I had briefly mentioned it in the past, but I haven’t really talked publicly about my struggles with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS or Spastic Colon). It’s a weird condition that no one is really sure what causes it but for those who suffer from it, they know it’s anything but pleasant.

Symptoms of IBS include

• Abdominal pain or cramping
• A bloated feeling
• Gas (flatulence)
• Diarrhea or constipation — sometimes alternating bouts of constipation and diarrhea
• Mucus in the stool

Typically you either fall into IBS-C (constipation) or IBS-D (diarrhea).

Over the past 4 years, I’ve been battling a pretty bad case of IBS-C. Anytime I would eat anything, I would get severe stabbing pain and cramping in my upper left abdominal quadrant (right under the bottom rib)  so much so that I often gave up eating halfway through a meal. The only thing that would relieve the pain was using the bathroom (taking a dump) but it was pretty common that I would not be able to use the bathroom for 2-3 days in a row. Because of the pain, and eating less, I lost a ton of weight (around 30lbs) since college. I visited numerous doctors to try to figure out what was wrong. “There’s not really any organs there…” was the typical response. I had extensive blood work done, ultra-sound scans of all the vital organs in the affected area. I thought the worst, maybe significant problems with my colon or pancreas.  All tests came back negative for anything. In fact, all the tests showed wass that I was supposedly “healthy”.

I scoured the internet for solutions and tried nearly everything suggested and continued to suffer silently. I learned that IBS is sometimes caused by a treatment of antibiotics wiping out your intestinal flora. I had serious case of strep throat a few months before my symptoms started which was treated with very powerful antibiotics. I deduced that this may have been the culprit. I tried probiotics to try to replenish the good intestinal flora but it didn’t really help and instead gave me bouts of heartburn. The pain continued. In fact no-one except my girlfriend knew just how miserable I was every single day. The daily pain lead to anxiety, panic attacks, depression and the feeling that I would never feel well again. The weight loss didn’t help either and it significantly hurt my self confidence as more and more people asked if I was sick.

I never intended to talk or write about it publicly but in the past 6 months, through trial and error I’ve managed to almost completely get rid of my IBS and the pain and suffering it brought. Hopefully what I’ve done can be replicated to help others who suffer silently daily.

Here’s what I discovered through trial and error worked to get rid of my symptoms:

1. Exercise. This was my first major breakthrough. I noticed that when I worked out, either cardio or weight training, my symptoms wouldn’t be so bad. I told my doctor this and he said, “well that’s weird…”

I’m not sure why it works, maybe its stress reduction, endorphin release, or just getting the blood pumping. Who knows, all I know is getting daily exercise made drastic improvements to my IBS symptoms. I now try to walk for at least 15-30 minutes every day and weight train whenever I can.

2. Clean up my diet. My diet and what I put into my body had  never been good. I was always “blessed” with a fast metabolism so I could always pretty much eat whatever I wanted and not gain weight. I would eat tons of fried foods, hamburgers, ice cream, etc. Pretty much anything that is considered bad for you, I would eat because I never saw any weight gain so I though I was ok. Through trial and error I noticed my abdominal pain was worse when I ate certain things. Though that I did more research and discovered a few things and made several drastic changes to my diet.

• Cut out almost all red meats - I cut down my red meat intake significantly. I used to love eating Rib Eyes, hamburgers, etc but I noticed after eating these things the pain would be worse than normal. Doing some research showed about some of the negative affects red meat consumption has on your body and how hard it is for your body to digest. Recent studies have also shown that red meat consumption may be a contributing factor to the development of certain cancers. I cut it almost completely out of my diet and it has helped tremendously. I now eat a lot of whole soy foods as well as fish, chicken and turkey.
• Cut out almost all dairy products - I used to LOVE dairy products, Ice cream, cheese, etc. The problem is cow’s milk is actually HORRIBLE for you. First off, to make a cow constantly produce milk, you need to make its body think its constantly pregnant and that’s done through hormone therapy. When you drink milk you’re getting that stuff as well. Not only that, casein, one of the primary proteins in cows milk causes a human body to secret excessive mucus. Have you ever noticed increased mucus after drinking milk? That’s casein. Most adults cannot process lactose, the primary sugar in milk and it causes excessive gas production in your gut. I can go on and on about why cow’s milk is bad but the research is there. I now drink almond milk and try not to use cheese on many things. I still love cheese but I use it sparingly or eat it only on occasion (less than once a week).
• Eat more fruits and vegetables – This is one of those things like flossing; you know its good for you, but you just don’t do it. The big benefit of fruits and veggies is that not only are you getting more vitamins in, most of these things are good sources of natural insoluble dietary fiber. This helps keep the pipes clean and stuff continuously moving in your gut.

Eating healthier made me feel much better but its also hard to get enough calories eating healthy. This is good if you can lose a few pounds but for me, someone who had already lost so much weight, this caused me to become even more underweight. Now that I’ve got my symptoms under control I’ve begun to try to eat more calories (healthy stuff though), to put some lbs back on. It’s much harder (and more expensive) to gain weight eating healthy whole foods but it’s something I’m determined to do.

3. Stress Management. Starting and running your own business is one of the most fulfilling things you can ever do in life. It’s also something that will throw your mental state way off balance. It’s an emotional roller coaster. One day it’ll seem like everything is going great, the next day your site is getting bombarded by spammers and you’re up at 2:30 in the morning deleting users. There are so many things to think about and worry about every day, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Everyone responds to it differently, for me it made my digestion poor. I’ve come up with many different things to deal with stress, it’ll be different for everyone but I’ve taken up daily walks, gardening, breathing exercises. It’ll be different for everyone but try to figure out ways to manage your stress.

4. Poop when you need to poop. Working a desk job sometimes you don’t feel comfortable pooping in public restrooms. Holding it in is not good. Sounds like common sense but I doubt I’m the only one that did so. Moving back to Kauai and working from home let me poop when I need to poop and not have to hold it in anymore.

These simple things have greatly improved my quality of life. I’m not longer dreading the pain caused by eating. If you’re suffering from IBS, I hope you try these things and they work out as well for you as it did for me. I also highly recommend reading 8 Weeks to Optimum Health by Dr Andrew Weil. I’ve recently discovered the book and it contains many of the recommendations I found out on my own. He is much more schooled than I am so he’s able to better explain it in more detail, it’s really fascinating stuff. I know IBS is hardly anything serious, it’s not life threatening or devastating like cancer, but quality if life is something you take for granted until it is gone.

I don’t look it because I’m still very underweight but now I feel healthier than I have in years. Give me a few months with my new diet exercise routines, I’m hoping to look it too.

With all the so called “Social Media Experts” pushing content around the web these days, it’s nice to find something that actually turned viral organically.

Earlier this year, The HPD (Honolulu Police Department) began publishing weekly photos of those arrested for drunk driving. The webpage is a simple HTML coded website, employs no social media marketing yet has become the most viral site out of Hawaii since icanhascheezburger.com. Each week, for a span of 24 hours, you can view mugshots of those arrested for OVUII (Operating a Vehicle Under the Influence of an Intoxicant). Capturing people photographically at their worst is always a laugh, but the added bonus of knowing that these people were caught doing something pretty stupid (and dangerous) makes this train wreck all the more irresistible.

Just how popular have these weekly photos become? Well a facebook fan page was created for “DUI Wednesdays” and quickly gained over 1000 fans in less than one week. It’s become quite the popular topic on twitter as well.

As with any true meme, remixes and photoshop edits have begun to pop up only adding more fuel to the fire.

I doubt that it will ever be a worldwide phenomenon the stature of LOLcats, but kudos goes to HPD for (unknowingly or not) creating quite possibly the ONLY positive thing to ever come from drunk driving. Hopefully this is something that can curtail drinking and driving on Oahu. Maybe public humiliation was the missing link to bring those numbers down.

To view photos of those arrested of OVUII, visit the HPD OVUII subsite every Wednesday at 10:00 am.

Our friend Jake Shimabukuro just performed at TED and received a standing ovation. TED is an exclusive idea conference where the worlds brightest minds come together to present their ideas, research, creations, talents etc. Everyone who is in the audience is a scheduled presenter. You can say that it is a small conference of geniuses (in their respected fields).

Why does this change everything for the ukulele? Many of the people there are influencers to the highest degree, let me give you an example of the type of person in the audience

http://twitter.com/BillGates/status/8916544197

I think it is highly likely for the people there to go and spread the word about what the ukulele is capable of and we may see even MORE new ukulele players out there. There’s a trend at TED to have more and more web and technology speakers and if the uke catches on in that scene, it has the chance to go viral like no other instrument ever. This goes hand in hand with the mission of Ukulele Underground, to grow the next generation of ukulele players which is why, right now, I am losing my mind thinking of the possibilities this may bring.

Jake has been the perfect ambassador for the new wave of ukulele popularity. The entire idea of customer experience is to exceed expectations. Most who have never seen Jake perform before have no idea what the Ukulele is capable of. The juxtaposition between what they think is possible, and what he then demonstrates is possible is light years apart. This leaves a typical audience with a sense of awe and opens their mind to the possibility that the ukulele is a serious instrument.

I can honestly say that my one of my strongest passions in life is business. More specifically the early stages of business. The genesis, and creation of something tangible from basically nothing. Although I am not anywhere near what I would consider a success yet, I feel I’ve accumulated a ton of knowledge and experience from my many failures and few successes throughout my professional life. I think many of my friends realize this as well as they always come to me with their business questions and are always more than happy that I give them my $0.02.

So this brings me to this internal debate I’ve been having with myself for the past few months. I want to start a podcast series about entrepreneurship and the process of starting a business (focusing on web based) from the ground up. In this series I would cover my thoughts on the changing business environment, how the internet is changing everything, resources, book reviews, inspirational interviews, etc.

I basically want to help as much people who want to start something of their own live their dream life.

What’s Holding Me Back?

Well basically three things.

1. I am embarrassed by the fact that although I feel I know what I am talking about, I still don’t have the proof that I do. I haven’t hit a homerun in business yet and I wonder if its too early for me to start talking business without having anything (financially) substantial to show for it. Right now, I have many theories/beliefs about what works, what doesn’t what’s important but I’m only now beginning to validate or invalidate these ideas.

2. I honestly have no idea what people want to hear about. There are many things that I’ve learned along the way that I guess I’ve taken for granted. I recently had a skype meeting with a few friends of mine who are looking to launch a new website. The questions I thought there were going to ask were completely different from what they actually wanted to know. They were asking things that I honestly thought everyone knew, but when I took some time to think about it, no not everyone does know these things. Questions like, “What legal things do I need to form a business?” or “How do I get payments online?” I’ve learned such a long time ago, I forgot that when I was first starting, I didn’t know where to start either. I think many things I don’t even think would be good topics are exactly the type of things people want to hear about.

3. My plate is becoming increasingly full. Although we’ve brought on some great people to help with the workload at Ukulele Underground, The projects we are launching will take up a lot of time. Not only that, Eatkauai.com still has a long way to go, and the record label needs at least 1 project this year. I also have some client work I need to finish up and a lot of other people who are asking me to design and create their website. I’m worried about spreading myself too thin with yet another project. It’s always been a bad habit of mine to not finish things that I start. It’s a habit I’m trying very hard to break.

So That brings us to this…

This project is something I think would be incredibly fun for me as I can honestly talk for hours about business if the party on the other end will bear it. I do have my concerns though, so honestly I would like some feedback so please leave a comment if you think its a good or bad idea. I’ll be mulling it over and hopefully by the end of the month, I’ll have made my decision if I’m going to do it or not.

In my first post of the new year, instead of talking more about myself, I’d like to point out a few people who I think should be watched in 2010. I fancy myself as someone who can identify the “it factor”. There are a few I stumbled across in 2009 who were just getting their personal brands going and I think can really kill it in 2010 and create legitimate businesses around their content. Although there are many more people who I think are skilled enough and can become successful in due time, these people featured here I feel can create sustainable business models in the next year if they take the correct steps.

DarkSydePhil – DarkSydePhil is a gamer based in the north east. In 2009 he began posting videos of himself playing video games while providing commentary to the in game action. Within one year his youtube channel skyrocketed to over 40,000 subscribers thanks to his hilarious often angry in game commentary.

Why do I think he can turn it into a business? First off, gaining 40k subscribers on youtube in a year from 0 is an indication that he resonates with a specific demographic. Sure 40k is a fraction of the top subbed channels on youtube, but the difference is DSP is very niche and attracts a very specific and lucrative advertising demographic (males with disposable incomes). This audience is growing at a very high rate as well. When December began he was around 30,000 and shooting for a goal of 35,000 subscribers, It reached 40,000 before the year.

What he should do? Create a web presence outside of youtube that allows his viewers to become an online community. By creating a community your options for monetization grow. You can do advertising, sponsorships, products. By creating an online community you allow your viewers and fans to create content on your website via their discussions. Money will come with the eyeballs and the earlier he creates his own space on the web, the faster he’ll get there.

Obstacles – His content (video game playthroughs) skirt the line of legality. Some may argue that play throughs are copyright infringement. If you consider video games the newest form of interactive story telling then this may be the case. There have been court cases that have established that putting recordings of movies and music online as illegal but there has been no precedence set for play throughs as of yet.

Ryan Gutierrez aka gootecks – Gootecks is a top SoCal Street Fighter 4 tournament player. In early 2009 he decided to dedicate more of his time to growing the fighting game scene and began pumping out podcasts, video content, and his own branded event ‘Street Fighter Bar Fights’. Within the last year he has appeared in the documentary ‘I Got Next‘ by Ian Cofino and has been featured on G4 TV.

The good thing about gootecks is that he gets it. Street Fighter fans are amongst the most passionate fans of any video game. They study and devour everything related to the game and many have been doing so since the early ’90s. With the release of Street Fighter 4 in 2009 and the upcoming Super Street Fighter 4 in March 2010, Gootecks has done a great job positioning himself to be one of the faces of the Street Fighter community. He is also friends with Justin Wong, the best SF4 player in the country and if they started working together it would undeniably demand the attention of everyone in the community. I’ve talked to Ryan a few times the last year and many of the ideas he has are awesome and if executed properly and with focus, there should be no reason why he can’t make a very comfortable living for himself doing what he loves.

There are many others who I am watching, some further along than others but these 2 are the ones who I am most intrigued by mainly because they are 2 more examples of the shift in media and media consumption by consumers. I believe that the next, next generation of celebrities will be born on the internet and not on TV and watching people like DSP and Gootecks grow their brand equity online is a good test of my theories.

Anyways, those are my thoughts, who do you think will have a breakout year in 2010? (besides me of course )

Hey everyone, well it’s Sunday, just about 1 week since I announced my website in a week challenge and I’m glad to say, eatkauai.com beta is up and running! It was a very tiring week finishing an entire website from start to finish in one week but I think it will be a very valuable resource to the people of Kauai.

Currently, we only have a few menu listings but we plan to continue to add more and more to the database until we pretty much have every restaurant on Kauai. There are a bunch of features I have planned out but one step at a time, getting this website up was the first step.

Please check it out and comment and rate your favorite restaurants. Please let me know what you think as well.

Ok, I’m off to help my dad prep for his company Christmas party. Happy Eating everyone!

It’s 12:56am Friday morning. I finished 99% of the first version of the website Thursday. The only thing left to do is customize the submission form for submitting menus and some SEO stuff. I moved the site to the production server and began testing. There was a few snags on the import, some of my localhost settings came over which created some 500 server errors but I got those taken care of quickly with the awesome tech support at site5 hosting.

Em is hard at work creating a spreadsheet of restaurants we plan to upload to the database. I’ve been scanning and touching up menus and have begun to add the first restaurants to the database. So far we have, Pono Market, Korean BBQ, Sushi Katsu, Monico’s, Deli & Bread, and Harley’s Tropical BBQ working on the site.

I don’t want to launch the website to the public until we have a lot more menus. I need to help my dad at his business tomorrow so I won’t be able to work on the website until that night. Still shooting for a Saturday or Sunday launch. If possible i’d like to get 100 restaurant menus in there, but I guess if we get 50 at launch, that is not bad. If you have some menus that you could send in, please do, you can send them to ryan(at)eatkauai.com.

Thanks to everybody who have been leaving suggestions on the facebook fan page. We’re working hard trying to get those for you guys.

See you all tomorrow for another site update!

I have the home page and category pages working in wordpress. There are just a couple little tweaks that need to be done and styled before I move the site to the production server. Very exciting! It will be in maintenance mode while I continue to tweak the plugins and settings until its ready to launch. I’m so happy with all the positive feedback I’ve received on this project. Thank you to everybody.

Please join the facebook group as well. http://www.facebook.com/eatkauai

I didn’t get a chance to post an update of the progress of the website yesterday. I have the html templates coded up for both the front page and category page. Those are ready to be brought into wordpress. I also started programming the menu submission form. There was a really cool Wordpress Plugin that I found that does pretty much exactly what I was looking for called TD Mini Forms. Started working with that to get it to where I need it to be.

Today I’ve been busy with Ukulele Underground stuff so hopefully I will get to work on EK tonight and start integrating the html templates into wordpress and installing plugins. Still on schedule to launch a beta by this weekend.

Also thank you to Bubba Burgers and Sara at Sushi Katsu for sending in menus. Follow them on twitter.
https://twitter.com/Bubba_Burger
http://twitter.com/sushikatsu_Sara