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Just over two years ago I thought I had it all figured out.  I had a degree in kinesiology, I’d been in the fitness industry for over a decade, trained clients for tens of thousands of hours, and had co-owned a training facility with my incredible wife, and I was up on almost every single fitness and nutrition happening on the planet.  I felt at that time I was ready to finally break out and publish my first articles in major online publications as well as starting to blog on a larger scale (rather than just for my clients).  So I did and this blog was the result of that decision.  I published a few articles, connected with some big names in the industry, starting writing posts, and had a rapidly growing readership.

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Then something happened.

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My wife and I decided to close our training facility so that we could focus a lot less on running a business and more on having a family.  I took a half time position with a Bariatric Medical Program to help treat people with obesity and continued to train some of my personal training clients out of a friend’s facility (as well as maintaining a small group of online training clients).

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I Lost My Voice

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The whole process of becoming a dad, learning more about obesity, getting more in touch with the research I’d been neglecting, and working with clients whose lives had been markedly impacted by their weight created a major perspective shift for me.  I kept trying to write the “same old stuff”, but it became harder and harder to talk about counting calories, carb cycling, and the detailed intricacies of physiology that improve body composition when I was coming to realize more and more that few of these things really matter for the vast majority of the population.  I love them.  They are important.  But not as important as some people would have us believe.  They are the details…and for a lot of people…the details won’t matter a lot until they take care of the bigger issues preventing them from succeeding.

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But when I started to talk about “less sexy” concepts like behavior change, obesity, general health, and slow (rather than idiotically fast resulting in regain) weight loss my readership dropped.  And further to that, I felt like my joking and fun loving personality didn’t really come through in these posts as I was trying to force content on an industry that wasn’t really interested in what I was saying…or at least I thought they weren’t.  In the blog writing world we talk about the way we write as our “voice” and I felt like I had lost mine.

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Getting My Voice Back

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As a result of the perspective change I’d had and the difficulty writing content people wanted to read I slowly decreased my writing to the point where I wasn’t really putting out much at all.  I felt like it wasn’t really reaching people and it certainly wasn’t fun anymore either.  But over the last several months I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact I want to have on this world and this industry and my vision for what I’d like to become is slowly forming.  I feel a passion burning and I KNOW that whether the industry is ready for it or not, it is on me to create a change in whatever way I can for whoever might be listening.  I’ve got my voice back, I know what I’m going to say, and I am going to bring it in 2012.

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I want to thank all of my readers for supporting me (and also making me laugh on Facebook and Twitter in the meantime).  In the coming year I hope to provide you with a steady stream of content to make you think, challenge you, and help you.  I appreciate whatever help you can give me by sharing my stuff along the way so I can reach as many people as possible.

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Let’s get after it!

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