I personally love your in-your-face style. Were you always like that?

Yes. From day one. I knew there was a lot of bullshit that I wanted to dispel and that I was going to take a myth-busting approach to things.

Oscar Wilde said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise, they will kill you.” I busted so many metabolism myths and the way that I have chosen to do that is through sarcasm and humor.

Another quote that I love is by Johnny Carson: “People will pay more to be entertained than educated.” I consider that I’m, to a significant degree, in the entertainment business. The reason why is that my goal is to get people to believe what I say and do what I say.

If I can’t make them read what I say, then what’s the point? Why did I even bother writing that article?

There are a lot of people who read my stuff solely for the entertainment value. The thing is that it’s exceptionally rare for anyone to have one article change their life. It’s not like they’re going to read this one article and say, “Yes! I get it! I’m going to go out and change my life today!”

What happens instead is they will read a hundred of them and will finally start to sink in. One email stands out: one person said, “You know what? I’ve been reading your stuff for three years. For the first two years, all I did was read them and I didn’t do anything. The only reason why I read them was because I thought you were funny. Then one day, it finally sunk in that maybe I should actually do some of this stuff and I kept reading your stuff. But a year later, I’ve lost 80 pounds.”

So I’ve had a number of emails that are like that and so I’m like, “Great! That was the plan.” People don’t turn into converts like that. You need to bring in people who normally would never read anything about fitness. So my stuff gets shared on Facebook and Twitter and whatever. People read it just because they thought it was funny.

Then maybe when they see my name again, they will go, “Oh, this guy. I’m going to read this one too.” Then they go to the website and maybe they read more stuff and over a period of months and even years, it kind of sinks in and they start – the education component is still there. It’s just put in an entertaining and humorous package and over months and years, it eventually hopefully sinks in. Then finally, you’ve helped change that person for life.

So I don’t know that I actually planned this all out in advance, if that was the way it was going to work. But over time, I realized that that was the way it had worked.

What’s your advice to a person who can’t find the motivation to not only just lose weight but how about something like pursue a career, pursue their dreams?

I am a big fan of self-efficacy theory, which was created by Albert Bandura in the 70s. It’s a situation-specific self concept: the more planning and preparation that you put in to something, the higher your confidence level, so that you’re more likely to actually enjoy the experience and more likely to be successful.

Let’s say that you’re in terrible shape and you walked past a gym and you see a Nike poster that says, “Just do it.” You say, “Fine. I’m going to walk in off the street in my jeans and sweater and go buy a membership and go right up to a machine that I don’t know how to use and I’m just going to try and work out, because Nike told me to just do it.”

Well, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have a terrible experience and you might hurt yourself and you’re going to hate it and you’re never going to want to go back. Alternatively, you walk past the gym and you think, “You know what? I should get in shape. I’m going to start figuring out how I’m going to do this.”

You start conducting some research and figuring out – well, maybe you figure out that weightlifting isn’t for you. Maybe you decide you want to try something else.

Or you can decide that you want to lift weights. So you find a gym that is at a good location, that has a crowd that you gel with. You find the trainer who you would like that’s going to teach you how to use that equipment. You buy some good, nice-looking fitness clothes that you feel comfortable in, spend a couple of weeks getting this whole process ready to the point that when you finally start – first of all, you’re much better prepared. You got an idea what you’re in for and your confidence level is higher. You’ve got some professional instruction to help you out and show you the ropes. That first experience is going to be much more positive. You’re going to be more likely to want to move ahead.

So the same thing happens with an entrepreneurial venture is that – actually, I didn’t really know that much when I launched into mine. The only thing I knew was I knew how to write.

I learned pretty quickly. But the thing is that if you’re looking to – well, I guess the one thing I did know was that I had learned enough that science fiction was not going to work. So I’m glad I didn’t chase down that career.

I knew enough about fitness. I knew that it was financially viable as a writing career. That was the important part. So if you spend some time just working on the investigation side of things like – how does this work? Is this something that I actually can make money out? What are the odds of my success? What are – the other people who have been successful, how did they do it? It’s perfectly fine to emulate other things but you can also set your own course and because I didn’t follow too many other people. I realized that yes, funny writers are often successful writers, but that was just my style anyway. It wasn’t that I decided to be funny. It was just that was the way that I liked to write. It was what I wanted to do.

But I think that if you spend a fair bit of time in the analysis research planning stage on the front-end before you leap in, then you’re going to make fewer mistakes and you’re going to feel more excited and confident in what you’re doing, that this is the course that I need to take. You need to be adaptable because once you get in, you’re going to figure out that a lot of your assumptions were wrong. But still, it’s better than just going in blind.

But there’s a caution with that, that’s called analysis paralysis. Eventually you got to take the leap. So I had been analyzing this for a few years. Just looking at the fitness industry as a whole and what was wrong with it. So I may not have known the path to success in terms of how to become – all this article writing and building a platform and stuff at the time. But I did know what was wrong with the fitness industry and I knew what I wanted to expose about it.

I’ve been looking at that and doing a lot of research for years before I ever wrote my first article to the point where I knew that I was going to explode. I was literally – maybe not literally. I was figuratively going insane with anticipation that I knew that if I didn’t try and make a career out of this, that I would regret the hell out of it for the rest of my life.

I got to the point where it was like I must do this. It was an overriding desire of something that had to be done and it got to the point where there was this opportunity where I could take this part-time job and still make money and I said, “Yeah, I got to do it.” I have an amazingly supportive wife the whole way through and then after two years, I was able to quit that other part-time job and do this full-time ever since.