It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 30 days since I started my weight loss challenge with Tyler Cruz.

When we first agreed to do a 4 month challenge, it seemed like such a long period of time – and now we’re already 25% of the way through it!

Progress So Far

Purely speaking from a weight loss results perspective, I haven’t made a lot of progress yet.

As of this morning I weighed in at 212.2 lbs which is only 3.8 lbs less than my starting weight of 216lbs.

If we were to break things down linearly, since we’re 25% of the way through the challenge I should technically have already lost 7.5 lbs in order to be on-pace to losing the 30 lbs I need to lose.

From a non-weight results oriented point of view I feel like I’ve made some good progress.

I’ve been intuitively guided to do some “house cleaning” on my external environment, prior to making dietary and exercise activity changes.

I went through my closet and got rid of about 10-15% of my wardrobe, letting go of clothing I no longer wear.

I went through my bookshelves and put together a box of books that I will be getting rid of.

Yesterday night I spent about four hours cleaning out my exercise room and making it a lot more comfortable for working out.  I can now actually get to my treadmill!

A Course in Weight Loss

I have also been reading a really great book which addresses the spiritual and psychological aspects of losing weight permanently.

The book is called “A Course in Weight Loss” and it’s written by Marianne Williamson.

The book teaches 21 spiritual lessons for surrendering your weight forever, and it’s based on lessons taught in the book “A Course in Miracles”.

I’m really enjoying this book and I think it really addresses the real issues surrounding weight loss.

For example, in one of the lessons you get to know, love and accept the “fat you” version of yourself.  Instead of trying to push away and hate this part of yourself, which perpetuates it’s existence, we instead accept it and forgive it and love it.

By doing this we end the cycle of self-hatred and allow for real, long term healing to start taking place.

Although I haven’t finished reading all of it yet, or going through all the exercises, just based on what I’ve read so far I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s struggled with weight in their lives.

Welcoming Exercise

Yesterday afternoon, seemingly out of nowhere I got this massive urge to clean out our exercise room and get my treadmill ready.

It was as if my intuition was saying “Ok, it’s time now.  Let’s get that room cleaned out.” and I was actually all excited about it.

I thought it was rather odd that I would have this urge since I have the PowerPlate machine all setup and I can do my workouts on it if I wanted to, and I could go outside to jog if I wanted to go for a run, but for some reason I just wanted to get that done.

I’m really, really looking forward to jumping on the treadmill and going for a run after I finish this Blog post.

This is drastically different to previous times when I would start exercising because I knew I “had” to in order to lose weight.  This time I actually want to do it.

Perhaps it’s some of the PSYCH-K balances I’ve been doing around weight loss, or maybe some of the exercises I’ve been doing from the “A Course in Weight Loss” book I mentioned above.  Whatever it is I’ve felt a slight shift around exercising.

Hopefully I still feel this way 5 minutes into my run tonight.

Dietary Changes

So far I’ve just been making very minor dietary changes in my routine.

More than anything I’ve just been trying to eat less snacks and crap like that.

However, I haven’t felt the call to make dietary changes yet so I’ve still been eating pretty much the same way I was eating before – minus a dessert here or there.

I have a feeling that as soon as I start doing more exercise though, diet will be next.

Tyler’s Progress

Unlike my approach of focusing on getting the spiritual and mental side of things figured out first, Tyler started implementing a healthier diet and exercising more right from day one.

Interestingly enough, even though he’s technically had a 30 day head start on me in terms of exercise and healthy eating, he’s only 0.4 lbs ahead of me in terms of weight loss as of this morning.

About a year ago I acquired a secret weapon for producing more effective results online.

It’s an online course that teaches essentially what is now the most effective way to communicate and produce results online in pretty much anything you do.

I haven’t talked about it much because by the time I actually started applying what I learned in this course and started producing results it was no longer available to the general public.

It was sold out.

And I hate telling people about something that could improve their results online when it’s not even available for them anymore.

So I kind of kept quiet about it, only mentioning it to my closest friends and one-on-one mentoring students who specifically asked me about it.

Anyway, I’m not sure what cave I’ve been in during the last few weeks but I just found out that this course is now re-opened to the public once again!

Apparently I totally missed all the emails leading up to the re-opening so I just found out about this right now.

Sorry about that guys, I should have told you sooner.

My Secret Weapon

Alright, so since it is re-opening again and all of you will have a chance to get access to it – I can finally talk about this little secret weapon I’ve been using for the past year or so.

It’s not like I’ve been hiding it or anything.  For anyone who reads my Blog, I’ve been blatantly using it for about a year now but I just didn’t explain why.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, my secret weapon is video.

Yes, video.

Video is by far the most effective communication method online.

I’ve known this for a few years now, but I had all these excuses as to why I can’t do video.

Some of these excuses included:

• Making videos is too expensive.
• Making videos is too complicated.
• Making videos is way too time intensive.

That was until I was introduced to Andy Jenkins and his online course called The Video Boss last year.

Andy basically destroys these myths / excuses and teaches you exactly how you can leverage online video to supercharge your results online.

There aren’t a lot of courses that I buy into that I feel good enough to promote as an affiliate, but as soon as I started applying what I learned in The Video Boss training last year and saw the results it produces I have been itching to tell everyone about this thing.

As an affiliate marketer I love promoting stuff that’s awesome and that I’ve actually used and applied myself.

Unfortunately, like I mentioned above, the course was closed and unavailable to the public until today.

So, now that they’ve re-opened for a period of time to accept new students I highly recommend you guys check this thing out.

Click on the image below to check out Andy’s hilarious new 3 minute re-opening video.

Results May Vary

Since I am promoting this re-launch as an affiliate I want to be fully transparent and say that the results I have produced by using The Video Boss program are not typical.

This is because nothing I do is typical.  I’m a weird guy, with a small army of video clones which are even weirder than me (some genetic mutation during the cloning process?), so the results we produce are as far away from typical as you can get.

Having said that, I really think that anyone who actually takes the course, and applies what is taught within can produce results that are much more impressive than what I’ve produced.

I know this because I have only applied about 30% of what’s taught in The Video Boss so far, and even then I haven’t done a great job even doing that.

Since I’m a polymath / scanner, I’m all over the place trying to do 500 things at the same time – dabbling in so many things at the same time as to render most of them largely ineffective.  However, even just by dabbling with video I’ve seen a huge response with it.

Here’s a few things I’ve used video to accomplish (starting from scratch!):

• Launched my Paulymath.tv channel on YouTube
• Built a YouTube following of 622 Subscribers and 4,692 Friends
• Produced 62 videos in the last year or so
• My channel has been viewed 9,470 times
• My videos combined have been viewed 85,953 times
• I’ve produced dozens of videos for consulting clients
• and more!

Although there is no way of knowing exactly what was the final deciding factor, I also do know that video played a huge role in helping me win the $5,000 Fitness Town 21 Day Challenge last month as well.

I was the only contestant who was using video in the contest and I think it gave me a huge advantage in promoting the competition, getting votes, and impressing the judges.

What Video Boss Won’t Do For You

The Video Boss training course is the best online marketing training course I bought in the last 5 years.  It was worth every penny.

Having said that, there are two downsides to this course.

First of all, buying The Video Boss course is not enough to produce results.  You have to also use what is taught inside to actually make some videos.

They don’t have to be great videos, or even good videos.  When I first started, my videos were mostly crap.  And they still produced results.

In fact, I still think my videos are pretty crappy compared to what some other people are doing, but that doesn’t matter… you know why?

Because even my crappiest videos produce WAY better results than anything else I do online.

This is a SAD fact.

I’m a writer. I’ve written over 600,000 words of text on my Blog over the last 5 years and at the end of the day the sad fact is that my videos are WAY more successful than anything I have written on my Blog.

I wish people actually READ stuff online, but the world has changed.

Nobody READS anymore.  In fact if you’re still reading this Blog post, consider yourself an exception.

99% of people already closed this page, clicked the link or just scrolled past this.

Written text is not enough in 2011.  You must do video.

The training in The Video Boss will help you to take advantage of video.

But, like I said above it won’t make the videos for you.  You have to apply at least some of what’s taught inside to see results, but even if you just do the bare minimum you’ll see results!

That’s what’s cool about video.  It produces amazing results very quickly, especially on YouTube.

Secondly though, there is one last thing that The Video Boss won’t do for you.

It won’t overcome your fear / shyness of being on camera.

I won’t lie, when I first even considered starting to do video I was horrified.  Being on camera is SCARY AS SHIT!

Maybe for some it isn’t, but for me it was.  And judging by what my mentoring students tell me, I’m not the only one.

Overcoming Camera Shyness

Because I was so camera shy when I first started contemplating doing videos, I had to really get creative on how to overcome that.

The cool thing is that I actually found a really simple, but effective process of overcoming camera shyness.

If you watch any of my videos on Paulymath.tv you’ll see that with every video I make I’m getting less and less camera shy.

However, to get to that point you have to start with your first video and if you’re camera shy that can be a big challenge.

Well, I’ve got a solution for that.  It’s a process that I go through with people that I taught myself and then tested out on a handful of my mentoring students.

And it works.

So if “Camera Shyness” is something that you’re worried about in terms of making videos, I’ve got a deal for you.

IF you decide that The Video Boss training course is for you, but you’re worried that you are too camera shy to make videos, I will personally coach you through overcoming your video shyness if you purchase the course through my affiliate link.

I know I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here as The Video Boss training is not even re-opened yet… but I’m just putting that out there as an offer to you as my valued Blog reader.

I want to see more of you using video to make money online and I know for a lot of you, camera shyness is an obstacle so I want to help you overcome that.

Before we even get to that point though, regardless whether you decide to get this course, I highly recommend getting access to this free set of videos Andy has put together here:

THE VIDEO BOSS

This afternoon I finished reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book “The Thank You Economy”.

I’ve been really looking forward to reading this book ever since I heard about it coming out.

I’m a big fan of Gary’s and I loved his previous book – “Crush It!”.

However, after finishing the book I wasn’t as impressed with the book as I hoped.  I explain why in today’s episode of The Paulymath Show.

Crystal clear sound can make a huge difference in the perceived quality of a video.  That’s why I’ve been desperately trying to find a good quality microphone solution for my videos.

I wanted to find a good quality microphone that would work with my Kodak Zi8 as well as my Sony FX1 cameras and that was wireless.

After a lot of research and based on a recommendation from Andy Jenkins (Video Boss), I ended up buying the Sennheiser EW112-p G3 Wireless Microphone System.

In this video I do an unboxing and a quick test of the setup.

Please note that my settings during the test were totally screwed up, so I had to adjust the gain manually in my editing software so the sound you hear at the end of the video is NOT representative of the quality of this microphone.  It actually sounds way better than that.

I have since played with it for about 3 hours testing and tweaking all different settings both on the microphone system and on my cameras to capture the best sound possible.  I think I have the settings pretty much figured out, but you won’t hear them until the next video.

So the sound test in this video is just an approximation.

In this episode of The Paulymath Show I review the Kodak Zi8 camera.

The Zi8 has been my little workhorse camera for about a year now.

Prior to the Kodak Zi8, I had a Flip Mino which I won in an affiliate marketing contest that was sponsored by Market Leverage on Tyler Cruz’s Blog.

The Flip Mino was a nice little pocket cam but it didn’t record in HD resolution and had a few other shortcomings, so last year I started my search for a better HD camera for my YouTube videos.

After doing some research I found that a lot of people were saying a lot of good stuff about the Kodak Zi8 so I decided to get one to try it out.

I spoke to my good friends at Amped Media and they were nice enough to sponsor the Kodak Zi8.  As a Blogger I love getting stuff for free so I always look for sponsors or other ways to get free stuff when it comes to new toys.

I’ve wanted to do a review on the Kodak Zi8 for a while now but until recently I didn’t have a second camera to shoot the review with.

Well, here is my in-depth review of the Kodak Zi8 and why I recommend it:

I’ve been testing out a bunch of different microphone solutions for shooting videos in the last while.

The challenge I’ve been having is finding a microphone that sounds good without forcing me to be tied down to a wire.

Up until recently I’ve been using my Yeti desktop microphone which I plug into my Kodak Zi8 HD camera, which is a pretty decent solution if I’m sitting down at a desk but it doesn’t sound the greatest when I’m standing at the whiteboard or moving around.

In such a situation I have to set the microphone to pickup all the sound in the room as I’m standing a few feet away from it, which works fine except that it picks up a bit of an echo and it’s not as clear as having a microphone attached to my shirt.

About a week ago I picked up this Azden SMX-10 microphone to test it out to see if it would sound better than my Yeti.

In this episode of The Paulymath Show I review the microphone and let you guys hear what it sounds like.

Two weeks ago I wrote a “review” post about the BodyMedia® FIT armband device.

I titled the post “BodyMedia® Fit Review”, but really there was no review of the product there.

The reason there was no review there was because I was having a really hard time getting a hold of anyone at BodyMedia® about the possibly of either sending me one of their units for review, or at least to approve me for their affiliate program if I chose to buy one of the units myself.

Normally if a company ignores my attempts to contact them, I just move on without giving it a second thought, but I really wanted to try this device out.  The premise behind it seems so cool, and I think it totally aligns with my weight loss philosophy.

So instead of just moving on, I decided to try one last thing.  I wrote the “review” post and I did a bit of SEO work on it to get it ranked in the Top 10 on Google / Yahoo and Bing for the keyword “bodymedia fit review”.

I figured if that doesn’t get their attention, then nothing will.

Sure enough it worked.

BodyMedia® Responds

This Monday I received an email from Aaron, from BodyMedia’s PR relations.

In the email he expressed his sincere apologies for what happened and stated that the breakdown in communication had nothing to do with my viewership or Blog statistics, but rather that there was a crack in their system which has now been fixed.

Aaron then told me that they would love to send out a BodyMedia FIT Armband for me to review if I was still interested.

Yaay, finally some progress.

I told Aaron that I would love to review the product, which is why I contacted them in the first place but I told him that I was leaving on a 3 week trip to eastern Canada this coming weekend so I might not be home to receive it if shipping takes about a week or so.

This afternoon I got home from a lunch meeting with a friend and I had this laying on my doorstep.

Aaron shipped the thing to me by Fedex so that I would get it in time before leaving on my trip.  Now that’s what I call good PR!

I popped open the box, installed the software, got the thing charged up, put on the armband and started gathering data.

Now, I’ve only had a chance to play with this thing for about 6 hours so far, but here are my first impressions.

Setup and Installation

The setup and installation of the device was really easy.

All I had to do is go to BodyMedia’s website, sign in and it downloaded the software to my computer.  Software installation took only a few seconds and then it asked me to plug in the arm band via USB cable.  It then charged the band for about 30 minutes and I was ready to go.

The installation was a breeze.

How the BodyMedia® FIT Works

So how does this thing work anyway?

Well, essentially the “FIT” is a lightweight device about 2.5″x2.5″ in size that fits into an armband strap that you wear on your non-dominant arm above your bicep.

The device easily conceals behind a sleeved t-shirt and you can easily wear it under your clothes without anyone noticing.

The device monitors 9,000 data-points per minute through a combination of four different sensors – a 3-Axis Accelerometer, a Heat Flux Sensor, a Skin Temperature Sensor and a Galvanic Skin Response Sensor (GSR).

What does that mean?

Well, it simply means that this thing monitors what’s going on with your body and shows you an accurate picture of the type of activity you’re doing throughout the day, how many calories you’re burning and the quality of sleep you are getting.

Then, combined with the online meal/calorie tracking software (Activity Manager) the whole system helps you to lose weight by raising your awareness to things such as:

• Amount of Calories Burned
• Amount of Calories Consumed
• Calorie Balance
• Physical Activity
• Steps Taken
• Sleep Duration
• Weight / Waist Circumference

I’m a huge believer in raising your awareness as a tool to making progress in something.

You can’t manage something that you can’t measure.  That’s why I think this thing is pretty ingenious.  It tracks pretty much everything you need to know in order to lose weight effectively, without needlessly over-complicating things.

The device connects to your computer through a supplied USB cable which also charges the internal rechargeable battery.

The battery lasts between 5-7 days under steady use, and it holds up to 14 days worth of collected data so you don’t need to sync it with your computer every day if you don’t want to, although I think it only makes sense to do that.

There are three versions of the BodyMedia® FIT packages on the market right now.

One of the packages simply comes with the armband which you sync up with the online Activity Manager.

The second package comes with the armband and a portable display unit which gives you a quick snapshot of the data in real-time without having to connect up to the computer.  That way you can monitor how many calories you’re burning at any given point in the day, or how much activity you’ve done, or how many steps you’ve taken in between uploads to the computer.

This second package is the one that BodyMedia® sent me for review.

The third package comes with the exact same device, except that it is Bluetooth® enabled so it can interface with your smart phone instead of the portable display unit.

The Bluetooth® version just came out this November, and I think it will eventually replace the other two versions – although it is a bit more expensive.

The Activity Manager

Ok, now that we’ve covered all the boring ( but still impressive ) stuff about the BodyMedia® FIT, let’s dive into what I think really makes this device useful – the Activity Manager.

The Activity Manager has a really sleek interface.  Here’s a snapshot:

Pretty spiffy eh?

Actually, let me back up a few steps here.  Before you even get to this stage, the Activity Manager first asks you to set some goals.

By going through the step-by-step process I created the following goals for myself:

So essentially I told the system that I wanted to lose 2 lbs / week and it calculated out that I need to burn 3,000 calories per day and consume 2,000 calories per day which will give me a 1,000/day calorie deficit.  That means that in one week I will have a 7,000 calorie deficit and since there are 3,500 calories in 1lb of fat, technically speaking I should lose an average of 2lbs/week if I stick to these numbers.

For my activity I set a goal to do 30 minutes of moderate activity / day, plus 15 minutes of vigorous activity and to take 8,000 steps / day.

Although these goals are not easy, I think they are totally realistic and achievable.

Once you have your goals setup, there are only two more things you need to enter into the system:

1. Your Daily Calories Consumed
2. Your Daily (or weekly/monthly) Weight

Everything else is automatically measured, calculated and uploaded into the system by the armband.

Now if you don’t want to enter in your daily calories, then you can enter in an estimated amount or have the system estimate the amount per day based on  your weight gain/loss, but I think the awareness gained from tracking your daily food intake is invaluable so I think it’s definitely worth the time to enter the data in.

I’m not going to do a detailed review of the rest of the Activity Manager in this post as I think it deserves a post of its own, and I also think it will be more useful if I do a post after I’ve gathered at least one full day’s worth of data.

But I will say that my first impressions of this device are very positive.

I’ve used the food log and it was pretty easy to enter in the foods so I’m happy with that part of it.  I like the way it tracks calories, activity, steps and sleep duration/quality.

The band is comfortable to wear and it totally doesn’t feel like you’re wearing it after just a few minutes.  Like right now I had to actually look down to see if I was wearing the thing because I can’t feel it on my arm.

I haven’t found any downsides to the device so far, except maybe for the fact that in the non-Bluetooth® version which I have, you need to take the device off of your arm in order to plug in the USB cable to the computer.  It only takes a few seconds to sync up the data so it would have been cooler if you could just plug the cable in while still wearing it.  But I guess the Bluetooth® version solves that problem anyways by sending the data wirelessly without the need to take off the band.

One final thing I’ll mention about this thing before I end this “first impressions” review, is that the device also offers mobile support.

What that means is that the Activity Manager can be used on your smart phone.

Why is this important?

Mobile food tracking!

I’m so excited about this.  I can now type in the foods that I’m eating right on my iPhone, before I eat them.

When I tried to do calorie tracking in the past, I would always have to write things down while I was in the kitchen or out at a restaurant and then try to enter them in at the end of the day.

Now I can enter things in as I go along.  Yaay!

I haven’t played with the mobile version for too long yet, but I did get it installed and it’s cool to be able to see your data on your iPhone.

The only thing I can’t see is a real-time report of my calories, steps and activity as that requires the Bluetooth® enabled version.  So what I see displayed there is my stats based on my last sync.

Still pretty cool, and the mobile meal tracking is going to be awesome.

Update: Just found out BodyMedia® is offering free shipping on all units until December 31, 2010.

Learn more about the BodyMedia® FIT here.

This afternoon I was contacted by one of the very first people who got a copy of my new Law of Attraction Turbocharge eBook.

His name is Josh Lipovetsky and he’s been a regular reader of my Blog for over two years now.

Josh runs a Blog over at OptimisticWellness.com where he blogs about many different personal development and wellness topics through the paradigm of optimism.

Even though Josh is just 17 years old, I have a lot of respect for him because when he was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease/UC at the age of 15, he didn’t fall into “victim mode”.

Instead he chose to develop and use an optimistic spirit/attitude to deal with the condition as best he could and today he passionately shares his optimism on his Blog.

I actually plan on doing an interview with Josh in the near future as I’d like to find out more about him and his “optimism secrets”, but for now here is his video review of my eBook:

Optimistic Wellness – Paulymath LOA TurboCharge Review from Josh Lipovetsky at OptimisticWellness.com.

If you’d like to read Josh’s Blog post of the review, click here.

If you still haven’t checked out my eBook, you can do so here:

As I continue with my body transformation challenge against Nima, I’ve decided to reveal the diet I am following.

Originally I was going to keep it a secret, since I didn’t want Nima jumping on this diet as well for the competition, but then I decided to just reveal it.  If he’s going to copy what I do, that’s fine.

Honestly I really feel like this whole challenge is just me versus myself, not really me versus Nima.  I’ll just do what I do, and if he wants to copy some or all of my strategies, that’s up to him.

What is The Carb Nite® Solution?

The Carb Nite® Solution is a guide to power dieting put together by a physicist named John Kiefer.

I was introduced to this diet by Debby, my personal trainer, a few weeks ago.  She spoke very highly of Kiefer’s (he prefers that over John) book and basically told me that if I want the most effective diet for burning fat while maintaining lean muscle mass, I should buy his book.

Kiefer was nice enough to send me a digital version of the book so that I wouldn’t have to wait for my Amazon order to come in and I devoured the book in a few hours.

I’ll start off by saying that I’m no stranger to diet books.  As part of my my own research over the years and my nutrition training for my advanced nutrition courses at Alive Academy, I had to read through and study a bunch of different diet types.  I’m familiar with most diet types out there and honestly most of them fail to impress me.  There’s are a lot of crappy diets out there.  Some of which, ironically even feature the overweight picture of the author on the cover.

What I immediately found different about Kiefer’s book is that it approaches the problem of dieting from a totally different perspective.  This is not your typical diet book written by a doctor, dietitian or some celebrity.  Kiefer is a physicist so he approached the problem of losing fat from a totally different perspective than I’ve seen in any other diet.

Unlike a lot of other diet books which base their science on a handful of research papers which where hand-picked to support the author’s originally theory, Kiefer really did his homework.  He read over 20,000 peer-reviewed research papers as part of his research for this book and did  a lot of experimenting to come up with and tweak what he believes to be the simplest diet for losing fat and keeping lean muscle tissue.

I have to admit that a lot of the stuff Kiefer talks about in this book can be seen as fairly controversial, in that a lot of it flies in the face of the common wisdom you’ll hear from diet books and even from doctors.

However, unlike so many other diet books, every statement Kiefer makes in the book is backed by thousands of research studies he includes as references at the end of the book.

What’s more, what he says in the book really just makes sense!

It’s not really rocket science, and it’s stuff that I actually remember doing naturally when I was  younger (and leaner), but have stopped doing because of the myths that I’ve been fed by other diet books and doctors.

Once I finished reading this book, I remember thinking “This makes total sense“, so I decided to give it a try.

How The Carb Nite® Solution Works

To really understand how this diet works, you’ll have to buy the book.

Trying to just generally understand the concept without understanding how all the pieces fit together will just cause you to mislabel this diet into something that it is not and toss it aside thinking it is a “flavor” of another similar diet you are familiar with.

It is not a low fat, low protein or low carb diet.  It’s not a diet based on your blood type, or ethnic origin, or named after some ancient tribe which invented it 8,000 years ago and hid it in some tomb only to be accidentally discovered now by some doctor.  It is not a diet that requires you to go in and get daily shots at your doctors office, and it doesn’t require that you purchase $900 worth of supplements to make it work.

It is also not a diet which solves all problems for everyone for all eternity.  It’s a very specialized power diet intended to help people lose fat while maintaining as much of their lean muscle tissue as possible.

In bodybuilder terms I guess it would be a “cutting” diet.  It’s not something you do forever.  It’s a very simple but specific diet which works with the natural cycles of your body to help you shed the excess fat you have, without putting the body into starvation mode and without leaving you hungry.

The closest thing to a label I could give this diet would be an ultra-low carb diet with precisely planned high carb nights at regular cycles in the diet.  Labeling it like that, however, doesn’t do it justice because there is a lot more to it than that.

It’s not just a regular low-carb diet with “cheat” nights like I’ve seen before.  The scheduled high carb nights are not “cheat” nights meant to offer relief from following a strict diet.  They are a planned and required part of making this diet work.  Without these carb nights (where the diet gets its name), the diet doesn’t work.

Also, on these nights where you are required to consume larger amounts of carbohydrates, it doesn’t mean you go out and pig out on fast food and soda pop, but it also doesn’t prevent you from having something as tasty as cheesecake or even doughnuts.

My Experience with The Carb Nite® Solution

Yesterday was my 10th day on the The Carb Nite® Solution diet.  I started it 4 days into my body transformation challenge with Nima.

In the first 10 days of being on this diet my weight dropped from 212.2 lbs to 206.0 lbs, so a weight loss of 6.2 lbs in 10 days.

The short term losses seem promising, but obviously it is the long term effectiveness that I’m looking for.  I’ll keep monitoring and reporting how things go on this diet, but so far after the first 10 days I’m pretty impressed.

During my ultra-low-carb days I’ve learned to prepare meals that fit within the guidelines of this diet and it’s really not that difficult.  I don’t have to buy any kind of proprietary supplements, and all the ingredients for the meals I can get at the grocery stores 15 minutes from my house.

The guidelines also make it easy for me to create my own recipes, so I’m not just locked into using some kind of specialized recipes in the book – although there are a lot of tasty recipes included with the book as well.

I really like the fact that once a week I get to have my Carb Nite® so that I can plan any kind of dinners I go to around that schedule.  In the past when I’ve been on strict diets, I’ve always found it a challenge to attend dinners which never fit within your diet.

On the Carb Nite® diet it’s actually pretty easy to pre-plan meals like that in advance.  This way if I get invited out to dinner somewhere I don’t have to be anti-social and decline because of my diet, or worse try to explain what the diet is and how it works so that someone can try to make a special meal just for me.

Carb Nite®  is also something very different than “cheat day”, which is something I’ve heard a few other diet authors advocate.  The premise behind “cheat day” really stems from the fact that typically on those types of diets you’re eating horrible tasting food, or starving yourself for a whole week and then once a week you get to pig out and have whatever you want.  This “cheat day” usually sets you back from any weight loss progress you’ve made during the week and really just slows things down.

What’s worse is that on other “cheat day” or “cheat meal” type diets, those “cheat days” very quickly turn into two cheat days, then three, and then you’re pretty much “cheating” every day and getting nowhere.

With the Carb Nite® diet, eating those carbs on each Carb Nite® cycle isn’t about cheating or just making yourself feel less deprived.  There is a very specific scientific reason why you must consume carbohydrates on that night, as explained in the book, otherwise your fat loss progress will suffer.

What this means is that on this diet it’s not that I want to eat pasta and cheesecake once a week as a way to make myself feel better, but rather that I have to eat paste and cheesecake (or some other carbs), in order for the diet to actually work.

I know it sounds weird right?

Read the book (or the 20,000 research papers Kiefer did) and you’ll understand why.

Earlier today I decided to get back into exploring ways of making money online that follow the “one-to-many” business model online, such as blogging or affiliate marketing.

It’s been about five months since I’ve done any serious affiliate marketing, and one of the things I immediately wanted to jump into was learning how to do affiliate marketing with Facebook.

Facebook continues to grow in traffic and easily rivals the traffic that Google delivers, without the snotty attitude that Google has towards affiliate marketers.

I briefly played with Facebook ads for a few days about a year ago but I didn’t have any luck with them as I had no clue what I was doing so I put it on hold until I found some good quality strategy guides to follow.

This morning I saw a Tweet from Johnathan Volk where he mentioned that he has a new Facebook Ads Guide eBook where he teaches you how to make money as an affiliate on Facebook.

Johnathan is a “super affiliate” who’s used Facebook to generate over a million dollars in affiliate revenues.  Before all the Google slaps and bans to affiliate accounts happened last year, Jonathan jumped onto Facebook to try to unlock the Facebook secrets that would allow him to diversify his traffic away from just being on Google.

In this eBook, Jonathan shares the secrets he’s learned from running affiliate offers on Facebook over the past 10 months.

Here’s my short review of the eBook so far.

Quick Summary

First of all, I’ll start off by saying that this eBook is short, to the point and right on target for the right individual.

I think I must be the absolute best target market for this eBook because I quickly read through it, and within less than an hour of getting it I had a Facebook campaign up and running.

I wouldn’t recommend this eBook for the absolute beginner affiliate, but if you’ve got a pretty good handle on what affiliate marketing is and have tested other traffic sources like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. you might want to check this thing out.  It’s a quick read, but it contains some really cool gems that would have taken me weeks if not months to figure out, and probably several thousand dollars in trial and error testing.

Section 1 – Finding a Company to Promote

Nothing really new in this section.  Jonathan introduces the concept of affiliate marketing and recommends some affiliate marketing networks to join in order to find some offers to promote.  I personally recommend my good friends at Amped Media as an affiliate network, but Jonathan shares some of his favorite networks in the eBook as well.

Once you’ve got access to some affiliate networks, Jonathan shares three methods he uses recommends for picking the right offers to run on Facebook including seven specific types of offers that he has had success with personally.

Section 2 – Who Will See Your Ads (Demographic Targeting)

In this section Jonathan teaches the importance of creating laser-targeted ads.  Much more granular than Google, Facebook allows you to target very specific users for your ads.  Things like location, age, sex, sexual preference, relationship status, likes and interests and workplace targeting are just a few examples of things you specify when targeting your ads.

Jonathan teaches three simple methods he recommends for identifying the exact demographic information for each of the offers you choose to promote on Facebook.

Section 3 – High CTR Ads

Here Jonathan outlines the importance of creating attention grabbing ads that get high click-through rates (CTR).  He covers proper image selection and the best types of ad copy to use in your ads.  Once again, I found a couple of gems in this section that will save me ten times the price of the eBook  in trial and error.

Section 4 – Bidding Strategy

There is one little gem in this section that totally blew me away.  A little “secret” bidding strategy that goes totally against what I would have done if I hadn’t read this eBook.

Jonathan also covers how Facebook handles daily spending limits, and how to do competitive analysis on Facebook ads.

Section 5 – Making Your First Campaign

This section is pretty self explanatory.  Here, Jonathan walks us through creating our first Facebook Ad campaign, and shares some interesting thing she’s discovered about getting your Facebook ads approved.

One of the problems I previously  had with Facebook was getting my ads approved, so this section helped to shed some light on the situation.

Section 6 – Maximizing Your Campaign Potential

In this section Jonathan shares some of the inner secrets you can use to gain an advantage or the “upper hand” on your competitors on Facebook.  Some of the stuff covered in this section I’ve already used when building my Google AdWords campaigns, but a few things mentioned here are totally the opposite of what’s allowed on Google.

I wouldn’t even have thought to try some of these things, as Google wouldn’t allow some of these things that Facebook is apparently totally OK with.  There is a total of 8 of these “Upper Hand Techniques” that Jonathan shares in the eBook and they’re all pretty cool.

Conclusion

All in all, I couldn’t really find anything to complain about in this eBook.  Normally I prefer to see a longer eBook than the 41 pages contained in this one, just so I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth, but in most cases people just end up fluffing up the content to make it seem longer than it really is.  Jonathan didn’t do any of that here.  He just wrote a solid eBook that I really liked and covered everything that needed to be covered in 41 pages which I think is great.

Jonathan is selling the eBook for $97, which I think is definitely a reasonable price for the content contained within and the eBook comes with an 8 week no-questions asked money back guarantee so there’s basically nothing to lose by checking it out.  Also, for the next day or two he’s offering the eBook at a discounted price of $79 which is subject to go up at any time.

There’s also a small upsell with the offer that includes a set of mastermind videos where Jonathan covers each of the sections from picking the right offer to having the right bidding strategy and the secret “upper hand techniques” he talks about in the eBook.  I just finished watching the videos and I really liked them.  There was definitely a bunch of details I missed from the eBook that Jonathan covers in these videos which are very valuable.

After watching the video’s I felt like I had just spent the last couple of hours on a coaching call with a super affiliate that does over a million dollars in revenues with Facebook alone.

If you’re an affiliate marketer looking to expand past Google and Yahoo as traffic sources, I recommend checking this eBook out for sure.

Like I said, if you don’t like it just ask for a refund.  It’s sold through Clickbank and they have a solid money back refund policy so there’s no risk from your side.

Check out Jonathan’s eBook below: