Drinking fresh juice has many benefits. With the fiber removed, fresh juice digests very easily, so you don’t have to expend as much energy on digestion. This extra energy then becomes available for your body and mind.

When I incorporate a lot of juice into my diet — about 32-64 oz per day, roughly 25-50% of my day’s caloric intake — I immediately notice a difference at the gym. My body just feels lighter and cleaner, and exercising feels easier as well.

Juicing and interval training

Lately I’ve been doing interval training at the gym on an elliptical machine. I know from past experience that interval training is an effective way to boost my cardiovascular fitness level in a matter of weeks. I’ve also shed several pounds this month.

For interval training I like my baseline heart rate to be around 148 beats per minute. Then I do various short intervals (usually 1-2 minutes in duration) that spike my heart rate as high as 180. Over a period of weeks, this training makes my cardiovascular system progressively more efficient, so my heart doesn’t have to pump as hard to handle the same workload. The effect is easily measurable with a heart rate monitor.

Four weeks ago I started out at level 10 for my baseline on a particular brand of elliptical machine. Sustained exertion at that level would get my heart up to about 146-148 beats per minute. Today that same setting will only get my heart rate into the 120s. To hit 148, I have to set the machine to level 14 now.

Also, four weeks ago I was doing intervals between levels 10 and 14. Now I’m doing intervals between levels 14 and 20 to create similar spikes in my heart rate.

How does juicing play into this? Well, I recently observed that if I drank a lot of juice the day before my workout (as opposed to all solid foods), my heart rate wouldn’t spike as high during the intervals.

Presently at level 14, my heart rate will be sustained at around 147 beats per minute. I don’t notice a change in that number whether I’m juicing or not. However, after a minute at level 19, my heart rate has been spiking to 177. But if I drink lots of juice the day before (about 64 oz), that same interval only spikes my heart rate to 163, and a minute at level 20 only spikes me to 171. If I go back to all solid food (including smoothies), then my heart rate spikes back up to 176-177 for that same level 19 interval. I don’t push it to level 20 on those days because I don’t like going past 180 (that puts me a little too close to passing out or throwing up).

So not only do I feel the difference when I’m juicing, I can also measure it at the gym when I’m working out. My heart doesn’t have to pump as hard to handle the same workload when I’m getting more of my calories from fresh juice.

If you’re curious if this would work for store-bought juice, I haven’t tried that. Pasteurized (i.e. cooked) juice isn’t something I want to put in my body.

I’ve also noticed that if I have a smaller amount of juice (like 24-32 oz), then the training benefit is diminished but still measurable. I haven’t tried going a full day on juice, which for me would require about 128 oz (1 gallon), but I may try that at some point to see if the effect is even greater.

Of course there’s a training effect whereby interval training helps my body adapt to greater workloads over time, but this effect isn’t too significant in the span of just a few days. By flip-flopping from juicy days to non-juicy days now and then (something I did simply by accident), I was able to get a reasonable idea of how my previous day’s diet affects me at the gym the next morning.

I don’t think this is because the juice is medicinal per se. I think the reason is that when I drink more juice, I eat less solid food, so my body doesn’t need as much energy for digestion, but I’m still getting adequate calories, so it’s not like I’m fasting. Digesting solid food also generates a lot more metabolic waste, some of which may be making my cardiovascular system and my muscles less efficient. The less energy my body has to expend on digestion and waste management, the more efficiently it works when I’m exercising.

Since I can push myself a bit harder when juicing — without causing my heart to explode — this makes my interval training more efficient. I’m able to burn more calories in the same amount of time. Beyond that, it’s hard to measure the long-term training impact as an individual trainee, but I can’t see it being a bad thing.

I’m eating 90-100% raw these days (and always 100% vegan), so I can’t say what effect juicing would have if you eat a diet heavy in cooked and/or processed foods. I suspect it may have an even greater impact though since you’d be crowding out foods that create a much greater digestive burden and which generate significantly more metabolic waste. However, if you jump right into it from a heavier diet, you might trigger a detox effect for the first week or two and feel a bit weaker during that time.

Juicing and weight training

What about weight training? Does juicing have an effect on that too? I haven’t been able to measure that yet because I’ve been so focused on interval training lately. I just added weight training back into my exercise routine today. This morning I did 30 minutes of interval training (including 5 minutes of warm-up and 5 minutes of cool-down), then 35 minutes of weight training, 10 minutes of basic stretching, and 20 minutes of yoga.

In the past I’ve noticed an obvious benefit to weight training on a diet of raw food vs. cooked food. I can lift more weight, and I have more muscular endurance (i.e. I can do more reps at the same weight) when I eat raw. I also don’t feel as tired during or after my workouts. As soon as I add back a little cooked food, like some cooked potatoes, I become a little weaker. I can’t lift as much weight or go as long.

Another cool benefit I’ve noticed is that my strength doesn’t degrade as much during periods when I’m not actively weight training if I’m eating high-raw or all-raw during those times. Normally on a cooked food diet, if I took several months off from weight training, I’d lose a lot of strength from atrophy, and it would take me at least a month or two to build back up to my previous high.

On a raw food diet, I seem to retain most of my strength gains even when I don’t train for months. This morning when I started weight training again after taking a lot of time off from it, I was pretty close to my previous max on most exercises. My chest seemed to have the most degradation, whereas my biceps were just as strong as they were a few months ago.

I don’t exactly know why this is so. Perhaps it’s because cleaner burning foods generate less metabolic waste, so there isn’t as much waste build-up in the muscles during non-training periods. Initially though, the training effect tends to be more neurological than muscular, whereby more muscle fibers get activated (as opposed to building new muscle tissue via hypertrophy). So perhaps with cleaner burning foods, the mind doesn’t find it as necessary to de-activate as many of the muscle fibers when training stops. Perhaps that de-activation process gets triggered to help free up resources to handle waste management with the higher toxic load from cooked foods. I’m just postulating here — quite honestly I haven’t a clue as to what’s really going on. But I’ve seen a marked difference in how my own body behaves on raw vs. cooked foods, and I rather like it, so I wanted to share it in the hopes that it may benefit you as well.

Making delicious juices

I tend to make fairly complex juices because I love how the different flavors combine. Even if I use the exact same ingredients, every juice comes out unique.

As I write this article, I’m drinking 34 oz of carrot, apple, beet, celery, mixed greens, dandelion greens, kale, parsley, ginger, lime, pomegranate juice. It takes me about 20 minutes to make that much juice, including prep and clean-up.

I frequently use 6-7 medium-sized carrots and an apple as a base for a 32-oz juice (one quart). It has a pleasant flavor and guarantees a sweet-tasting juice no matter what I add to it. When I start with carrot-apple, it’s hard to screw it up.

If I want a slightly sweeter, earthier juice, I’ll add 1/2 to 1 beet to it. I juice the beet greens too.

Carrots, apples, and beets are all high in natural sugar, so you can use them in any combination to create a sweet base for a juice that will effectively mask stronger flavors like those of bitter greens. Over time you may wish to decrease the quantity of these ingredients as your palate adjusts.

Celery, cucumber, and romaine lettuce make nice alkalizing additions to any juice. They’re mild in flavor, so they won’t overpower your juice. Usually I’ll include at least 4 stalks of celery and/or a small cucumber. Sometimes I’ll juice a whole head of celery. These foods are very water-rich, so they’re great to use for adding volume to a juice if you want to make a lot of juice quickly without a lot of prep work. Because of their mild flavors, they won’t wreck the flavor of your juice no matter how much you use.

Romaine lettuce (and most other lettuces) also have a mild flavor when juiced, so that’s another good ingredient to use frequently.

Next I include some dark greens, usually at least 2-3 different types. My favorites include spinach, dandelion greens, kale (especially dinosaur kale), beet greens, and parsley, mainly because they’re easy to feed into my Green Star juicer. Sometimes I’ll use mixed greens, Swiss chard, or collard greens. Dark greens tend to have a very strong flavor when juiced, so I don’t recommend trying to drink them straight. You’ll want something to mask their bitterness. Carrot-apple does a great job of that, so you can include a lot of greens while still enjoying an extremely palatable juice.

Lastly I add a few ingredients to create more sizzle and spike up the flavor. My favorites are lime and ginger — it’s rare that I make a juice w/o one or both of them. I normally use 1/4 to 1/2 of a lime plus 1-2 tsp of fresh ginger for a 32-oz juice. Sometimes I use lemon, but I almost always prefer lime. You can juice the lemon and lime with the skin too — and the ginger as well.

Other flavor-spiking ingredients I use are pomegranate seeds (several tablespoons), kiwi (one or two of them), and fennel (1-2 sprigs). Some people like to toss in a clove of garlic or some hot peppers, but I’m not really into that. Don’t use onion though — even a small amount of onion can overpower a juice and make it taste pretty nasty. I learned that lesson the hard way.

When I want to clean out my fridge, I will sometimes toss in a zucchini, sprouts, some cabbage, or some bell pepper (any color). Most water-rich produce can be juiced, but not all juicers can accommodate every type of produce. For example, my juicer doesn’t handle tomatoes or pineapples well because they clog the mesh filter.

Many juice-loving friends of mine prefer to make much simpler juices with only 3-4 ingredients, such as cucumber, celery, romaine juice or carrot, romaine, spinach. I sometimes make such juices too, but I seem to keep going back to the complex ones with 10-12 ingredients. I just love how the different items combine to create an explosive layering of different flavors and sensations.

My favorite simple juice is probably pineapple-garlic juice. I blend one pineapple (minus the skin) plus 3 garlic cloves in my Vita-Mix and then run it through a nut milk bag to remove the pulp. I know it probably sounds disgusting, but it’s quite delicious. Since it’s mostly pineapple juice, the garlic adds an interesting accent. When I drink this juice, however, I can expect to smell like garlic for 2-3 days afterwards. Raw garlic is pretty potent!

Try it for yourself

If you enjoy physical training or if you’re just curious about juicing, try incorporating more fresh juice into your diet to see if you notice a difference in your workouts. I suspect that at the very least, you’ll notice that exercising feels a little easier, so you can push yourself a bit harder each time.

Note that juicing is different from blending up a smoothie. With a smoothie the fiber remains intact, but with juicing the fiber is removed as pulp. I even run my juice through a nut milk bag just to remove the last bits of fiber that made it through my juicer.

If you don’t have a juicer yet, read the section on Juice Feasting Equipment from my juice feasting article for some recommendations on how to get started.

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

At some point we decided to pull out our Flip cameras and do some interviews.

Matt posted his interview with me today. We talked about some of my ongoing experiments with raw and cooked foods (it’s been a while since I posted an update about that), creating social support for change, and how to achieve new income goals.

Hope you enjoy it.

In another interview we did, I asked Matt and Angela some questions about the raw diet and simple steps people can take to eating healthier. As soon as Erin edits it and uploads it, I’ll be happy to share it here as well.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Realize that if you eat eggs, you’re actively and directly supporting practices like this. This video is actually pretty mild compared to what happens to the hens.

What’s the difference between being the guy who tosses the live baby chicks into the grinder vs. paying someone else to do it for you? Of course there’s no meaningful difference other than how much you distance yourself from the truth.

There’s really no difference between this level of conscience and Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. If people can justify treating animals like this for the mere taste and satiety of an unnecessary digestible, what’s to stop them from relating to other human beings the same way? The law? If you’re willing to kill and torture defenseless animals simply to satisfy a craving that you could easily do without, what more are you capable of when the stakes are higher?

Animal torture and human torture both occur at the same level of consciousness — the level of separation at which inflicting harm on another being is seen as justifiable. Distinctions between the two are made at the level of rationalization and assigned meaning, but harming animals doesn’t occur at a higher level of consciousness than harming humans. If you do either, you’re certainly capable of both, given the right conditions. Look within yourself and observe that the same consciousness that says, “I don’t care what happens to this baby chick” is the same level of consciousness that says, “I don’t care what happens to that guy overseas.”

All it takes is for you to say, “That person/animal is unimportant to me,” or “If it gives me a little more pleasure, then torturing and killing is fine,” and you can justify any behaviors you like. And as history shows us, quite often people do exactly that. Is this how you truly want to live, or do you think you’re capable of better?

Now you might think that if you eat free range eggs, then your conscience is clear. Nice try, but not even in the ballpark. Free range is no better because the hens still originate from the same factories that grind up the male chicks alive, so you’re still supporting the same practices. “Free range” is only a marketing term anyway and has no legal meaning. It’s largely a gimmick for branding purposes.

What about the excuse, “Everyone else is doing it, so it must be okay”? Hey, that line worked pretty well for the Nazis. Maybe it pisses you off to have me compare you to the Nazis. The Nazis were pretty pissed off too, so there’s another match. Perhaps you aren’t so dissimilar after all.

Obviously it’s a different story if you get your eggs from a local chicken-loving farm where the animals are well-treated, but do you get all of your eggs from such sources and never stray? This would mean never consuming any products that include eggs, such as baked goods or pasta or processed foods or restaurant foods with eggs, where the source is almost certain to be a factory like the above. If you’re lazy about it, you might as well buy a meat grinder and lend the guy in the video a helping hand.

If you give it a little thought, does it really make sense to eat the reproductive material from another species’ ovaries? I know it tastes good with certain preparation methods, but I’m sure your own reproductive organs would taste good with the right sauce. When you eat eggs, you do realize that you’re eating something that comes out of a bird’s vagina, don’t you? You might as well turn a woman’s period into pasta sauce.

Dropping eggs from your diet is actually quite easy. It’s a nasty habit that arises from social conditioning, but it isn’t hard to dump. I stopped eating eggs many years ago and never went back. Before that I often had eggs for breakfast. I especially loved omelettes. In January 1997 I did a 30-day trial with no eggs (I also dropped dairy at the same time), and I never had any desire for eggs after that. I lost 7 pounds the first week and felt a lot more energetic afterwards. You can just as easily use the same 30-day trial method to see what egg-free life is like for you.

If you like scrambled eggs, a good transition food is scrambled tofu. Google the phrase, and you’re sure to find plenty of recipes online. Scrambled tofu (or tofu scramble) is very easy to make. Tofu is a very bland food by itself, but it easily picks up the flavor of anything you mix into it such as various spices. No doubt some people would rather avoid soy, but it’s a big step up from any meal that comes from a menstruating bird.

Then again, maybe you’re one of those Nazis who really enjoys their work. Maybe you’re the kind of person who watches the video and thinks about applying for a job at a chicken processing plant. Well, at least you’re congruent.

Ultimately you have four basic options:

(1) Eat eggs and feel good about the whole process, including how the baby chicks and the adult hens are treated. This means you experience no guilt or regret about it. You’re totally fine with slaughtering baby birds on a daily basis. If baby chicks must die, so be it. Your taste buds are worth it. Heinrich Himmler would be proud.

(2) Eat eggs and turn your back on truth. It makes you feel sad, guilty, etc. to retain awareness of the reality behind your food choices, so you do your best to tune all of that out. Listen to the marketing messages, and try not to think about what goes on behind the scenes. Become dumber and more ignorant in order to create faux happiness. Distance yourself from your true feelings, and become increasingly disconnected from yourself and more of a social drone. Don’t rock the boat. Live as a typical Nazi.

(3) Keep eating eggs, but get them only from compassionate sources that fits your values. You’re willing to go out of your way to satisfy your craving, but you want to do as little harm as possible.

(4) Stop eating eggs and stop supporting a process that doesn’t feel good to you. Listen to your conscience ahead of your cravings and addictions. This is a more difficult path to be sure, but it also promises tremendous growth. On this path you may get egged by others from time to time because your actions will expose their incongruencies, but you’ll know you’ve made the right decision for you, and any resistance will simply make you stronger. The more you can summon the courage and fortitude to make such decisions, the stronger and more congruent you become as a compassionate human being.

Technically there are other levels beyond this, but at that point the solutions became less about personal growth and more about contribution.

If this post/video pushes some emotional buttons in you, rest assured it’s intentional. To whom do those buttons belong anyway, and why do they keep flashing “push me” in bright neon letters?

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This group is comprised of respected U.S. scientists from a variety of disciplines. According to their web site, the USGCRP “coordinates and integrates federal changes in the global environment and their implications to society.” They’ve been conducting heavy peer-reviewed research in this field and reporting their findings since 1989.

In this article I’ll share with you some of the latest findings from this report. This report is limited to how climate change is affecting the USA, but some of these impacts can be generalized to other parts of the world as well.

Is climate change happening?

The USGCRP scientists report that climate change is already occurring in a measurable way, and those changes are primarily caused by human activity. They were very clear and direct about that.

During the past 50 years, average U.S. temperatures have risen by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. This change is due to human activity, most notably from the rise in greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. During the 50-year period before that, there was no net change in average temps.

This recent increase isn’t due to natural fluctuations — the scientists were able to rule that out as the cause. Human activity has caused this increase.

Even a slight increase like this is causing measurable side effects, including more heat-related deaths (especially in the elderly), melting glaciers and permafrost, more flooding, more demand for energy used for cooling during hot months, stronger and more frequent wildfires, and more insect problems.

The scientists concluded that climate change isn’t merely something that threatens to create consequences decades from now — those changes are already taking place, they can be measured, and they’re a result of human activity.

Predictions for the future

The scientists shared their collective predictions for the next 50-100 years. To do this they employ a variety of predictive models. Where multiple models agree, they have stronger confidence vs. when their models disagree. Consequently, many of their predictions deal with general trends where they have high confidence as opposed to specific details where confidence is lower.

Here are some of those predictions, in no particular order:

• Average U.S. temps will rise by 2 to 11.5 degrees over the next 100 years, largely depending on what we do or don’t do to slow global warming.
• Cities in warm climates will see more days over 100 degrees. (According to the maps I saw, Arizona will be especially hard hit by temperature increases.)
• Oceans will become more acidic.
• Coral reef destruction will continue.
• We’ll see fewer fish in the ocean.
• Wet areas will become wetter; dry areas will become dryer.
• More precipitation will fall as rain; less will fall as snow.
• Snow will begin to fall later in the year, there will be less of it, and it will melt sooner.
• Ski resorts will have fewer days to run their operations.
• Some crops may become ungrowable in certain regions where they’re currently grown, such as maple trees and apples in the NE. This will especially affect crops that require a certain minimum number of cold nights per year.
• Problems with invasive insects will increase.
• There will be more and potentially larger wildfires.
• The demand for cooling energy during hot months will increase.
• We’ll see more heat-related deaths, especially in aging baby boomers.
• Destruction of wetlands will increase.
• Coastal homes and buildings will be threatened by rising sea levels and storm surges.
• There will be more droughts in the SW.
• There will be more torrential downpours and flooding in the Midwest and NE, especially near the Great Lakes.
• We’ll see hurricanes that are more intense.
• If sea level rises by up to 3 feet, large portions of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico will be underwater. Global warming causes sea level to rise for two primary reasons: (1) warmer water expands in volume, and (2) hotter temps melt more ice that flows into the oceans.
• Many shipments, including much of the country’s oil, come through ports and railways in the Gulf region. These transportation gateways will be threatened by flooding from encroaching sea water.

If you want to see a list of the top 10 findings of this report from the scientists, you can find it here.

If you want to know how this report was specifically prepared and who was behind it, you’ll find that info on this page.

How to cope with climate change

I watched a press conference where these scientists delivered their report to the media. They delivered these findings rather matter-of-factly, not with the sort of passion or appeal to emotion you might see from Al Gore. The main emotions I picked up from them suggested that they were proud of the hard work they did to analyze the data and prepare this report. I didn’t detect any hidden agenda from them other than wanting to share what they believed was the truth, so that our political leaders can use their information to make better decisions.

The scientists who created this report are not politicians, so they don’t set government policy. Their role is limited to an advisory capacity.

A member of the media asked during the press conference if the scientists were influenced by the White House to alter their findings. The scientist who answered the question responded, “There was no political pressure for us to change anything in this report. This is about scientific integrity. None of the authors would participate in that kind of a process.”

Their advice on how to deal with climate change focused on two primary strategies: corrective action and adaptive action. They gave some examples of each.

Their main suggestions for corrective action to combat global warming were to: (1) reduce usage of fossil fuels, (2) increase energy efficiency, and (3) increase the supply of clean energy. They concluded that any or all of these actions would help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, thereby helping to slow global warming.

They indicated that climate change happens naturally too, and that such change isn’t necessarily a problem. Problems arise when climate change happens too abruptly, and societies or species don’t have sufficient time to adapt. Even if we can’t reverse global warming, slowing it down is still a worthy pursuit because it gives populations more time to take adaptive action.

The scientists also suggested that government and businesses can use the information in this report to make better adaptive decisions in preparation for expected climate changes. For example, one sewage plant on the East coast is being built a couple feet higher in anticipation of a rise in sea level over the next 50 years, which is the expected operating life of the plant.

How can individuals deal with climate change?

At this point I’m shifting from sharing the scientists’ findings to offering my own thoughts about what we as individuals can do to deal with climate change.

First, there are many competing interests that have an agenda with respect to influencing what you believe about climate change. This unfortunately spreads misinformation and half-truths, which creates confusion. For the most part, confusion benefits those in favor of maintaining the status quo.

I recently shared a small piece of data from the climate change report on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, and I saw some very strong opinions offered in response. Some backed up the data, while others claimed that climate change is a myth promoted by the green industry.

Since I’m not a climatologist, and since I have no interest in becoming one, I have to rely on others for much of my information in this area. In that case the challenge becomes figuring out whom to trust. Personally I think the USGCRP is a strong source to get at the truth with minimal filtering and bias. They’re the people who are actively researching climate change, so I’m inclined to trust their findings more than what is shared by a politician who may have serious conflicts of interest based on who’s financially backing him/her.

My first suggestion then is to be skeptical of information that comes from secondary and tertiary sources like the media, your friends and family, from politicians (including Al Gore), or even from me. Get your information as unfiltered as possible. Visit the website of the USGCRP and have a look around. You can read their reports for free, and I believe they update their findings every year. They do a good job of making their information digestible — after all, they have to present their findings to politicians — so you don’t have to worry about drowning in incomprehensible terminology.

Now let’s consider the corrective and adaptive changes you can make to your own lifestyle. How can you as a conscious human being respond to the challenge of global warming?

What can you do to help mitigate the effects of climate change?

What’s the most significant corrective action the average American could take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Go ahead and take your best guess, and then I’ll share the answer with you.

Is it to buy a hybrid or alternative-fuel car? Nope. That’s not a bad guess, but we can do better.

What about changing your home to use only clean energy, such as by installing solar panels? Nope.

The answer is actually quite simple.

The answer is to reduce or eliminate your consumption of animal products.

Do I say this because I have a hidden agenda to turn you into a vegan because I care so deeply about the pigs, chickens, and cows? No, if you want to go out and hunt down your breakfast, be my guest.

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the main problem isn’t that animals are being killed and eaten. The major culprit here is the factory farming system and the Americans who fund it.

What contributes to global warming is how you decide to get your fix of animal foods.

If you still want to eat meat, as far as global warming is concerned, that’s okay. Go out and hunt some wild game that forages for its food, or pay someone to do it for you.

The worst thing you can do from an environmental perspective is to regularly consume factory farmed animal foods. Meat and meat products are the worst by far. Dairy and eggs aren’t quite as bad. It’s estimated that dairy consumption increases greenhouse gas emissions by only 2%, and most of that is coming out of the animals’ behinds. However, by giving the cows less gas-producing foods, even those emissions can be reduced significantly.

The real greenhouse gas monster is commercial meat production. You can look into the facts and figures like many others have done to reach the same conclusion I have, but if you prefer not to do that, I don’t think it’s necessary for most people to recognize the truth of it. Just employ some basic common sense, and consider how the process works.

Think of all the resources that must be expended in order to raise a food animal to maturity. First you have to give it water. Lots of water!

To produce one pound of meat requires, on average, about 5000 gallons of water. Compare that to 25 gallons for a pound of wheat. To produce their daily food, a vegetarian needs 300 gallons of water per day, while a typical meat-eater needs 4000 gallons. It takes energy to transport all that water too, and this means more greenhouse gas emissions.

Then you have to feed the animal. The vast majority of commercially grown animals don’t just roam around grazing on grass. Most animals eat a lot of grain. This requires fields to grow the grain, fertilizers, and lots and lots of water. It also requires transporting and refining the grain, often over vast distances. Growing grain requires tilling the soil, crop dusting, transporting the grain in gas-guzzling trucks, running feed mills, and transporting it to the factory farms.

Then there are the hormones and antibiotics the food animals are injected with. It takes resources to manufacture, transport, and administer those too.

Moreover, you have to transport the animals too. They have to be trucked to the slaughterhouse — more fuel. It takes energy to operate the slaughterhouse. Then the animal flesh is taken to processing plants — more fuel. Those plants require energy and maintenance to operate as well. Then the meat has to be trucked to grocery stores — more fuel. Then it has to be frozen or refrigerated — more energy. Every step in this lengthy process consumes massive energy and causes enormous pollution.

And this is what we get when everything is working properly. When it goes awry and there’s a problem like a mass recall of contaminated meat, all of this energy is wasted completely, and even more energy and pollution are required to conduct the recall.

Snaring a wild bunny rabbit and snapping its neck is starting to look a whole lot better.

Compare this unwieldy process to growing an apple tree in your backyard. You pluck an apple from the tree and eat it. More apples grow back. You don’t even have to snare the apple. Apples are such easy prey.

Growing grain is energy intensive enough. To feed that grain to animals reduces the efficiency of the operation by an order of magnitude, and that loss is irrecoverable.

Now imagine if you don’t buy the meat directly, but you buy it in the form of a prepared food, like a burger at a restaurant. This adds even more waste. Now you’re basically bitchslapping the atmosphere.

It’s hard to design a more wasteful and polluting process than this even if you try.

Consider the massive scale on which this polluting operation takes place. The majority of Americans consume animal products daily, including children who can’t drive a gas-guzzling SUV for the first 16 years of their lives.

These billions (yes, billions) of farm animals also produce tons of waste. The EPA reports that the run-off from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. Food animals in the USA produce 45 tons of animal excrement per second. That’s 130 times as much excrement as our human population produces. Some farms have so much excrement to deal with that they actually liquefy it and spray it into the air, so it gets carried away by the wind. This can cause serious health problems when people breathe the polluted air.

One third of all fossil fuels in the USA are used to raise animals for food. 80% of our agricultural land is consumed by that industry as well.

A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined. If we’re going to combat global warming, doesn’t it make sense to work on the #1 source of greenhouse gas emissions? Shouldn’t we strike at the root of the problem instead of just hacking at the branches?

The University of Chicago reports that going vegan is 50% more effective than switching to a hybrid car in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Imagine how much better it gets if you incorporate lots of raw, unprocessed, and/or locally grown foods too. You can be vegan and still eat mostly processed foods that require more energy to produce, but you’ll still be causing much lower emissions than someone who buys commercial animal foods.

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, eating one pound of meat is equivalent to driving an SUV 40 miles.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) isn’t the only greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Two others are methane and nitrous oxide. Methane is 20 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping atmospheric heat, and nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. EPA reports show that animal agriculture is the #1 source of methane, and the United Nations reports that it’s responsible for 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions.

It’s reasonable to conclude that you cannot be a committed environmentalist these days without eating a primarily vegan diet. Otherwise you’re clearly not walking your talk. How can someone claim to care about reducing their emissions if they won’t make the single most important change an individual can make? To eat commercially produced meat these days is to say “F— you” to the environment with every bite.

The good news is that eating vegan will save us all money. I could get into issues like reducing health care costs and the strong links between animal products and preventable lifestyle diseases, but fortunately we don’t need to go that far. The true cost of meat and the wastefulness of the animal products industry is largely disguised because of government subsidies; the meat and dairy industries have deep pockets to fund their lobbyists. This makes their products less expensive in the stores, but we all pay for their kickbacks in the form of higher taxes. If there was ever a good time for the government and individuals to start saving money and cut waste, this would be it. Who do you think pays for all the resources that go into producing animal products? We all do.

It’s good to make other changes to your lifestyle too, but your diet is the #1 place where you can reduce your personal contribution to global warming. If you want to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, you need look no further than your dinner plate.

I don’t expect you to change overnight, but you can certainly make some reductions if you eat a lot of animal products or processed foods. Eat foods that are closer to nature, foods that required less energy and which yield less pollution. Even better is to eat locally grown foods if you can. Although I live in Las Vegas where the temps can get pretty extreme, I have a small garden in my backyard. It’s nice to walk to my garden and pick some produce instead of having to buy items at the store which were transported from California or South America. It saves me a little money too.

I’m definitely not perfect when it comes to reducing my greenhouse gas emissions. There are surely other things I could do to reduce my environmental impact. However, this is an area where I apply the 80/20 rule. What’s the 20% I can get right that will yield 80% of the value?

I’ve been vegetarian for 16 years and vegan for 12.5 years. Erin has been vegan just as long, and both of our kids have been vegan since birth. Based on the feedback I’ve gotten over the years, it’s safe to say that I’ve influenced hundreds of people to make dietary changes that will significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Consequently, I’m confident that my net environmental impact is positive, and my lifestyle and influence are creating a net reduction in our usage of water, energy, fossil fuels, and other resources. I’m sharing this to point out that you don’t have to be perfect to make a difference. You just have to care, and you need to focus on making the most beneficial changes you can. Use your common sense to reduce or eliminate the most destructive elements of your lifestyle, and don’t get distracted by trivialities. If you can influence your family and friends to try eating lower on the food chain too, that’s a very positive and constructive influence indeed. It means that your lifestyle is producing a net gain for the planet rather than a net abuse.

I think the best thing you can do here is to lead by example. Live as consciously as you can, so you can serve as a positive influence for others.

A great place to start is to kick off a 30-day trial of a specific lifestyle change. Even if you decide not to continue beyond those 30 days, your temporary trial will still produce a net gain for the environment.

What can you do to adapt to the effects of climate change?

What if global warming continues as the scientists predict? How can you prepare for the future?

Whatever you do, do NOT move to Florida!

If we can’t fully prevent global warming, we can still adapt to the expected climate changes.

I suggest you review the regional impact assessments from the USGCRP. You can click on the region where you live and see a summary of the expected impacts from climate change. Let those assessments inform your decisions regarding where you plan to live.

If you don’t like the trends where you live, consider moving to a region where the impacts won’t be as troubling for you. For example, if you have serious problems with the heat, you probably won’t want to live in Arizona.

The most extreme changes will happen in the coastal areas and in the northernmost and southernmost states. The area near the Great Lakes is expected to see a lot more precipitation and flooding.

In Las Vegas where I live, it looks like we can expect fairly mild changes compared to some states. Most likely we’ll have more days over 100 degrees in the decades ahead (today’s high is 107). Nearby Mt. Charleston might not see as many ski days. The most serious problem for this city is going to be water, especially if the population keeps growing and Lake Mead keeps shrinking. There may come a time when the city’s population will outstrip its water resources.

Most likely you’ll review the changes that are expected to affect your area, and you’ll say to yourself, “I can cope with that.” All in all, it doesn’t look like the U.S. will be hurt by global warming nearly as badly as some countries. But the big picture is that we need to consider how our actions as individuals are affecting the rest of the planet. Just because our hometowns may not be hard hit doesn’t mean we should ignore our responsibilities to Mother Earth.

Regarding Al Gore

As you can probably guess from the above, I have my doubts about Al Gore. I loved An Inconvenient Truth, and I’m glad to see that he’s been raising awareness about climate change. I think he deserves his Nobel Prize for his efforts. However, I question the advice he’s suggesting for individual action. He’s wasting time hacking at the branches and isn’t serving as a good example of how we can realistically tackle this challenge. We Americans in particular must change our lifestyles. We can’t blame everything on the energy sector.

Apparently Al Gore is still a heavy consumer of animal products, and I know that some groups have been pressuring him to go veg, to talk about going veg, and to set a proper and congruent example. His apparent unwillingness to walk his talk gives me serious pause. I cannot fathom that he’s ignorant of the massive negative impact caused by animal agriculture, so I must conclude that (1) he’s intentionally misleading people for some hidden agenda; (2) he lacks the knowledge, motivation, or support to navigate this lifestyle change; or (3) he thinks it would be political suicide to tell the whole truth. What do you think the reason is? I suspect it’s a combination of (2) and (3).

Al Gore helped organize and promote the Live Earth concerts. Their official handbook stated that “refusing meat” is the “single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint.”

Clearly something doesn’t add up here.

So here’s my offer to Al Gore. If he’s so inclined, I will personally help him transition to a vegan or mostly vegan diet. He can stay at my house for a while, and I’ll bring in some experienced vegan chefs and educators to prepare food for him and teach him how to live as a vegan, at my expense. I’ll pay for all the food too.

Whether he succeeds or not, just for making the attempt, I’ll give him the opportunity to make a guest post on my blog about anything he so desires. Perhaps he’ll be interested in sharing a positive message with a couple million people, half of which are Americans.

Al, if you happen to read this, my phone number is on my contact page. This offer has no expiration date.

Home

If you haven’t already seen it, I encourage you to watch the movie Home (it’s free). It’s a fascinating 93-minute documentary on the ways in which human activity is impacting the planet. After my daughter Emily watched it, she asked Erin, “Mommy, will the planet still be alive when I’m a grown up?”

Let’s intend a yes.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

At previous potlucks I’ve brought guacamole, nori rolls, and garlic “bread,” but by far the most popular item I’ve made was a raw fruit pie. I’ve brought raw pies to three potlucks, and I always brought home an empty pie plate. People always compliment me on how good they are.

Raw fruit pies are very easy to make. Depending on what kind of fruit you use, it can take as little as 20 minutes from start to finish, including making the crust from scratch. And it’s a lot healthier for you than a typical cooked pie.

I want to credit Jennifer Cornbleet for getting me started on the path to raw pie nirvana. I began with one of her blueberry pie recipes and have been gradually tweaking it to make other fruit pies.

Here’s a photo of a raw strawberry pie I made, so you can see what the end result looks like. This one took about 30 minutes to make from start to finish. I made it for a raw potluck, and it quickly disappeared.

How to Make a Raw Pie Crust

Making a raw pie crust is easy and only takes about 5 minutes once you get the hang of it. There are lots of variations on how to do it, so I’ll start you off with one of the simplest.

There are only three ingredients:

• 2 cups raw nuts (almonds, walnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans, etc) – don’t soak the nuts
• 1 cup dates, pitted
• 1/4 tsp sea salt (optional)

Put the raw nuts in a food processor, and blend with the S-blade until the nuts are reduced to small crumbs. (This will be very noisy when you first turn on the machine.) Add the dates and salt, and blend again until there are no more chunks of dates. The end result should look like loose crumbs.

Pour the crumbs into a 9-inch pie plate, and use your hands to press them into the form of a pie crust. It may take a little practice to get it to look symmetrical, but it isn’t difficult. I usually start by pressing straight down to get the bottom flat, and then I press around the sides as I turn the pie plate. You can make the pie crust flush with the top of the pie plate, or you can create a lip around the edges. The strawberry pie shown above has a lip; the other photos show pies without the lip. Sculpt it however you like.

Put the pie crust in the freezer for about 15 minutes. This helps it become more firm and solid. Fortunately this is just enough time to prepare the filling.

There are countless variations on the ingredients you can use to make the crust, but generally the best place to start is with raw nuts and some kind of chewy dried fruit. Instead of dates you can use raisins or figs. I suppose you could even use dried apricots, but I haven’t tried that one yet.

The salt is optional, but I find that a little salt in the crust makes for a nice contrast to the sweet fruit mixture that will fill the pie.

You can also add some spices like cinnamon or nutmeg. If you like the taste of coconut, try adding some shredded coconut as well.

As a side note, if you’re strict about using truly raw ingredients, then you should know that many nuts that are labeled raw are not actually raw.

For example, thanks to the (idiotic, paranoid, and otherwise dumb) ruling of the California Almond Board, California almonds have to be pasteurized by law. This means that the nuts are heated/cooked at temperatures well above 110 degrees. In my opinion it’s totally unethical that they should be labeled and sold as raw nuts when they are actually cooked, no longer a living food, and nutritionally not the same as raw nuts. I’ve read that roughly 98% of the almonds sold in the USA come from California, so if you buy raw almonds from a grocery store in the USA, they’re probably not raw.

Lately I’ve been using raw organic almonds which are imported from Spain. These Spanish almonds are larger and more flavorful than the California almonds, and they make a better pie crust too. It’s unfortunate that I have to get my nuts from 5500 miles away instead of 55 miles away, but I’d rather use the best ingredients available. I’d be happy to help out the (crashing and burning) California economy since California is my birthplace, but I can’t help them if they’re going to make stupid choices like cooking their nuts and trying to sell them as raw. I doubt that the deep cuts in education they’re planning will improve their vocabulary. Cooked and raw are not synonyms. Nor are actor and governor.

How to Make the Fruit Filling

Making the filling is quite simple and only requires three ingredients:

• 6 cups fresh fruit such as blueberries, strawberries, cherries, peaches, apples, etc.
• 2 tbs fresh lemon juice
• 1 cup dates, soaked about 10 minutes

Blueberry pie is the easiest to make because the blueberries don’t require any prep work other than washing. If you’re using larger fruits, you’ll need to cut them into smaller chunks. If you’re making strawberry pie, cut off the stem part, and cut the strawberries into quarters (into sixths or eighths if the berries are very large). For cherry pie, pit the cherries and then quarter each cherry. For apple pie, cut the apples into thin slices or small chunks.

Put 2 cups of the fruit, the lemon juice, and the soaked dates (minus the soak water) into a blender or Vita-Mix, and blend until you have a smooth liquid. Put the remaining 4 cups of fruit into a large bowl, and pour the blended mixture over it. Mix it together.

Take your pie crust out of the freezer, and pour the fruit mixture into it. Use a rubber spatula to spread the filling into the crust.

Viola! Your pie is done. You can actually eat it right now, but it’s best if you refrigerate it for at least an hour or two.

The blueberry pie is easiest and tends to come out best because the blueberries hold their moisture well. If you use strawberries or other fruits and cut them into small pieces, they’ll release some of their moisture as the pie sits in the fridge, so the crust will become wetter. This isn’t a big deal for my family because our pies rarely last more than a day anyway.

You can make pies with frozen fruit, but you’ll need to thaw and drain the fruit first. Personally I prefer fresh fruit pies. One time I made a blueberry pie for a potluck with organic frozen blueberries, and everyone still loved it.

Use your imagination to create different flavors and textures for the filling. You can add other ingredients to the sauce, like adding cinnamon for an apple pie. You can also mix and match different fruits. For example, you could use a strawberry sauce for a blueberry pie and vice versa.

Here’s a photo of a blueberry cream pie I made. I began with the original blueberry pie recipe, and then I made a cream sauce from soaked cashews, soaked dates, water, and vanilla (I think). I used a spatula to swirl the cream sauce into the pie filling. This one was actually a little too rich for my tastes.

The final photo is a slice of raw cherry pie. Erin and I made this on Saturday using fresh cherries. Erin used a cherry pitter to pit the cherries while I made the crust. Fortunately she managed to snap a photo of it on Sunday before it was all gone. This pie tasted better on the second day because the cherries weren’t as tart.

These pies are so good that you can even eat them as a meal. After all it’s just fresh fruit and nuts. My daughter Emily and I ate some of this cherry pie for breakfast yesterday.

Have fun, and enjoy the pies!

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

First off, I’m still 100% raw, and I absolutely love this diet. It’s hard for me to imagine ever wanting to go back to cooked food.

Today’s Menu

Here’s what I ate today (Saturday).

Breakfast

1 quart of green juice – apple, celery, cucumber, kale, dandelion greens, parsley, fennel, lime, ginger

2 tbs of fresh coconut meat

Lunch

flax crackers with fresh guacamole

1 mango

1 quart of water

I made the guacamole extra spicy this time by adding 1 habanero pepper, 2 jalapeño peppers, and some dried red chili flakes. By the time I was done eating, I was sweating. My daughter had some of this with me and kept fanning her tongue, but she seems to enjoy spicy food just like her dad.

Snack

bowl of blueberries (about 1 cup)

Dinner

large salad of mixed greens, grape tomatoes, and clover sprouts with fresh salad dressing made from orange, lemon, raw tahini, and Celtic sea salt

about 15 olives (cured in salt water, not vinegar)

1 mango

Evening

1 mug of senna herbal tea with lemon juice

Recent Changes

Lately I’ve been making some adjustments to my diet. I’ve been delighted with the results thus far, but I want to keep experimenting to see if I can optimize it even more.

First, I felt I was eating too many nuts. I especially fell in love with Brazil nuts and would eat several ounces of them each morning. I decided to cut back on the nuts for a while and favor other fat sources instead, namely avocados, olives, and coconut. I’m probably averaging about 10-12 avocados per week now. So far I don’t notice much difference as compared to getting most of my fat from nuts.

Secondly, I decided to cut back on the bananas for a while. Bananas have been a huge part of my diet for the past several months. I would buy them by the 40-lb case (about 105 bananas). That would last about a week. Most days I was getting at least 50% of my calories from bananas.

Bananas are a hybridized fruit, however, and some raw foodists say it’s good to reduce or eliminate them in the long run, partly due to their high sugar content. Others disagree and say that bananas are wonderful. I’m testing a low-banana diet for a while to see how it goes. Today I didn’t eat any bananas.

I notice that when I eat no bananas, I tend to enjoy greater variety of other fruits. I love bananas so much that sometimes it’s the only fruit I eat all day. When I favor other fruits, I get more variety.

Cooked Food vs. Raw Food

I have zero interest in cooked food. Most days the thought of eating anything cooked never occurs to me. It just doesn’t seem like something I’d want to put in my body. When I look at anything cooked — especially processed food — it feels energetically dead to me, no more appetizing than cardboard.

Raw foods have such wonderful life energy. I love eating raw not just for the wide variety of tastes and textures but also for the different “feel” of the foods I eat. For example, mango feels very light and energetic to me. An apple feels a bit lighter, more airy. An avocado feels earthy and grounded. Every meal is a unique energetic experience.

Cooked food lacks this energetic variety. It’s all 100% dead, so it has the same energetic feel as a newspaper.

Staying raw is very easy for me. It was definitely hard to transition to this lifestyle, but it’s very easy to maintain. It doesn’t require any special level of discipline to keep eating 100% raw, certainly not with months of success behind me. It feels totally normal to me now. It would take a major force to knock me off this path. It’s easier for me to stay raw than to try to go back to cooked.

My tastes buds have shifted since I started on this path. I especially love the taste of greens. It’s hard for me to go more than 24 hours without a big salad. I love the juicy tenderness and subtle taste varieties of different greens.

Psychic Boost

I am way more psychic/intuitive than I’ve ever been. Erin and I have had some fascinating experiences as a result of this. Sometimes I know the exact sentence she’s about to speak, or I can sense what another person is experiencing before they tell me. I’m really enjoying this enhanced ability. This improvement alone is probably enough to discourage me from ever going back to cooked food.

I noticed the biggest increase in this area after my 30-day juice feast, even more than I gained from the initial transition from cooked vegan to raw. Juice feasting gave me a huge intuitive boost somehow. I don’t even need to meditate to pick up psychic impressions anymore. It’s like the connection is always on.

Raw Food Diet Book Recommendations

I recently read an awesome book about raw food nutrition called The Sunfood Diet Success System by David Wolfe. I met David briefly in Sedona last year. His book is very long and detailed (almost 500 pages), and it filled in many of the gaps for me. Many of the tweaks I’m making to my diet this year are based on recommendations from his book, which is an outstanding guide for long-term success on the raw diet. Practically every question you may have about raw food nutrition is thoroughly addressed. There are whole chapters on specific foods like avocados and olives. I especially liked the menu plans in the appendix. There are week-long sample menus for transitioning to raw, 80% raw, and 100% raw.

I don’t recommend David’s book for raw food beginners unless you’re really committed because I think the complexity would overwhelm most people. It’s too much information to assimilate unless you already have a strong background in raw nutrition.

For people who are new to raw foods, I highly recommend Laura Bruno’s ebook The Lazy Raw Foodist’s Guide. Laura gave me a lot of helpful advice as I transitioned to 100% raw foods, and we keep in touch regularly. I often recommend her book to people looking to get started on raw foods. Laura’s book covers all the components for raw success and offers an awesome overview of the major schools of raw nutrition, but she doesn’t overwhelm you with undue complexity. Her book is a great guide to help you transition to a raw diet while avoiding the major stumbling blocks. She also includes a variety of quick, simple recipes to get you started.

Moving Forward

I’m incredibly optimistic about the long-term potential of raw food nutrition. It takes a lot of education and testing to adapt to it, mainly because our bodies have been clogged with toxicity from eating an unnatural diet. The longer I stick with this diet, the better it feels. I’m much more awake and alert mentally and intuitively, and emotionally it’s like I’m just now discovering what being human is supposed to feel like.

The funny thing is that my social life has improved dramatically since going raw. Although some people expressed concern that this lifestyle would cramp their social lives, my experience has been just the opposite. With the increase in mental and emotional clarity and the ability to read people more easily, socializing is a lot more fun. Consequently, I intentionally spend more time interacting with people, and I enjoy it now more than ever.

Going raw was one of the best decisions I ever made.

It all boils down to eating foods directly from nature instead of consuming factory products and/or killing our food with fire. Recognize the simple truth that nature doesn’t corrupt its food to satisfy a profit motive. Natural food is grown, not manufactured. I hope that at some point in your life, you’ll choose to walk away from frankenfood and shift your diet to uncorrupted raw plant foods. Become the healthy, vibrant human being you are destined to be.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

People afflicted with this personality disorder suffer from an uncontrollable urge to diagnose individuals as suffering from one or more psychological disorders, specifically individuals which the RDD sufferer has had little or no direct personal interaction with. RDD sufferers often diagnose specific mental illnesses and may go so far as to offer treatment suggestions.

Rather than conducting a formal psychological exam, including a structured face-to-face or verbal evaluation, RDD sufferers are inclined to make snap diagnoses based on data such as a very brief personal interaction, the opinions of third parties, asynchronous and/or indirect interaction (such as email), and the imaginary neuro-associations they’ve created for the people they diagnose.

Despite having little or no direct interaction with those they diagnose, RDD sufferers often remain strongly convinced their diagnoses are accurate. A side effect of this disorder is that RDD sufferers will typically avoid prolonged direct interaction with those they diagnose, as this could corrupt the benefits they obtain from RDD by proving their assumptions inaccurate.

RDD is essentially a form of projection. RDD sufferers remotely diagnose in others the mental disorders they experience in themselves but cannot yet bring themselves to accept.

RDD is often accompanied by one or more of the following symptoms: anger, depression, episodic dysphoria, anxiety, Internet addiction, substance abuse, instability in personal relationships, fear of abandonment, unstable self-image, severe dissociation, and eating disorders.

An effective treatment for RDD is to help RDD sufferers consider how their diagnoses of others are actually a projection of their own imbalances. By having the RDD sufferer make a list of his/her remote diagnosis of others, the therapist can begin treating these specific disorders in the RDD patient. Once the patient accepts these issues as his/her own and begins working through them directly, symptoms of RDD tend to fade. However, RDD symptoms may continue throughout therapy as new issues are brought to the surface through the mechanism of RDD.

Another practical treatment is to ask RDD patient to offer their own treatment suggestions for those they diagnose with various mental disorders. These suggested treatments can provide a starting point for treating the RDD disorder itself. In this manner the patient’s subconscious may offer effective treatment suggestions, bypassing any resistance from the conscious mind.

Some additional treatment resources for RDD include: Understanding Human Relationships and People and Subjective Reality.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Sleep and Dreams

I’m back to sleeping normally again. During the juice feast I needed 8-10 hours of sleep most nights. Now I do fine on 6-7 hours.

The super-vivid nighttime dreams continued for another week or two after I finished the juice feast. After that my dreams gradually returned to normal. That’s a shame. I’m going to miss those amazing dreams.

Dry Skin

My skin is back to normal. The cracks on my knuckles are fully healed. Apparently my body doesn’t like low-fat diets (less than 10% of calories from fat). My skin is very soft and smooth now.

Psychic Boost

The psychic/intuitive boost I enjoyed during my juice feast seems to have continued. I really hope this lasts.

Since Erin is halfway through her own 30-day raw food trial, her psychic abilities are off the scale now. We’re enjoying amazing telepathy as a couple. We can’t keep any secrets because it’s so easy to pick them out of each others’ minds. It’s pretty funny sometimes. I don’t think there will be many surprises when we open our Christmas gifts this year.

If you’re getting an intuitive reading with Erin this month, you’re getting a great deal because she has such an amazing level of clarity right now. She’s even getting great insights for people who are quite shielded and skeptical. I told her she should go raw for at least 30 days a year and raise her prices during that time.

Social Shift

I feel a bit different energetically after the juice feast, like I’m more open and balanced.

Other people must be picking up on this because I’m getting different responses that I used to. It’s like everyone has become much more friendly than usual. Total strangers give me conversation openers all the time now. In one 24-hour period, I got hit on by three different women. Okay, so two of them were prostitutes, but still…

One day I went out unshaven, unshowered, and in schlubby clothes — sweat pants and an old sweatshirt — to see if it would turn people off. It didn’t make any difference. It was eerie. The same people who used to ignore me a couple months ago were now making eye contact and starting up conversations.

I can’t attribute this to holiday cheer. I’ve been through many holiday seasons before, and this is definitely something new. It’s like I’m wearing a T-shirt that says, “I’m friendly. Start a conversation with me.”

I’m enjoying this change, but it takes some getting used to. It seemed to happen very abruptly.

Another thing is that I’m getting more face-to-face connections with people who’ve heard of me from my work — a lot more than usual. This is happening synchronistically.

For example, my family and I were shopping at Whole Foods one day. A woman was handing out raw chocolate samples. We got to chatting, and it turns out she’d heard of me.

Another day I’m at a raw food potluck. I’m chatting with people at the table. Suddenly a woman at the table says, “Wait a minute! I know you. I’ve listened to your podcasts before.

There were a couple more stories like that too. It’s rare that my professional life and personal life intersect like this. The lines are blurring. It doesn’t bother me, but it’s odd to see it happening so quickly.

Some people fear making dietary changes because they think it will negatively impact their social life. Such fears are silly though. My experience has been the exact opposite. The more I improve my diet, the more socially open I become. Socializing is easier than ever now.

It’s a mistake to think that socializing is easier if you’re just like everyone else. If you’re just like everyone else, then you can’t provide any value. There’s no reason for people to get to know you. You bring nothing to the table. You’re just dead weight.

But if you’re the one who’s different, the one who’s unique in some way, now you bring a lot of value to others. People have a reason to get to know you. You can enhance people’s lives just by being yourself.

Think of it like this. If you go out to eat, and you’re eating 100% raw while everyone else is eating cooked food, who’s more likely to be the focal point of the conversation? People will open you.

I think when people say that improving their diets will hurt their social lives, it’s just cowardice talking. Deep down they don’t want to be the center of attention. They don’t want to stand out. They prefer social mediocrity because it’s more comfortable. But when you learn to feel good in your own skin, and you know your diet is right for you, then other people will respond to that. Instead of being socially ostracized, you’ll be socially valued.

Mental Clarity

I’m noticing a significant mental clarity boost after the juice feast, especially when writing. It’s so easy for me to write now that the main limiting factor is how fast I can type. After the juice feast, I wrote my longest article ever. And it was very easy.

My mind is sometimes writing 1-2 paragraphs ahead of my fingers. I have to tell it to slow down from time to time and let me catch up. I can’t even fathom the possibility of writer’s block. I experience writer’s flood.

Weight

As expected, I regained some weight when I returned to solid foods, about 4 pounds. After that my weight seemed to stabilize and has been hovering around 173 lbs. This morning I weighed 170.8.

Liver and Parasite Cleanses

I decided to start the parasite cleanse early because I wanted to be done with it before Christmas. The potential downside is that I wouldn’t feel good, especially if there were parasites dying off in my body. The anti-parasitic herbs are quite strong and have been known to cause nausea as well.

I’ve since completed the parasite and liver cleanses. The liver cleanse took about 30 days, and the parasite cleanse took about 2 weeks.

With the parasite cleanse, I noticed no difference whatsoever. No adverse reactions. No visible parasites that I could detect. Perhaps after years of being vegan and months of being raw, I didn’t have any significant parasites in me. I didn’t find this result too surprising.

The liver/kidney cleanse involved taking Chanca Piedra. Instead of trying to squeeze out stones, this herb gradually dissolves them. So it’s a gentler cleanse than most, but it takes longer.

I noticed that during the first week I took Chanca Piedra, my urine sometimes came out dark green. After the first week or so, everything was back to normal. So it’s possible I had some small stones that this cleanse helped to dissolve. This was a very easy cleanse with no adverse reactions.

If you eat animal products, I’d definitely recommend trying a Chanca Piedra cleanse, since you’re much more likely to have liver and kidney stones. Members of our forums have reported doing various liver/kidney cleanses and saw hundreds of visible stones come out of them. Your digestion will be more efficient once you get the stones out.

Loving Salads

Salads are my favorite foods now. After the juice feast, I just can’t seem to get enough fresh greens. Sometimes I’ll eat a big salad, and then an hour later I’ll be back in the kitchen making another one. Organic greens are just so delicious!

One of my favorite salads is to take a big bowl of mixed greens, add an avocado, the juice of one lime, and some sea salt, and then squeeze everything with my hands until it’s all mooshed together. Then I’ll throw some cherry tomatoes on top and mix those in. It’s really good.

I still make green smoothies, but I prefer salads now because I like the taste of the greens so much. I don’t want to hide the taste anymore. I want to experience it.

It can be hard to adapt to a raw diet if you’ve never done it before, but I find it very easy to maintain this way of eating now. I actually enjoy the raw foods I’m eating more than the cooked foods I used to eat. There’s no deprivation — just the opposite in fact. Eating raw seems so abundant. It’s great to eat so many delicious foods.

It’s clear that nature knows how to make delicious, healthy food. Human beings… not so much.

Cooked Food Experiment

One of the issues I face on a 100% raw food diet is the possibility that I may lose my ability to digest cooked food. As the body becomes cleaner, it grows less tolerant of toxins, and cooked foods are loaded with them.

One of my friends who’s 100% raw says she regrets taking the diet as far as she did because now she can’t eat any cooked food without getting sick. She doesn’t crave cooked food or anything, but she wonders about the long-term practicality of never being able to eat cooked food again.

I’ve been having similar concerns. Is it wise to abandon cooked food for so long that I lose my ability to eat it without getting sick? Have I already crossed that threshold?

My main concern is traveling. Will it be practical to maintain a 100% raw diet if I do a lot of traveling? Are there some locations where it would be impractical to eat 100% raw and never have anything cooked? I don’t know. Some people have told me that it would be very difficult to eat raw in certain places, such as in parts of Eastern Europe during the winter.

Anyway, I decided it would be wise to do a simple test to see what my current tolerance for cooked for is. I think it’s been around 7 months since I had any cooked food.

On Sunday morning I ate a small bowl of oatmeal, about 1 cup of cooked oats with raisins. I chose this because it’s a food I used to eat all the time as a cooked foodie, and I never had any problems digesting it. In order to make the meal more alkaline and less acidic, I ate several cups of greens in the same meal as well as some water with lemon juice. After that I went back to eating 100% raw as usual.

The oatmeal tasted a bit lifeless to me, but it was okay. I didn’t feel any real desire to eat it, but I was curious to see how it would affect me. I didn’t expect there to be any serious adverse reaction except for maybe some tiredness due to the heavier digestive load.

The first hour after eating the oatmeal, I felt okay. Basically normal. But after another hour had passed, I became very drowsy and had to lie down. I drifted off immediately and slept for 90 minutes.

Later in the day I felt mentally foggy. It was strange. I could actually feel this fog of confusion rolling in across my mind. I also felt sluggish physically.

The next day (Monday), I still felt foggy and more tired than usual. I also had some afternoon sleepiness, although I didn’t go to sleep this time. I went to a Toastmasters meeting that night and felt mostly okay. I won our club’s “Best Humor” award for some observational humor I did at the end of the meeting.

The next day (Tuesday), I felt fatigued and foggy, and by the afternoon, I felt like I was getting a cold. I had a runny nose and was sneezing a lot. Keep in mind that after the oatmeal on Sunday morning, I continued eating 100% raw as usual.

By Tuesday night I knew I had a cold. This was more than just mild detox. I was definitely sick.

Wednesday I was down with a bad cold. I had no energy and spent most of the day in bed. I had no energy and just wanted to sleep most of the time.

Today (Thursday) I still have a cold, but I seem to be on the mend. My mind is still foggy, and I’m sneezing a lot, but at least I’m awake and semi-functional. I’m typing this from my laptop while sitting in bed.

The only other time I’ve been sick this whole year was in early February when I went back to cooked food after my 30-day raw food diet trial.

Wow. I can’t believe that one cup of cooked oatmeal could take me down like this.

I’m glad I did this experiment though. It didn’t turn out the way I expected, so at least I learned something. I had no idea my body would react so negatively.

I may try other experiments with a little cooked food further down the road just to see how sensitive I am. Maybe my body could handle some lightly steamed veggies. I honestly thought a cup of oatmeal wouldn’t be a problem. Guess I was wrong.

I still have no interest in returning to cooked food as a major part of my diet. It doesn’t appeal to me anyway. I did this experiment purely out of curiosity. But it’s interesting to see that the longer I stay 100% raw, the harder it may be to return to cooked foods. Other raw foodists have reported similar results.

I’m not particularly bothered by this because I can’t imagine giving up the massive benefits of eating raw. But now I may have to think of cooked food as not just being something outside my normal diet… but also as something immediately toxic. When I was first going raw, this would have seemed like a big sacrifice. Now it’s no big whoop really… just something I need to be aware of.

I want my raw immunity powers back.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

I went to my first raw potluck last night and brought a large batch of this guacamole to share. I figured there would be leftovers, but by the end of the night, the bowl was practically licked clean. People seemed to really dig it.

Steve’s Rawsome Guacamole

Ingredients

• 2 large avocados (or 3 small ones)
• juice of 2 limes (about 1/4 cup)
• 1 medium tomato (or 2 roma tomatoes), chopped
• 3/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/3 cup chopped green onion
• 1 teaspoon minced jalapeño pepper (red or green)
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

Directions

1. Put the avocado flesh into a bowl. Add the lime juice. Mash the avocado and lime juice together with a fork until creamy.
2. Fold in tomato, cilantro, green onion, jalapeño pepper, and sea salt.
3. Enjoy!

Notes / Suggestions

1. This guacamole works especially well as a dip for organic carrot and celery sticks. It also goes well with flax crackers. If you aren’t a raw foodist, it goes well with tortilla chips too of course.
2. Feel free to adjust the ingredient ratios to suit your tastes (i.e. more green onion, more jalapeño, more or less salt, etc).
3. If you like spicy guacamole, feel free to double or triple the jalapeño (or more). The version above is pretty mild.

The raw potluck was a lot of fun by the way. About 20 people showed up. Not everyone there was a raw foodist, but most seemed to be at least 80% raw. It was nice to try so many interesting raw dishes. I especially loved the coconut macaroons.

It’s lightly snowing in Las Vegas right now. I think this is the third time it has snowed in the five years I’ve lived here. It’s so strange to look out of my office window and see snow falling from the sky.

An even stranger sight is seeing the Vegas casinos decked out in Christmas decor. It just doesn’t feel right when I see a giant Christmas tree next to a bunch of slot machines. Sure it’s all bright and shiny looking, but my mind immediately starts singing the old childhood diddy, “One of these things is not like the others…”

P.S. This post is for those people who require low-level, practical action steps to improve their lives and who lack the capacity to grasp and apply high-level concepts. For such people I also recommend increasing the jalapeño to 1/2 cup.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This is a majorly long article. At about 8,600 words, I’m pretty sure this is the longest article I’ve ever written. It’s more like a free book chapter. The length is because my goal is to share one of the most comprehensive articles ever written on this topic. If you actually read the whole thing, you should gain many helpful insights from it. There are many subtle ideas here. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to print it out for later. It goes good with peppermint tea.

Calibration for Long-term Success

When you begin any new activity or endeavor, initially you won’t be calibrated for success, so you’ll experience mostly failure. However, if you keep moving forward with a clear goal in mind, and if you progressively adjust your thinking and actions along the way, you’ll eventually calibrate yourself to get the results you want. This calibration only occurs from directly applying a skill under real-world conditions, not by reading about it.

When you’re in the pre-calibration period, achieving even a small degree of success in a new field requires a massive, all-out effort. Post-calibration, success is practically on auto-pilot; you can consistently achieve the results you want with minimal effort.

Calibration Examples

It’s easiest to understand calibration by way of example, so here are some detailed examples to consider:

Social Dynamics, Making Friends, and Dating

In the field of social dynamics, calibration is the process of learning how to meet new people, initiate conversations, keep conversations going, make new friends, get dates (second meetings), and basically achieve positive social interactions.

How you calibrate your social skills will depend on your personal goals for this area. A salesperson may focus on learning how to build rapport, generate interest, close sales, and construct a database of quality contacts. A professional speaker may learn how to get attention, arouse emotion, generate laughter, and inspire people to action. A pick-up artist may study how to initiate conversations, demonstrate value, build attraction, and achieve successful closes (a close could be getting a phone number, a date, or a sexual encounter).

In high school I was comfortable within certain social circles, but I was still more introverted than I wanted to be. So when I started at college, I decided to remake myself into a more extroverted person. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just dove in and attempted to be as social as possible. I accepted any and all opportunities for social interaction. If anyone invited me to go out, I always said yes. I made a huge commitment to elevate this part of my life, and I stuck with it for my entire freshman year.

This strategy actually worked. I hadn’t read any books on social skills at the time, but I quickly calibrated my social skills via trial and error.

Within a few weeks, I’d made dozens of new friends, and I was going to parties every week. If I ever wanted to hang out and do something fun, I could always find someone willing. Not including sleep time, I’m sure I spent more time in other people’s dorm rooms than my own. I was always going out — for parties, poker games, volleyball, ping pong, or just for pizza. I created an absolutely amazing social life and packed more fun into each month than I used to enjoy in a year. I practically became like a different person.

What I found interesting was that in the beginning, it seemed like I was always the one to initiate new connections, but once I felt comfortable doing that, additional connections began flowing into my life almost effortlessly. During my first week at college, I noticed a party across the hall and asked if I could join in the fun (and got a quick yes). After that I was always getting invitations to parties and virtually never had to ask. During the first few months, I initiated a lot of social experiences (Wanna join me for dinner at the dining commons? Wanna grab a slice? Wanna get a poker game together?). But eventually I had so many invites coming to me passively that I didn’t have to initiate as much.

Looking back, I probably went way overboard. The good news was that I really took control of this area of my life. By throwing myself into it with a passion, I quickly became comfortable meeting new people, and I learned to make friends easily. The bad news was that I totally blew off my studies and was flunking out of school. In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad trade off though. I got expelled after my third semester, but the social calibration I gained during that time has served me well ever since. I went to a different school later and still earned my college degrees, but I think the social calibration has proven more valuable in the long run. I don’t feel intimidated in new social situations, and it’s normally easy for me to make new friends and connect with people. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a wife without even trying.

When Erin and I moved to Las Vegas in 2004, we didn’t know anyone in the city. We went from having a lot of friends in L.A. to having zero local friends in Vegas. It was just the two of us and our kids in a big city of strangers. But part of the reason I was happy to move to a new city was that I knew I could make new friends easily. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I had plenty of great local friends. The bigger challenge for me has been feeling over-socialized at times. There have been some weeks where I’d have preferred more alone time.

This social calibration has benefited me tremendously in business. I can go to a mixer or conference where I don’t know anyone, and I have an easy time making new friends and contacts. I remember when I first started attending the Game Developer’s Conference many years ago, most of the attendees seemed shy and socially awkward. They’d mostly keep to themselves or cling to their co-workers, especially at meal times. Meanwhile, I was going around making new friends, which just felt natural to me. Some of those chance encounters led to new opportunities and deals that helped grow my business. It was also nice to have more friends with similar interests.

One year at that conference, I hung out so late that the shuttles had stopped running. It was pouring rain outside, but a new friend offered me a ride back to my hotel. In fact, something similar happened at a different conference this year. It’s nice to know that my social calibration can keep me out of the rain when necessary.

To some people this may not sound like a big deal. Many people develop such skills in high school or younger. But for a shy kid like me who went to an all boys Catholic high school, it was indeed a big deal.

Although I use my social skills mainly to make friends and business contacts, you can use a similar process to develop dating and relationship skills. For example, if you want to go on more dates, you can calibrate your skills to get good at opening conversations with strangers, develop fun and interesting conversations, build attraction, and at least close with a phone number. There are lots of people teaching this stuff online now, with varying degrees of credibility (and sanity), but the most important thing is to just dive in and start experimenting. You’ll experience some rejection at first, but if you just keep learning and adapting, your skills will calibrate to the point where you’re able to get consistently good results.

If you happen to be suffering from loneliness, most likely it’s because you never took the time to adequately calibrate your social skills. Consequently, you may avoid making new friends because you don’t understand the social nuances of how to do it. You probably feel socially awkward and suffer from an amplified fear of rejection. The solution is to focus on a different goal first. You need to calibrate your social skills before you can apply them. Go out and socialize for the sake of learning how to socialize. Don’t worry about whether or not you make any new friends. Once your social skills are calibrated, which may take a few months, then you can focus on building the kinds of friendships you desire, and it will be much easier for you. Aim to get good first. Then aim to get results.

Martial Arts

If you study martial arts and begin learning to spar, you’re going to be pretty bad at it initially. You’ll have no sense of timing, and you won’t grasp the rhythm of a sparring match. You’ll probably bang knees with your opponent a lot. All the newbies do that.

For the most part, you can expect to look and feel like a total dork. The first time I sparred, which was more than 10 years ago, I was laughing during the match, mostly at how awkward I felt. I’m sure I looked like a total dork.

This is to be expected. You can try to play it cool, but the truth is that the first few times you attempt any new sport, you’re virtually guaranteed to look and feel like a dork. This is because your mind and body aren’t calibrated to that sport.

Within a few months of regular training, your sparring should be fairly well-calibrated for an intermediate level of skill. At the very least, you won’t embarrass yourself. You’ll have sparred many different opponents, and you’ll have a good sense of what to expect. You’ll be able to use different moves successfully, land punches and kicks, and pull off the occasional surprise. I remember how cool it was when I stripped an opponent’s helmet off with an axe kick during a sparring match.

While sparring at the beginner level feels awkward and intimidating, once you gain a little competence, it becomes a fun challenge. At this point the subtleties of the skill begin to reveal themselves. Once your basic sparring moves and tactics are calibrated, you can begin to calibrate your strategic decisions, and this is where the richness of sparring really opens up. The game becomes less physical and more mental. Some would even say it becomes spiritual at a certain point.

Calibrating to a particular sport is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. Even if you don’t train for a while, the mental calibration remains, and you can easily pick it up again later.

I trained for about three years in Tae Kwon Do in the late 90s with a mix of group classes and private lessons. Over time I got pretty good at sparring and really enjoyed it. I moved away from the studio and stopped training, but several years later, I started training in a different martial art, Kempo, starting as a white belt. Kempo is geared toward self-defense, while TKD is more sporty. Fortunately, all the moves that are legal in TKD are also legal in Kempo, and Kempo allows you to do some things that aren’t legal in TKD, such as punching to the face. (Protective gear is worn during sparring, but there’s still some risk. I suffered a bruised rib and a split lip on different occasions.)

Even though I’d lost most of my flexibility, the first time I sparred in Kempo, I did amazingly well, certainly far beyond the white belt level. From my first Kempo sparring class, I was able to hold my own against one of the black belts in the studio. I was sparring TKD-style, not Kempo-style, but that actually gave me an advantage because the other students weren’t calibrated to that style. TKD is mostly kicking, but Kempo uses more hand techniques. My preference for kicks surprised the other students because they would hover just outside of punching range, but they were still within my TKD-calibrated kicking range, so I hammered them with kicking combos until they figured out they needed to back up. This threw them off mentally, and it took months for many of them to adapt to my style. Of course, it also took me a while to get used to having punches thrown at my head.

After a year of training in Kempo, I was fairly well-calibrated to that style, but I had to unlearn some of my TKD habits that were ineffective in Kempo. I had to work on my speed, defensive maneuvers, and incorporating punches, strikes, and backfists into my sparring.

The point is that once you gain calibration at a particular skill set, you may very well lock in that skill for life. I feel as if basic competence in sparring is so ingrained in me that even if I didn’t spar again for 20 years, I’d be able to quickly pick it up again. I can actually feel that calibration in my body.

Blogging

Since blogging is still a fairly new medium, it usually takes new bloggers a while to properly calibrate. The failure rate is pretty high for newbies because most of them give up before they calibrate for success. I’d say you need to write at least 200-300 posts before you get a decent calibration going, and that assumes you’re making a solid commitment to getting better. For some people it will require more than 500 posts to achieve reasonable calibration, especially if they aren’t very good writers. There’s just a lot to learn.

In particular, there’s a huge gap between writing posts that people read and forget vs. writing posts that people will remember well enough that they’re still referring their friends, family members, and co-workers to read a year later. One of the key calibrations for long-term blogging success is to learn how to write the latter type of post; that’s how you get your archives working for you, and your traffic can still grow even when you aren’t posting anything.

For example, of the top 10 articles on my website that generate the most referrals, only one was written this year. Articles I wrote years ago continue to attract new readers today. However, it took me a long time to learn to write the kinds of articles that would produce such results. I’ve publicly shared how I do this, and that’s been helpful for some people, but it still takes time for new bloggers to “get it” to the point where they can apply it.

Not long ago I was at a party, chatting with a woman who got started blogging after attending a blogging workshop I did a couple years ago. She was telling me some of the mistakes she made with her blog during that time, all of which were mistakes I explicitly said to avoid during the workshop. For example, she wrote lots of timely content instead of timeless content, so she felt like she was on an endless treadmill, and her archives were largely worthless. She remembered that I said to avoid those mistakes too, but that wasn’t enough to stop her from making them. Despite having the opportunity to learn from my experience and avoid the pitfalls I described, she still had to go out and make those mistakes in order to refine her own calibration. I’ve seen countless bloggers make the same mistakes. They seek my advice, I tell them what to do and what not to do and why, and they do exactly what I tell them not to do and then wonder why it isn’t working. Oy vey! This is okay though, as long as they keep plugging ahead and learn from those mistakes. We human beings aren’t known to be the best listeners in the galaxy. We learn much better by doing something than by reading about it.

Different bloggers will naturally calibrate themselves toward different goals. For example, I wanted to calibrate my blogging skills to the goal of having a deep, long-term impact on my readers. I want to change people’s lives for the better. This is partly why I do things differently than most bloggers. I blow off many practices that other pro bloggers defend as sacred. My articles tend to be very long and detailed. I typically avoid posting shallow short info-crack pieces. I post less frequently, sometimes going a week or more with no fresh content. I largely ignore current events. I don’t often link to other blogs. This is all because I’m calibrating my skills toward a certain type of result. Those popular strategies just aren’t very helpful at achieving the results I desire, so I don’t use them. If you want this to become yet another info-crack blog, get used to disappointment. I want to change your life, not provide you with a five-minute distraction.

So be careful when taking advice from others. If you’re calibrating toward a different goal than they are, their advice may hurt you more than help you. It’s best to learn from people who’ve already achieved a similar calibration to what you want to achieve. For example, if you just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care how you get it, then you probably wouldn’t want to model my blogging methods because I’ve calibrated myself toward a different goal. But you might want to follow those bloggers who proudly proclaim they’re in it for the money — there are plenty to select from. On the other hand, if you believe you’re here for a reason and that blogging could potentially become a sustainable expression of your life purpose, then you’d probably benefit greatly by studying my style, since I’ve been getting positive results in this area for years. The point is that if you decide to model someone, be sure you’re modeling someone with compatible goals (and thus a compatible calibration).

One thing I’ve learned from 4+ years of blogging is that it really isn’t that hard in principle to become a successful blogger; however, it’s very hard in practice. Newbies’ minds are typically filled with many false notions. In some ways they need to unload more useless ideas than they need to absorb useful ideas. I’ve raped quite a few pro blogging sacred cows, yet my blog is still going strong.

There are a lot of blogging success factors that are somewhat counter-intuitive. You won’t realize this if you just read sites about blogging because they’ll rarely write about these factors. For the most part, it’s not that anyone is intentionally withholding information. The ideas are simply too subtle for most bloggers to be consciously aware of them. Many calibration issues are like this — they’re just too subtle to appear on any “top 10″ or “how to” lists. Sometimes people who succeed can’t document all the specific reasons they’ve succeeded. They can’t consciously unearth every detail of their unconscious calibration. There are some things I do as a successful blogger that I’ve never seen anyone write or speak about publicly, myself included. Some of the concepts are so subtle or intricate that even if I explained them in detail, nobody but other successful pro bloggers would even understand what I’m talking about, and some people would accuse me of lying.

Yesterday another blogger emailed me a link to a post he wrote, explaining why he personally dislikes my writing style. This is a blogger who says he gets significantly less traffic than I do. His main criticism is that I state my opinions too directly, as if they’re facts. This is a perfectly valid criticism of course; I confess to doing this liberally. The attitude of that blogger was that this is a personal defect I should correct. However, what he probably doesn’t realize is that this is a trait I developed over time as part of my calibration process for blogging success. I’m sure his advice is well-meaning, but I know that if I take his advice, my results will actually decline. I can say he’s wrong and that I’m right because I’ve learned which approach works best for me via trial and error. As a generalization, I know that making strong statements works better than making weak statements.

This is one of many subtle calibration refinements I learned from years of blogging. I discovered that prefacing every opinion with phrases like “I think…” or “I feel…” or “In my opinion…” leads to the creation of wimpy content. So this was actually a personal defect I learned to correct, and I intentionally make strong statements. My readers aren’t stupid. They know that since this is my website, such statements represent my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. When I offer up my thoughts directly, as opposed to watering them down with qualifiers, people are challenged to agree or disagree with me. This helps people question their beliefs, strengthening some while weakening others. This is what I like to see.

Another benefit to making strong statements is that other bloggers, including the one critical of my posting style, will take the time to write posts just to disagree with me, thereby sending traffic to my website and actively helping me achieve my goals. Yet because their content is usually wimpier, they don’t benefit equally from this same mechanism. There are a lot of subtle interactions going on here, and I’m only offering a cursory overview here, but the net effect is that by posting strong statements, I enjoy more blogging success, but I also attract more criticism. However, the criticism actually benefits me. This is pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

Part of the reason I’ve been so successful as a blogger is that people remember what I’ve written, especially if they disagree with it. If you look at the comments written about my work throughout the blogosphere, you’ll find that most people have very polarized opinions about my work. Some people love my work. Some absolutely despise it. Very few are neutral. However, love it or hate it, these same people keep discussing my work, constantly spreading the word to those who don’t know about me. Such controversy makes people curious and brings new readers to my website every day. Isn’t this just insidious? The more people dislike me, the more they actively go out and market my work to others, and the more they help me achieve my goal of helping people grow. This is so effective that I can even tell such people how they’re helping me, and they’ll keep right on doing it.

I could certainly write more agreeable posts that few people would find objectionable. I could apologize for every opinion of mine that isn’t mainstream. But that’s totally the wrong calibration for my goals, not to mention for my personality. It’s way too cowardly. I don’t want to calibrate as a wimpy blogger that nobody can find fault with. It’s more effective to calibrate as a blogger who challenges people and makes a difference, even if it sends some people running the other way (to go out and promote my work instead of reading it themselves).

Uncalibrated newbie bloggers often blog scared. They try to please everyone and avoid taking risks. Consequently, they write posts that are easily forgotten and which will generate few referrals. Then some new upstart blogger comes along with a better calibration, breaks all the newbie rules, and surges ahead in traffic. And the other newbies think it’s luck. It’s not luck though. A good example is the blog Stuff White People Like. I first happened upon it shortly after it launched, and I knew it would become successful. I could see it had a great calibration for building traffic quickly — it was only a matter of time before it took off. The posts were politically incorrect to the max, but they were witty and memorable. Sure enough, that blog became a hit and even led to a book deal. If this sort of success surprises you as a blogger, it means your calibration is off. If your calibration is solid, you should be able to browse through the early posts on that blog and NOT be surprised by its success. Overall, if you’re often surprised by the success of others in your field, it means your calibration isn’t very good yet. As your own calibration matures, you’ll get better at being able to predict successes.

One of the keys to success in any field, especially blogging, is to accept that there are good reasons the successful people are succeeding, and it has nothing to do with luck. If you see someone who’s getting better results than you, even if it’s someone with less experience who started after you, chances are they have a more accurate calibration than you. You can rail against that, feel jealous, and call them names, but it’s better to take a step back, eat your humble pie, and learn from such people if you can. I’ve learned some pretty cool things from bloggers who started long after I did. Although my current calibration is obviously working, I know I can always improve, and I never want to think of myself as such as expert that I can’t keep learning and growing.

One of the worst things you can do in blogging is to write in such a manner that will offend no one. If you don’t offend or challenge anyone, you’re probably writing content that isn’t very memorable or meaningful. If you write what people expect, their minds won’t store it. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any highly successful bloggers that don’t have multiple negative rants written about them somewhere. All of them piss people off. Most of them aren’t intentionally trying to upset people. It’s just that upsetting people seems to be a natural consequence of the calibration required for blogging success.

This isn’t unique to blogging either. Think of any successful media personality, and I’m sure you can find some rants about them with a quick online search. In fact, the biggest stars will have tons of rants. Consider Tom Cruise for instance.

Some people might assume this sort of controversy is a side-effect of success, like perhaps that celebrity got a big head after enjoying some success (causing people to turn against him/her), or maybe the rants appeared as a side effect of the celebrity’s popularity (like it’s just a numbers game). I’d say that’s the wrong way to look at this. It’s more likely that generating controversy was part of the celebrity’s early calibration process. If anything, the ability to handle controversy probably helped them become a celebrity in the first place.

Some of the first articles I ever wrote, even before I launched StevePavlina.com, generated controversy that helped turn them into fast hits. An example was the article Do It Now, which I wrote in 2000. Lots of people love that article, but some people find it disturbing and feel compelled to rant about it (even eight years after it was first posted online), perhaps because it makes them realize just how unproductive they are compared to what they could be achieving if they really made an all-out effort. Unfortunately, it took me years to figure out why that article became a hit and to learn how to reproduce the kind of impact it had. It also took me a long time to realize that the negative backlash generated by that article was actually helping me grow my readership… and that I should accept and embrace such critical feedback rather than worry about it. What I initially interpreted as negative feedback (i.e. I did something wrong) was actually positive feedback (I did something right). Interpreting emails from people saying “you are wrong” as evidence that you did something right is again pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

This is a key point of calibration. When you’re building a new skill, you have to look at the big picture in terms of the results you’re getting. You might do something that seems to generate immediate negative feedback from people, but when you step back and look at the big picture, you may see that the overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive. This happens a lot in blogging, where a reader may chew you out for something you wrote, and then six months later, they’re singing your praises for helping them achieve a breakthrough they never thought possible. And even if they aren’t singing your praises, they’re out there telling people why they hate you, thereby making people curious and sending you more traffic.

A similar effect also happens in social dynamics, where the “bad guys” can actually attract more success because they have so many detractors unwittingly doing their marketing for them.

Newbie Fear

Perhaps the toughest part of calibration is dealing with newbie fear. This is the fear of failure or rejection we experience when learning a new skill. Initially we suck, we know full well that we suck, and we really don’t want to deal with the embarrassment and humiliation of other people witnessing just how badly we suck. This is most distressing with skills that must be calibrated in public, such as dating skills and public speaking.

There are some ways to mitigate newbie fear. One of the best ways is to connect with other newbies and go through the initial training together. When you look up to experts who are already well-calibrated, it’s easy to become intimidated and psyche yourself out. You’ll tend to hold yourself to an unreasonable standard of performance. But if you befriend and hang out with other newbies, the learning process can be a lot more fun. It’s comforting to have buddies that suck just as badly as you do. You can blow off steam together, share your latest insights, and poke fun at each other as you learn. “Misery loves company” isn’t such a bad idea in this case.

The key is to associate with newbies who are committed to learning and growing. If you hang out with flakes, it probably won’t help you much. Try to identify other newbies that you predict are likely to stick with it and succeed, and hang out with them if you can. This will help increase your commitment without making you feel too intimidated.

When I first started learning about blogging, I enjoyed connecting with other newbie bloggers. In the old days (old as in four years ago), we swapped links with each other, shared advice, and found ways to help each other gain traffic. Many of those people gave up and quit of course, but a few are doing very well today. It’s cool to watch your newbie friends improve their calibration right along with you, even though everyone improves at different rates.

Ultimately, you’ll only get so much mileage out of trying to reduce newbie fear. The fastest way to overcome it is to simply charge straight at it. Just accept that you’ll suck, that some embarrassment will happen, and that the only way out is through. This is especially important for building good social skills.

You’ll only get so far by sitting at home reading, listening to audio programs, and watching videos. Such educational aids can help, but they can never substitute for real-world experience. Use them as supplemental materials to refine your in-field experimentation. If you want to become a successful blogger, start blogging immediately. If you want to build an online business, get some kind of website online right away. If you want to improve your social skills, go outside and meet people tonight. Yes, you’re going to suck at first. But if you push through the newbie fear and do it anyway, the fear will subside, and you’ll begin to calibrate your skills very quickly.

Even if you read all the books in your field, you will still suck on your first in-field experience. You won’t even be able to apply what’s in those books. So get out in the field and start calibrating.

Get that first crappy “Hello, World” blog post under your belt. Let out that inane “Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” pick-up line. Bang shins with your sparring partner as you scream, “Ouch!”

Newbie Pride

If you’re a newbie at something, and you’re feeling hesitant to go after some live in-field experience, realize that this is very normal. Many newbies resist being newbies, but this resistance only makes them more nervous. So realize that a big part of the problem is your own resistance to being a newbie. You’ll get into the field sooner if you can accept this phase of your learning curve.

My advice for turning this around is to fully embrace your newbieness. Don the badge of Newbie Pride. Instead of fearing that you’ll look like a total dork, take this the other way. Embrace and even exaggerate your dorkiness. Don’t try to resist it. Blow it up even larger.

In martial arts classes, there’s no hiding your newbie status. You wear a white belt, so everyone knows you’re a beginner. This actually makes it easier because you know people don’t expect much of you. The lower belts may be nervous about sparring, but since they know that nobody expects much of them, most are able to get out on the mat and spar without undue hesitation.

However, in other fields, people don’t wear white belts. This has positive and negative side-effects.

In online business, for example, many newbies try to hide their newbieness. I made this mistake when I started my first business. I pretended to be an experienced business person when I just started. I talked about my staff even when I was the only person in the business. That was totally unnecessary, not to mention really dumb. When I started blogging, however, I didn’t try to hide my newbieness. I embraced that dorky beginner phase and had fun with it. And because of that, more experienced bloggers reached out to help me. Back then, “more experienced” meant they started blogging a month before I did.

I still maintain this attitude today. If I’m new at something, I’ll openly share my newbie dorkiness and hesitation. It doesn’t embarrass me to share my weaknesses. On the contrary, it actually invites a lot of help and advice from non-newbies who want to help me calibrate.

The Master Newbie Pick-up Artist

Suppose you’re a guy who wants to learn how to pick up women at night clubs, but you’re terrified of going out, and you can’t imagine walking up to a woman and delivering an opener. Realize that so much of your resistance is because you’re trying to appear cooler and more experienced than you really are. Do you realize this is totally unnecessary? It’s better to embrace your newbieness and use it to your advantage.

If I were trying to develop this particular skill, here’s what I’d do. I’d go up to women and tell them the plain and simple truth. I’ve never actually done this, so take my advice with a grain of salt because this isn’t a calibration I’ve bothered to develop, but I’ll bet you it would work well at initiating fun conversations.

I’d walk up to a group of women with a big smile on my face. I’d get their attention and say to them, “Hey guys, I’m currently learning how to meet women at night clubs, but I’m a total newbie at this. Would you mind if I practice on you just for fun for a couple minutes? And would you give me some honest feedback afterwards?”

I suspect you’ll probably get a laugh if you do this, and if you don’t, then the women aren’t likely worth talking to anyway, so you can quickly disqualify them as boring or humorless. You’ve taken the pressure off by initiating a “practice session,” so it doesn’t even matter what you say next. Your next line could even be, “Okay what do you think of this? [Switch to deep voice] Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” That would probably get another laugh, but even a groan isn’t bad. You can keep saying other funny lines. You could also kick off a meta conversation about meeting women at night clubs, such as by asking a question like, “Okay, after I do the opener, what should I talk about next? Would this be a good time to tell you a quick story to demonstrate that I’m a cool guy? Should I tell you about the time I …?” The context is that you’re just practicing, but in truth you’ve already opened the group.

This is an untested suggestion of course, so you’ll have to try it yourself to see if it works for you. The general idea is not to hide your newbieness. It’s perfectly okay to be a newbie and even to admit it to people. When you’re a newbie, your initial goal is to calibrate your skills, not to achieve a particular result. So take the pressure off as to whether or not you succeed or fail. You can go for results after you’ve calibrated your skills.

If you pretend to be an expert when you’re not, you’ll just stress yourself out. Wear the badge of Newbie Pride.

Incidentally, if you actually try this, please let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear how people react to it. I think this could work for men and women alike.

In fact, if a woman came up and used this opener on me, I’d probably laugh and say, “Sure, let’s practice.” I’d be pretty impressed by a woman who used such a line because it demonstrates a high level of awareness with a certain playfulness. I’d probably fall in love on the spot.

Great… now I’ve gotten myself all riled up to the point where I totally want to go to a night club and try this for real just to see what happens.

The Skill of Calibration

Being able to calibrate yourself to a new skill set is a skill in itself. The more skills you learn, the faster you’ll be able to achieve competence in each new skill you attempt.

One thing that happens as you calibrate to many different skills is that you become more comfortable being a newbie in general. Once you’ve gone through the newbie phase enough times, it ceases to bother you so much. You can start from rock bottom in a new field and be mostly okay with how badly you suck. You get used to it, and you know you’ll eventually get better. This makes it easier to put in the time as a newbie, so you can quickly progress to intermediate. For me the newbie phase is often the most fun and exciting because I learn the fastest during this time.

Another benefit of having lots of calibration experience is that you’ll be less intimidated by the experts. You’ll accept that they fine-tuned their calibration over many years. This will help you develop the patience necessary to keep hacking away in order to build long-term competence.

When I became a raw foodist earlier this year, I spent a lot of time communicating with successful long-term raw foodists. Initially, the information I gained was just overwhelming. I was offered thousands of pages of text to read (books, e-books, articles), plus audio, video, and live lectures to attend. There were some weeks where learning this skill practically became my full-time job. I had to unlearn many bad habits that were holding me back, not to mention breaking a lifelong addiction to cooked food. This was a total lifestyle overhaul, not just a minor diet change.

After months of study and practice, I eventually calibrated myself to being a successful raw foodist, well enough that I felt I could maintain it on autopilot. I’d probably label myself an advanced intermediate at this point. I have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, cooked foods are no longer appealing to me, I feel fantastic, and I love the foods I eat. As part of this re-calibration to raw foods, my taste buds have shifted a lot. I actually crave fresh greens now. I feel mildly deprived if I don’t eat at least a pound of greens each day. Now that I’ve achieved a decent calibration, maintaining this lifestyle is pretty much a no-brainer for me. But during the first few months, I had to invest a lot of thought and effort into it.

Immersion and Experimentation

When learning new skills, my preference is to get through the newbie phase as quickly as possible, so I can start enjoying some good results. In order to accomplish this, I’ll often put other areas of my life on hold, so I can devote the bulk of my time to building competence in the new skill. I don’t always do this, but if the skill is important to me, I prefer the strategy of total immersion instead of working on it a little bit each week.

The danger of being stuck in beginner mode for too long is that your early motivation may fade, and more self-discipline will be required to keep going. Many new bloggers give up within the first few months, well before they’re getting any results. It takes them too long to calibrate their skills to what is required for success in blogging, so they never make it past the beginner phase. After a few months, they still haven’t calibrated, so they continue to make the sorts of mistakes that a well-calibrated blogger could spot within seconds. For example, they write boring posts that nobody cares to read, or they write time-bound posts that will be worthless a year later. It takes too much discipline for them to keep going with no results to show for it, so they give up. Then they repeat the same process again in a different field. Hopefully by now you can clearly see that this is a loser strategy.

On the other hand, I’ve seen bloggers who’ve built a lot of traffic very quickly, earning $1000+ per month within a few months after they started. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into learning everything they could about blogging, and they were willing to be open-minded and flexible. They learned what worked for them and did more of it. They learned what didn’t work and stopped doing it. They understood that if they wrote a blog post, and it generated no increase in traffic whatsoever, then perhaps they should write something totally different instead of sticking with more of the same.

Proper calibration requires a lot of experimentation. If you don’t get a good result, you can interpret that as a negative result, and change something — change anything. But don’t keep doing what didn’t work, expecting that it’s just a matter of time before things pick up. It’s not really a matter of time. It’s a matter of skill.

When you immerse yourself in learning a new skill, don’t focus on trying to get results with the skill — at least not right away. Instead, focus on getting good at the skill.

For example, if you’re learning to blog, focus on writing posts in a variety of styles. You want to calibrate yourself to get good at writing blog posts that generate referrals. Don’t worry about trying to make money with your blog. Don’t even worry about trying to build a certain level of traffic. You can focus on those goals later. But initially, aim to figure out how to semi-consistently write awesome posts that generate referrals. If you can’t figure out how to do that, your blog will surely fail. But if you can calibrate yourself to this skill, then you can shift from building your skill to applying your skill. That’s where you can start really building your traffic and generating income from your work.

A New Equilibrium – Post-Calibration

The funny thing about calibration is that once you reach a certain point, you’ll tend to let go of all the tricks, tactics, and techniques you learned along the way. Now you’re able to maintain a certain level of success just by being yourself.

This happens because the skills you learned have been internalized. You no longer have to think about the details because your subconscious mind takes care of them for you. Applying your skill becomes much easier when you reach this point.

Blogging is largely effortless for me these days. I can crank out a detailed new article with fairly little effort. I got the idea for this particular article while I was at the gym this morning. I outlined it in my head while I took a shower. Later I sat down to write, and the words just flowed. It took me a while to write an article of this length of course, but the process was easy and effortless. The reason it was easy is that I’ve already calibrated myself to the skill of writing articles. There are lots of details that go into writing an article of this length, but I don’t have to consciously think about the process of how to write. It’s all internalized. I can just sit down at my desk, the ideas start flowing, and my fingers automatically start typing. I can chunk the task of writing an article as a single to-do item, even an article of this length, and it isn’t a big deal to me.

When I write a new blog post, I don’t consciously think about all the details that other pro bloggers would tell you are important. I just blog. It feels like a very simple thing to do, not nearly as complicated as it might seem. However, the reason I can keep it simple and still do well in this field is because I went through that complicated newbie phase years ago. I internalized the techniques that proved effective for me, so today I don’t even think about them anymore.

Putting a skill on automatic pilot is the long-term benefit of good calibration. Once you gain this calibration, you can’t really lose it. You may need to re-calibrate your skills from time to time to adapt to changing conditions, but that usually isn’t as hard as acquiring the initial calibration.

If you took away my blog and all my articles, and I had to start over from scratch as an anonymous blogger today, do you think I could repeat my success? I’m sure I could do so very quickly because I’ve already calibrated my blogging skills. I typically experience quick success when I can rely on a previous calibration, such as learning to spar in a new martial art or building a social network of friends in a new city. One of the reasons I achieved quick success as a blogger was that I benefited from my previous calibration of running a profitable online business for years, so I was able to adapt much of that skill to the medium of blogging. I was also able to adapt my blogging calibration to writing a book.

When you calibrate, you lock in a new skill. Then you can use that skill to generate consistently good results. This is a wonderful place to be. Post-calibration, you’ll typically feel very confident within the realm of that skill. You have every reason to feel confident because you’re genuinely competent. I’d feel comfortable starting a new online business. I’d feel comfortable moving to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. I’d feel confident studying a new style of martial arts. I’d feel confident giving a new speech. However, the first time I did these things, I hadn’t yet calibrated myself for success. The only kind of confidence I was able to muster back then was the “fake it till you make it kind,” which is more false bravado than genuine confidence.

Calibrate Is a Verb

Don’t let the newbie phase get you down. Everyone has to go through it. Get a newbie training partner if you must, but turn toward that newbie fear, and run straight at it. The fear will soon go away. It’s not a big deal to fail or to get rejected. That’s part of being a newbie. Accept it. You will get better.

In order to calibrate your skills, you have to take action. You can’t just sit at home reading or studying training materials. You must go into the field and do field work under real-world conditions.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

I know so many people who’ve spent months reading about and talking about starting an online business. They still don’t have an online business. But they just keep talking about it and planning it, as if that’s some form of phantom progress. Their calibration is still at zero. They think they’re getting closer to their goal. From my perspective, they haven’t even started yet. They’re just procrastinating.

Such people would do much better if they stopped reading and planning and started doing. Nobody earned a black belt from reading about martial arts.

Which approach do you think will generate the best results? Reading about a diet for 30 days? Or doing a 30-day trial of that diet?

Which will improve your social skills the most? Watching social skills videos for 30 days? Or going out every night for 30 days and starting up conversations with strangers?

Which will generate the best blogging results? Reading blogs on blogging for 30 days? Or starting your own blog and posting your own blog entries for 30 days?

Which will generate the best physical results? Read about weight training for 30 days? Or hit the gym and do 30 days of weight training?

Reading and studying will give you knowledge and information that sits in your mind. That seems like a good thing, but you’ll still have zero results to show for your efforts. You’re actually no closer to your goals. You’re still at the starting line. But if you go out and do the best you can to apply what you know right now, even if your understanding is full of holes, you’ll quickly learn what works under real-world conditions, and you’ll adapt. You’ll make a huge leap forward in your calibration. You’ll also generate some real-world results that may benefit you.

Get your nose out of the books and onto the field. Take your licks as they come, and learn from them. Build your skills under real-world conditions, so you can actually apply them to get results. Don’t just read about life. Live it.

Reading and learning are awesome, but make sure you’re using these as supplements for in-field experience, not substitutes. If you’re reading about any skill you want to develop, but you aren’t regularly performing in the field yet, you’re just procrastinating. Deep down you already knew that, didn’t you? I’m here to remind you of this, so you can hate me for it and help spread the word about how awful I am.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.