I am ashamed to admit it, but I have to confess that I took about eight years to lose 100 pounds. That's just about a pound a month. Why? Because I am such a cheater. Sure, over the long haul I stuck to a way of life, but I could have done a lot better a lot more quickly.

So why did I cheat so much? To be honest, I had my head buried in the sand. I really didn't know how many great low carb products were out there.

You see, I started my Atkins diet in the dark ages when there was nothing at all on the market for low carb, and I was tempted to cheat way too often because I had no alternative products to eat. I had tried a few of the things as they were just coming onto the market, but the early days of low carb food produced some pretty nasty tasting things. It took a long time to get the great products that we have today.

I was a big evangelist for the Atkins Diet and I always told people how great it was and how I lost all my weight. I even got a lot of my friends to give it a try. Well, one day a friend that I had encouraged to try the diet came running to my desk at work practically giddy with excitement. He was carrying a chocolate bar and he threw it down on my desk and told me I had to try it right away. I was not too happy with him, because I had been doing so well on my diet and he knew I couldn't eat chocolate. I told him to "get that poison away from me" and he said it was low carb chocolate. Well I had heard that one before. I had tried some low carb chocolates when they first came out and I thought they were the nastiest waxiest, oily, bad-aftertaste, grossest things I had ever had. I was not interested in tasting that again. He pleaded with me, "You've got to try these chocolates! They are incredible!"

I was so amazed at how good this new product was that I put up a web page that same weekend to tell the world about how incredible they were. My web page was a small free site that was not very impressive. I showed another friend my website and he called me fifteen minutes later and told me to go look at another web page. He had taken my web page and given it a complete makeover and put it up somewhere else.

I called around and found out that I had to buy a truckload of chocolate in order to get a good deal on them, so I decided it was worth it and I jumped in my car, drove all the way to Canada and picked up a ton of chocolates. When I got back I was one motivated fellow. I had a ton of chocolate on my hands and I had to get rid of a lot of it. So I went to the web and called other low carb websites and offered them the chocolates, I couldn't get anywhere with them, so I decided to promote it on the web myself. It was easy to get started because PayPal had just launched and I could take payments from people with PayPal accounts without having to run the risk of opening a Visa/MC merchant account. (If it hadn't been for PayPal I never would have even tried to start selling online.) Within a few days I got my first order!

I put the chocolate in a walk-in closet at my house and sent all the orders out from my mailbox on the street. I would come home late at night after promoting my website all evening, bring home my orders, walk into the closet, shut the door so I wouldn't wake up my roommate, and package my orders so I could send them out the next day. After a while I realized that I was actually going to get more orders than I wanted to pack up every night—and never get any sleep, so I hired a fulfillment center to ship my orders.

From there it is all history. My business grew, I got a 24 hour toll free order line, I began accepting all forms of payment, moved warehouses, and even became a West Coast Distributor for Ross Chocolates. I have thought about expanding even further, taking on new brands of low carb chocolates, and getting into the whole low carb grocery store, or even just updating my website so it has a cool modern interface, but you know what? After it is all said and done, I still feel that I want to stick with my original focus- to let people know how awesome Ross Chocolates are and to help people get them. I could do a million different things with my business, but I want to remain focused on my original goal and do it in a way that is personal and friendly. I still use that same simple web design my buddy made for me years ago, and even if it looks a little bit like a "mom and pop" site I don't mind, because that's me plain and simple—what you see is what you get: great low carb chocolate bars and great service from a friendly face at a friendly place.