Aaron Wall

My Ironic Weight Loss Past

AaronWall — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:54:07 +0000

In 2004 I created a weight loss blog because I wanted to lose 30 pounds in 2 months. But I kept doing more and more web stuff and less and less exercise. Eventually I gave up on that blog, and decided to give it to my mom, who has blogged about weight loss (and lots of funny yardwork stories) for the past few years.

When I started that blog in May of 2004 some people told me I was rediculous for wanting to lose 30 pounds in 2 months, but if you look at SEOsFightFat David lost 16 pounds in less than a month, and in 2006 I actually lost 40 pounds in 2 months. But losing that much required me to go to the gym twice or 3 times a day. I am not sure if I have that much time now.

The one upside to being as fat as I am right now is that there are many bad habbits that lead to this weight…which means there is lots of opportunity to change.

When I was younger a short fat older friend had a theory on body weight… that you can be x pounds per year of age. As a 11 year old this theory seamed reasonable, but when I got in my 20s I laughed about how stupid the idea is and how fat I would be if I fell in line with that theory. In spite of my past weight loss, I am currently somehow fatter than ever, and this is the first time I caught up with that x multiple since I was 17. Gulp.

A Bit Embarassed

AaronWall — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:34:55 +0000

Before I met my wife I lost 40 pounds in 2 months. But back then all I did was work out because I got addicted to it and wanted to be in really good shape when we met.

Sometimes when a girl gets married she stops caring so much and puts on 20 or 30 pounds. Well my wife did not do that, but I have been doing so much stuff that I just sorta let my health go, unfortunately. Because I lost so much weight before I met her in such a short period of time it was easy to gain it back. Plus I gained extra. I am too embarassed to even write down a starting weight, but I am well above everyone else on the list.

In addition to moving, getting engaged, and getting married last year, I also took on more partnerships, worked on more sites, rebuilt my business model, helped my wife start kicking butt, and etc.

We are a product of our past decisions. I kept being the nice guy saying nice to everything until I could take on no more. When I really turned the corner was when a VC offered me a decent equity stake in a company to help them build it out and I decided to say no. Then I cured myself of the email blues when my business model changed.

The web consolidates markets. If you are not near the top of a market and are spread across many many markets it is hard to do as well as you could if you focused on a few sites / a few projects / a few markets.

I still have a lot of work to do on the business front, creating more SEO tools, adding more SEO videos to my site, doing interviews and newsletters, chatting on the forums every day, and maintaining my blog. But I have been cutting back on other projects. And the weather is warming up. Hopefully I will start working out every day again soon. I am hoping to go to the gym first thing tomorrow morning

Stress

AaronWall — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:23:59 +0000

Changing business models (and programmers in the middle of the change) can be ugly and time consuming. For the last few weeks I only slept like every other night, and used caffiene to help keep me up as needed when I was trying to put the finishing touches on launching our community and SEO training program. Donna gave me the thumbs up on the new program, in spite of my lack of blogging here.

The good thing is, I went from a person who answered email like 4 hours a day to a person who has maybe 1 hour of email. And because my business model is now more interactive I ensure that I transfer more value to customers.

After reinventing my business model I need to work more at reinventing me…