn more money. Each site also includes an email subscription list that compliments the content available on those sites. The key word being compliments. The content available through the email lists rarely duplicates what is available on the sites, although it sometimes gives advance looks at the content about to be published on the website. As I was reading through his massive email, I began to think about his layers of content and how in order to maximize the knowledge gained through Ramit’s writings, you have to commit to more than following through a RSS subscription or Twitter feed.

Having the different layers of content available is a strength for Ramit’s subscribers. You can engage as much or as little with his writings as you would like. If you want to learn even more, you sign up for the emails and the Twitter feed. If you want less, follow the blog only. His strategy is a different line of thought compared to how the majority of bloggers operate, and one of the biggest criticisms of Google Buzz as it tries to build a following. For most of us, we start with a blog and then pump the same content (mainly links to the blog posts) to our Twitter feeds, Facebook streams, Digg, Reddit, etc. With our Twitter feeds, the additional information we provide there is usually a duplicate of the content found within our posts. For example, a direct quote or a summary of a key paragraph.

There is value in making sure everyone reads our content and spread the word as far out as we possibly can, but there is more value in having people commit further to the content you are creating. A reader changes and becomes more of a follower and treats you, the writer, as a guru or pseudo-mentor. You still have to create content to keep people interested, but the more you limit who can see the content, the more valuable the content will become.

I think this is a key reason why people like Ramit Sethi, Steve Pavlina, Erica Douglas, Mark Sisson and so on have been so successful. Each of them has a core means of distributing their content, but also developed layers on top that allowed people to consume extra content through an email subscription, or to connect directly to the writers and the community through the forums hosted on the site. The more people have to work at attaining knowledge, the more we value it. Spending an hour devouring a National Geographic issue gives us a sense of accomplishment after we get through it, whereas I doubt people feel that same sense of having finished something significant after an hour of Discovery Channel.

We may not all be at a good point to create a deep layer of content like an email subscription or a forum, but we can rethink how we use the tools available to us. Is it more important to republish the links to our blog posts on Twitter, or should we be searching to publish information available only to those who follow the Twitter stream? A lot of people publish eBooks for people to download, but it is not a recurring source of content – read it once and then wait for the next eBook. A better idea may be using a mini-blog tool like Tumblr which allows you to create another layer of content. I currently use it to publish quick quotes or videos that I find interesting, but I could easily use it to provide secondary content more directly related to this blog.

There are other lessons to be learned from Ramit Sethi after you subscribe to his email list. He wrote a summary of the reactions to his monster email on his blog. The key point he raises in that post is that not everything he publishes should be free. He wants to:

[share his] best content with people who’ve taken some action to get it. Taking action” could be joining one of my premium courses. Or it could simply be trusting me with your email address. Either way, people who take action are worth more to me (in every way — not just financially) than someone who simply consumes material. I’m not in this game for people to simply read my stuff, think to themselves “That was good!!” and then go on chewing their bagel.

I want behavioral change — and people who take some kind of action are qualitatively and quantitatively more likely to take action to live a richer life.

I agree with him. Take action, visit his website, enter your email address, and be ready to consume more ideas about blogging and progressing in life. Afterwards, take a moment to consider some of the ideas I presented here and think about how you can add a new layer of content to your blog or website.

Digital Sabbatical

 It was all just starting to feel too much like an eating disorder or like academic mania — being preoccupied with thoughts you don’t care about, compulsively seeking information that is at once overwhelming and boring, soliciting the approval of people you don’t know, relying on your own anxiety for stimulation.

Alice Gregory, Ornament of My Might 

As I sit here, staring at my growing number of unread articles in Google Reader (437 at last count), my mind is starting to stress out. How am I to finish reading all of these posts, and they are only today’s posts, too?! A glance at my Twitter account reveals the same for me – too many status updates to work my way through. Some people have too much on their mind that they think is worth sharing to the rest of us. I hunt Twitter for the valuable links and quotes of inspiration, but instead find the affiliate links for bogus products or over used #hashtags, which are replacing the overused hyphen in today’s writing. 

It is almost a parallel meme surging through the internet, balanced by the growing concerns of privacy on Facebook and through search. The people who are taking digital sabbaticals are processing too much information, and the people who are concerned about privacy issues are sending out too much. The internet is the worst enemy for both of these camps, allowing them to easily access or share information on a whim with no deep curiosity. One mouse clicks or tap takes them into a new world, one that they most likely don’t have the time to fully explore, but will do anyways. 

Alice also writes in the same post, “I had forgotten that thoughts and feelings actually grow more complex if you just stop documenting their earliest iterations.” Documenting those first flashes of brilliance is useful when brainstorming, or mind mapping, but useless dribble when it comes to commentary of one’s opinion in a public forum. I tend to find people over-react when they read something, and don’t allow that gestation period for the ideas to fully settle into their body. People are in a rush to be the first responders, the first to point out similar posts on their blog, and to share the links without writing their own commentary to attach with it. 

Nicholas Carr writes in his new book, The Shallows: 

“Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going- so far as I can tell- but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

Where we were once able to focus on long articles and novels, now our minds are constantly searching for the easy way out. I have always thought these changes were unique to myself, but now that I know it is more widespread, it makes me wonder what I can do to reverse these changes or slow them down? There are two directions I see us choosing. 

Digital Sabbatical

An absolute disconnection from the digital world, including social media, email, surfing, search, as well as, television, movies, cellphones, and other devices. It is an extremely challenging thing to do in this world, but one that would be necessary to reset our minds and allow us to tune into what is really happening to them. This sabbatical would be for however long you personally think you need a break for. Most people seem to be taking them for 30 days to give a solid break to your mind, but maybe a seven day sabbatical would be sufficient. For Steve Pavlina, a 30 day trial of no television led to a 60 day trial, and then further. A digital sabbatical may be as life changing for you as a digital life has had on you. 

Slow Steep

I am stealing this term from Gwen Bell who recently underwent her own digital sabbatical. 

In a normal day for a heavy internet user, they will check their email in the mornings and throughout the day, they will log into Facebook/MySpace at least once a day, check up on their Twitter feeds, and read their RSS subscriptions. It will usually be a loop of activity, going from one site to the next, or using an application like Seesmic or Brizzly to follow all the action in one spot.

With a slow steep, you slow the pace of your interactions with digital media. Perhaps you check your email in the mornings and then in the evenings, but not in between. You log into your social media sites every few days, and not daily. You use the power of “Mark All as Read” to eliminate the unread subscription posts and emails to clear your mind of them. If you come across something that captures your interest on the web, bookmark it and come back to it in a few days if you think of it again. Rather than attempt to respond to that article through a blog post or comment, let it sit in the back of your mind. If those thoughts are still there after a gestation period of at least a day, then respond to that post. 

I find myself shifting more towards a slow steep mentality when it comes to not only my reading, but also my writing. With Google Reader, I can use their tools to determine which feeds I read on a regular basis, and start eliminating the feeds I hardly ever read. I will also bookmark articles to read at a later time. I am not bothered by the fact that my bookmark folder of “To Read” is a list of 40+ links, and will purge that list in the coming days. With writing, I quickly jot out ideas in a task manager, then let it sit. When I have time in the evenings, I will look over that list of ideas and start to draft out a post if an idea really stands out. If I read one of my ideas and I’m not sure which direction I meant to take that idea in, I may either leave it on the list to think about or delete it right away. If a thought is no longer in my mind after a day, the thought is not truly important to me, and most likely won’t be of any interest to anyone else either. 

While a digital sabbatical is a huge leap of faith in believing you will be better off without all the interactions, a slow steep is a more methodical approach in weaning yourself off of the media. In time, the slow steep could be a branch of productivity to counter balance the Getting Things Done or the Pomodoro approach. 

 

Diets are the new social class

After reading various blogs about Primal and raw eating, and then reading The Primal Blueprint (written by Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple), I have noticed a common theme that corresponds to each diet’s success. At the same time, after reading hundreds of comments by the readers, there is a secondary theme that comes across, one of superiority to others. The more I read these comments, the more I thought about the larger ideas surrounding diets and health in general. Diets are becoming the way we identify and associate with people. 

A quick breakdown of these diets for people unaware of these relatively new diets. 
 
Primal/Paleo diets and lifestyles are based upon how our ancestors would have lived pre-agriculture, roughly 10,000 years ago. In the Primal Blueprint, there are ten laws to guide your life, with the key component being the elimination of grains (bread, pasta, sugar, beans, corn, etc.) and processed foods from your diet. Instead, the focus is on animal meats, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and healthy fats. A full review of this book will be coming, but the other laws are about fitness, adequate sleep patterns, and life choices. 
 
Raw food diets are a vegan diet but taken a step further to eliminate all the processes in heating the food above 40 degrees Celsius. Some raw diets will include raw animal products, including raw milk, cheese and yogurt, eggs, and fish (sashimi). The users I have read about ate none of the animal products and focused more on salads and juices. 
 
Both diets go into detail about their health benefits and people have lost incredible amounts of weight. The common theme between the diets is eliminating the processed food, and exercising regularly, which I’m thinking has a lot to do with the weight loss and general health increases of the users. The other common theme that comes out from reading the comments is that anyone not on that particular diet are schmucks. Reading those comments made me question my own views of others and how it applies across society. 
 
One day when I was exiting Walmart to get a few things, I noticed a family of fairly large proportions enter the store, but then veer off to head towards McDonald’s. The mother was holding a large iced cappuccino from Tim Horton’s, making me wonder if she knew how many calories were in one of those, and whether her family really needed to be eating at McDonald’s. Ten years ago, going to these fast food restaurants was more accepted by the majority, but by going there, you were thought to be cheap and in poor financial shape. Now, going to these restaurants is not really associated with being poor, but by making poor health decisions. Remember, I was shopping at Walmart myself, not exactly a shop of grandeur, and I am far from in good financial shape. 
 
This judgment of people based on diet is or already has expanded to include fitness regimes. While I was exploring fitness blogs to find a philosophy that would work with me (while combining it with the right diet for me), I began to notice that commenters were elitists. They think their way works best, and any other way (even if it produces results) is not the right way. There are so many conflicting views of fitness and diets out there, one has to wonder if there is anything such as The Perfect Life that we keep trying to attain.
 
The longer I think about it, the more the answer seems clear to me. There is no such thing as The Perfect Life for any of us, but there is a Right Life that we have to discover for ourselves. Make a choice about your diet, make a choice about your fitness plan, and then stick to it. When we set our minds to do something, we succeed greatly, in health, business, relationships, in all aspects of life. We should suppress our natural instincts of “survival of the fittest” to be more accepting of other’s health choices, whether they be vegan, Primal, Raw, organic, and so forth.
 
Everyone has to come to the conclusion that what they are doing is working or is not working, and then make the choice to accept or to change. Trying to change someone will further confuse that person and not allow them to make a clear choice for change. 

 

Postscript

I thought it may be useful to post up some of the success stories I have come across about people using either a primal or raw diet to lose weight and become healthier.

Steve Pavlina is how I first discovered raw diets when he began a 30 day challenge back in January 2008. I was quite keen to follow his journey and discover its outcome. It was something I had considered doing at the time, but my job and location (northern Canada) wouldn’t allow for it. Everything is more expensive in the north, especially fresh fruit and vegetables. 

Zoe at  (Red)efining Reality posted up this page recently showing her transformation with a raw diet. Very impressive work by her and her partner.

Lori Painter set a New Year’s resolution to regain her form through a raw diet through 2009, and wrote about it periodically with updated videos. She did start with a body most would like to have right now, but there were improvements throughout the year and has some inspiring thoughts along the way.

We Like It Raw has posted up a series of success stories. These stories focus more on overcoming health challenges, like diabetes and cancer, than mainly weight loss. 

Free the Animal‘s Richard Nikoley is the writer that piqued my interest in the primal lifestyle, especially after seeing his before and after pictures.

Michelle from Primal Journey has lost an incredible 90+ lbs, making the news in her native New Zealand.

So many people have been sending their stories after following the Primal Blueprint that there is now ten pages worth of stories to read. There is an incredible mix of people following his guidelines, and it’s wonderful to read them all.

This is just a small sample of so many great stories from the internet about following these diets, and hopefully, I will be among them.