Ever since I started really absorbing and pondering the principals that Dr. Beck shares in her book The Beck Diet Solution of how all weight loss sucess is truly all in our heads first, I've been thinking about totally re-inventing the thinking behind what mypetfat represents going forward.
And with this posting that's exactly what I've decided to do.
For some reason mypetfat v1.0 came into existence, and I believe that reason is continuing to be revealed to me. So with this posting I'm surrendering to continued guidance of how I am supposed to be a postive channel for personal transformation and weight loss.
And for all of you who've never really known how the seed of an idea for mypetfat came into being, the following is a copy of a letter I sent to Steve Greenberg, a.k.a The Innovation Insider a little over a year ago so that Steve could include the story of mypetfat in his soon to be released book Gadget Nation [working title].
mypetfat v1.0 IT ALL BEGAN AS A SEED OF AN IDEA
Dear Steve,
I first discovered the shock and awe power of my first piece of mypetfat over ten years ago, but at that time it had no name. It was then, as it is today, a medical model of anatomically correct body fat.
A nameless, visceral, chunk of yellow latex plastic.
It may have been nameless, but it certainly wasn’t forgettable.
By using, naming and then sharing mypetfat with the world, I’ve seen first hand the amazing power of re-inventing a product or a service by breathing new life into it.
Like Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks [my favorite coffee], who took what some may have considered a commodity, he re-invented a 2,000-year drink by sharing a whole new way of enjoying and thinking about all things coffee.
Now I’m not comparing fat to coffee, but being that they’ve both been around forever, that’s what’s fun to me about re-invention. It’s great if you can invent something that’s truly unique and new, but many successful ideas, products, services and businesses are just simply re-invented.
So, here’s the skinny behind the re-invention of mypetfat.
For about 30 years a yellow plastic lump of human body fat sat on many shelves of doctors and nutritionists, along with models of the inside of your ear, and all of the other stuff they use to scare you into doing something other than what you’re probably doing now.
There it was, a medical model of anatomically correct body fat. A nameless, visceral, chunk of yellow latex plastic intended to help you visualize what was hanging out through your veins and yes, right there under your skin.
Doctors would pull it off the shelf, they put it in your hands and then they told you that this stuff was lurking throughout your body, just waiting to strike you down.
This little piece of yellow plastic was meant to mentally motivate you start
thinking and doing what they’ve been telling you to do every time you visited their office
My very first encounter with the little piece of yellow plastic wasn’t actually in a doctors office but in Washington D.C. at fun little novelty store called BrainStorm in the Georgetown Mall, which no longer exists.
There tucked away in a far corner of the store was a pile of it. Now out of all of the other stuff that I could have bought that day, the only thing I left with was a 1LB piece of what was to me at that time, a piece of FAKE FAT, that was it, a novelty, nothing more.
And like many things that you buy on a whim it traveled throughout the house resting at various places, and eventually landed on my desk.
For 5+ years that chunk of fat sat on my desk and I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime during that time a seed of an idea came to me. Maybe, just maybe people would buy this as a novelty, something fun to keep on their desk. But as it happens for lots of us, it was an idea, a thought, and there it sat, and sat and sat…
While it sat there, I was doing a lot of sitting as well. And all during this time my weight continued it’s merry roller coaster ride 350LBS, 325LBS, 300LBS, 325LBS, 350LBS, 325LBS, 350LBS, 375LBS, 350LBS, 375LBS, 400LBS+. Back and forth dropping below 400LBS and then tipping over the edge of 400LBS again and again. I guess what scared me the most after years of watching my weight rise and fall was that if I could hit 300LBS, then 400LBS, it really wasn’t a stretch to get to 500LBS and beyond.
That was my reality up to that point but as Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story.
I don’t remember the day it clicked, but one day, that seed of an idea took root, but not as a novelty, but more as it was intended to be, a mental motivator.
For anyone who has been challenged all of their life with losing weight, sooner or later you’ll try anything. And since I had never been to a nutritionist before I thought I might as well check that off my list, so off I went.
I was hoping to get some new insights, some motivation or even maybe learn about the latest supposed cure. Well, none of that came to pass, but something did “click” in my head during that visit.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation I blurted out I have one of those and she turned back to where I was pointing, she pulled off her shelf a yellow piece of plastic. Holding it in my hand I rambled on about how I came upon one and how much of a conversation started it was whenever people happened upon it on my desk.
Then she asked a simple question, one that I had never thought of all the time it was right there in plain view so, "why don’t you use it?"
She said, "I’m sorry to say there’s nothing really new about weight loss, it's still pretty much the tried and true old formula of calories in, calories out", and people that lose weight and keep it off pretty much have to get and keep their heads in that mindset.
Less calories eaten, more calories burned.
Now I can’t say that it was the very next day that I started to think differently about that piece of yellow plastic on my desk, but after what she said "so, why don’t you use it?", that little piece of yellow plastic started to take on a whole new meaning.
Little by little I started getting my head more and more into what she said, it’s all about calories in, calories out.
I became more conscious of what I was eating, I started making better choices and with some physical conditioning the scale started moving not only in the right direction, most importantly, when I’d go off, it wasn’t a nightmare.
Over time I started noticing that little yellow piece of plastic more often. If I ate lunch at my desk I couldn’t help to be more conscious of what I had chosen to eat. And then one day I thought it would be fun to play a joke on my family and stick it in the fridge. As each of us forgot it was there and then we found it sitting right there at eye level, you might imagine it caused a pause in our late night snacking.
From the fridge it would show up in the cupboards and my kids returned my antics by bringing it for a long ride in the car.
What had been literally right under my nose started to take on a whole new meaning. And when people would continue to ask me what it was, the more I explained “yes, that really is a pound of fat” something in my head finally clicked and I realized how strange must it be for a “fat guy” to keep a piece of fat on his desk right there in plain view for all the world to see, and then it hit me. If it was helping to remind and motivate me to make better choices, maybe it would do the same for others as well.
So it was off my desk at home and off to the office it went. Now it’s not so new, but you can imagine back then when it still had no name, it didn’t take long for streams of people to come past my desk wanting to know is that really…
The 1LB piece of fat caused quite a buzz, but I really knew it could touch a raw nerve in people when I brought in my first 5LB piece of fat to the office. Time and time again as people picked up a 5LB piece of fat they almost always said is that really what 5LBS of fat looks like, is it really that heavy, are you sure it’s not 10LBS?
Not only where they shocked by seeing and picking it up, I learned how personal and individual each of our own struggles with weight loss and exercise really is. And how even though we are inundated daily with tons and tons of information about all types of weight loss recommendations and solutions, most people really know very little about the basic rules of weight loss.
Seeing first hand how much of a reaction a medical model of anatomically correct body fat could stir up, being a marketing guy, yes a marketing guy, I was starting to see how a seed of an idea could have the potential to blossom into something big, and little did I know at that time how far reaching that seed would travel.
So… if this yellow mental reminder is helping me keep conscious of making better choices, and I’ve seen first hand that it’s also getting others thinking as well. Maybe, just maybe I can package this idea and then share it and sell it.
Years earlier I thought of it as a novelty, but now I saw it as a potential entrepreneurial reality.
The reality was that with a little packaging, some thoughts on how to use it to lose it and a channel to sell it through, I might be on to something.
Now I’m not a weight loss expert, but if doctors and nutritionists can assign meaning to a piece of yellow plastic, I thought there must be some room out there for me to take a crack at sharing some of my own thoughts and experiences with it as well. Some people listen to doctors, but I also know that we all can be motivated by non-experts as well, especially if it’s some one we can relate to.
But what do I call it?
Nowadays you see all kinds of Internet sites using my somewhere in their name, myspace, myamericanexpress and so on. But believe or not a few years ago using my as part of a product name or part of a website was pretty rare. I'm proud to say I was one of the early adopters of the my marketing wave.
In so many conversations when talking about weight loss or exercise challenges with people I’d here them say my, this, my that… time and time again.
You know when you see a car you want to buy and then that’s all you see. Well that’s what happened when I got tuned into my, it was coming at me from everywhere.
Being a marketing guy I’ve had the opportunity to have participated in lots of naming brainstorming sessions so I did what any one can do when you need to come up with a name.
Use the three P’s, paper pencil and ponder. And most important in any naming exercise, as I share in my e-book JUST BEGIN IT, most important, JUST BEGIN IT!
Now it’s been so long since I did it, that this is the best I can recall of how the name came to be. Lots of people believe I was inspired by the pet rock and you’ll see it told that way and that’s fine, but this is the real story of how it came to be known as mypetfat.
With lots of paper, pencil and pondering in progress, and after pages of words on paper, as best as I can recall the first word that stuck was my. Nothing exciting about my but it kept coming back in my head [see the power of my] time and time again.
my, ok, I don’t know where I’m going with it but it feels like it needs to be part of the name.
More paper, pencil and pondering [condensing what happened over about a week] and after all kinds of tricky marketing words, I resorted to marketing 101 when you’re stuck.
simplify, simplify, simplify… what are you selling…
ah, weight loss, better health, lose inches, hope, no, what are you selling!
fat
You know when you really start doubting yourself, well sometime during this exercise, now when I think back on it, I was probably seconds from putting this little yellow piece of plastic back on the shelf.
I did it when I first thought of it as a novelty, and I was close to doing it again.
Ok, I’m clueless at the exact sequencing of how all of this happened but after a few days I had two words I was still playing with
my
fat
and not much else. myfat, yeah it was simple, but it felt very flat and way too personal. If I was going to really make it personal I might as well call it I’m FAT! Ok I was having a bad day.
At some point during this free association I started thinking of words that described how I was using it, what it was like having it around, hmmm, by my side… Ok, after that little clue it’s no surprise that pet made it onto paper.
my fat pet, pet my fat… my pet fat
Now if you’ve ever had the challenge to stick your neck out there and name something, the only thing I can tell you that everyone universally feels is DOUBT.
Why, well just because.
And the longer you stare at whatever you’ve come up with the more you feel waves of some times brilliance, but mostly dis-ease and that’s certainly how I felt when this name unfolded.
And even though you might not believe it, the whole pet rock connection hadn’t even occurred to me until about a week later when like one of those puzzles that has the face in it, and you look and look, all of the sudden you see it.
There it was… after staring at my pet fat endlessly all of the sudden I saw my pet fat, hey, that reminds me of “pet rock” and with that aha of similarity the name was born. I figured I came by it honestly and when it comes to naming anything, if you can find a clever way to connect to something that’s already in people’s minds when you’re launching something new, you need all the help you can get.
Truth be told I did struggle in the back of my mind with DOUBT about the name for about a year weaving in and out of reasoning and justification, especially with my as I wasn’t sure that people clearly understood that the piece of pet fat they were buying was their fat not my fat. You see how easy it is to DOUBT yourself. And I didn’t want to drop the my as I felt just being pet fat would feel way too much like a knock off, a novelty, and I consciously left the novelty idea on the shelf years ago..
And still to this day which is understandable some people think this is a weight loss solution for fat pets. Yeah that’s a seed I have waiting in the wings, but not now.
mypetfat goes to market
Officially launched on the web @ www.mypetfat.com in the early summer of 2003, mypetfat has been recognized as being one of the best visually + mentally motivating weight tools to spread and sell around the world to date.
In January 04 after a posting in Daily Candy, ia tidal wave of publicity all over the world garnered enough interest in the idea that the mypetfat web site experienced over 1,000,000 unique page views. To date over 3 TONS of mypetfat has been shipped to over 15 countries to help win the global battle of the bulge.
In addition to global acceptance and sales success, mypetfat has garnered unbelievable press and publicity in all mediums, TV, Radio, Print and online as well.
To date, stories about mypetfat have appeared in Time Magazine, Reader’s Digest, FHM and Men’s Health. mypetfat has been highlighted in papers all over North America and Europe such as The Washington Times, The Toronto Star and too many numerous other papers to mention. mypetfat has been featured on NBC, ABC, CBS, Good Morning America, FOX + Friends, FOX NEWS to name a few.
mypetfat the re-invention…
The story of how mypetfat came into existence is similar to how many ideas, products, services and businesses come to market.
See a need, and fill it, and if you look close enough, an opportunity very well may be right there under your nose
Invent it, re-invent, but no matter what it is… JUST BEGIN IT!
