today we are joined by entrepreneur slash
renaissance man best-selling author top 10 app developer 50 million downloads on his podcast
the fat burning man show abel james welcome to the show mark thank you so much for having me abel
it is my pleasure as i was preparing for our interview i wasn't exactly sure where to start
because you've done a million different things all right um but i figured let's start here let's
start at the very beginning of how the fat burning man show got started and let me ask you this when
was that aha moment why did you decide to go into health and fitness yeah because i hit rock bottom
in my early 20s like before a lot of my friends did from a health perspective long story short
i uh was paying off my loans in washington dc working really hard in consulting for my day job
doing moonlighting computer programming on the side and playing gigs on the nights and weekends
so that part was a little insane but even worse i had great health insurance that came with that job
and so i really wanted to use it and so i followed that doctor's advice to go really low fat almost
zero cholesterol and follow a lot of the typical you know stuff that was coming out
of doctors especially in those years and i got fat and sick within about 18 months he
put me on a half dozen different prescription meds and i was i was kind of falling apart with several
different conditions and then i lost everything in an apartment fire and was pretty much broke
with none of my own clothes literally and i looked at myself in the mirror and i'm just like
man you got to do some work on yourself if the rest of your life is completely in shambles
and out of your control at least you can say whatever you're doing is not working let's
let's dial this in a little bit and for me you know being a huge nerd i like to go down the
rabbit holes you know and just kind of obsess about things for better or worse for a while and
i when i did that i was shocked by how much of what i can't came to believe was true about health
from the doctors i've been a lifelong runner and athlete and from the running magazines from
some of those coaches the rest of it is just complete hogwash nonsense and so i did some of the
opposite of that got insanely good results and i got mad enough to want to start my own thing uh to
help other people realize that if you're willing to do certain things some of the fundamentals of
of health and movement and nutrition and all that then getting the results you want and the body
composition you want and also improving your athleticism isn't so very far off and it's not
that hard to do it's just a matter of putting it into action and i never felt that way in my life
because i was trying to do the wrong thing so hard that it made me fatter and sicker than people
around me and uh that made me mad enough to really they put a fire under my my butt to see that at
the time i was working with in consulting fortune 500s and the federal government state government
stuff like that seeing that change was not coming from the top down yeah and you know well i
love i got to say a lot of people kind of go go ahead well i just i love the idea of taking
control of what you can right where everything else feels like it's out of control start with the
simple things like making your bed or going for a jog or maybe eating even a little bit more healthy
i i absolutely love that and i think especially for all the after-hours entrepreneurs out there
we can definitely empathize with that problem of feeling like things are out of your
control and okay we're gonna take control so i again i love that you started getting to
this health and fitness i'm gonna take care of you know one of my greatest assets my actual body
but how did you turn it from a personal passion into something that you could actually turn into
a business how did you make that jump a little bit at a time and also the landscape was completely
different in the like late 2008 2009 early 2010s when i was i was going hard into blogging um
rss was really big back then it was kind of a mature or low-tech version of social media where
you could subscribe and your feed was actually what you wanted though and it didn't have ads
in between it whatever so we had a lot of people reading that way but when that started to shift
and when i saw podcasting was was something that was coming on uh i really wanted to go into it
and i was really burnt out as a live musician which i'd been playing over 300 shows a year for
a while and i burnt myself out on that and also felt like i wasn't getting results anymore live
music was really starting to tank around then relatively speaking compared to where it was at
before and so uh i figured might as well start a podcast and and just start interviewing people who
uh i was personally very interested in and were my heroes you know nutrition authors or people
who had lost over 100 pounds or accomplished these insane athletic feats and it's just like
this is this could be a dream job type thing i could be serving other people and helping to
educate other people wow just being insanely interested in what we were talking about so even
back in 2011 you saw the financial promise there i saw that there was well relative to music
you know sure it's interesting because i see my business almost like and my team running a band
it's a small team everyone has a role but they can take on the roles of other people if they
need to you know but for the most part you're i would so much rather work with a small team
that's all on board and when you run it more like a artistic or passion endeavor as opposed
to just like a strict serious business thing you can have a lot more fun with
it i learned a lot from my wife who was a career one of the first
professional video game players she was on a all female video pro video gaming team that toured
the world making boys cry mostly halo for her she did first person shooters um she's insanely
good but anyway then she worked with video game companies so when i met her i was doing consulting
just like crusty wearing a suit shaking hands and you know like really biting your tongue and
not not really expressing yourself and then the first like video game party that i went to was
just mind-blowing for me because i'm just like these people are in the right business they get
to goof off and have fun all the time and so i think that more people would would be served
especially in in today's saturated and social media environment where it's a lot easier to
share multimedia um by just expressing yourself a bit more and having more fun with it being more
playful so you've got a couple really good pieces of advice here hey be true to yourself because
when you're waking up a lot of us can empathize with waking up going to a job that we don't love
we're not passionate about where our creativity is stifled so you can follow that passion all the
after-hours entrepreneurs understand that and the second great piece of advice listen to your wife
you can't go wrong ladies and gentlemen listen to listen to your spouse pro advice i've
been married a little over five years uh together with my wife over over a dozen so
that's the key advice here from abel thank you so much for watching i'm glad you enjoyed this
episode i've got several other episodes right here for you smash one of these videos to make
sure that you don't miss out on the tips tools and tactics of industry experts let's take that
side hustle full time smash one of these links
Turn you Hobby into Business! I Abel James
