Weight Loss/Maintenance

I think they dropped the price last year, pretty sure I paid 1200 the first year and it was a hard decision for me to make. Ended up totally worth it to me. I had been yelled at by a doctor trying to get my leg healed and he tried to send me to a local medical weight loss place. But when I called them I didn't actually have any medical problems and they wouldn't accept me. So I started looking around on line and found an article by Dr. Barardi that really resonated with me, having to do with counting calories or something and how inaccurate that is and I just liked how reality based it was. Looked some more - got really turned off by the contest stuff, went back and forth, couldn't find many reviews at all good or bad, and the few bad seemed more on the disgruntled side rather than actually anything wrong with the program itself so I got on the list for early registration figuring I could decide when that came up. For once in my life I had the money on hand (or at least available credit LOL) when the day came so I took it as a sign and went for it.

I disagree that it is not a good program for a beginner, at least for me - I was a total beginner (my only ever working out for the sake of working out was grade school PE and a few months of Jane Fonda on vinyl/vhs in the early 80s ) I also disagree about the book they offer at the end - it does in fact duplicate a lot of the material - it seems to actually be based on an even older version of PN when it was called Lean Eating or something like that. I bought it but I feel just kind of neutral about it - there is some reinforcing material but there isn't really anything new. Might be good for people that like paper and real books (which I normally do, but for some reason I just liked the on-line aspects of the program)

As to the web format, I really liked it and they upgraded to fix some of that reviewer's complaints last year (the owners manual was separated out and is a lot easier to search than the archives, which still require a lot of scrolling though it can be sorted to make it a bit less) I didn't get any 90s vibe from it. It is clean and easy to use.

I was in the July 2016 and July 2017 cohorts. In 2017 they changed the way they do the facebook stuff - put all the coaches and their coachees in one place so you could cross over and talk to anybody in the cohort and any coach, assistant or mentor (or anybody) could reply. I am not sure I liked the change, but I have issues with FB that biases me against it anyway. There are people from all over the world doing it (English only though) Australia, Asia, Indonesia, all over Europe, Mexico, I think there was even somebody from Russia last year. Mostly the US and Canada, of course. All the conference calls/videos were available to watch and you could still ask questions later on FB if not participate directly so that wasn't a big deal to me (and frankly I didn't find them that helpful anyway) I think you will get a smaller proportion of people that actively participate in these sorts of things no matter what. Some people are just readers/observers while others like to get right in there and ask for support, get high fives etc. Last year they had those zoom meeting at different times and some weekends so that is changed. As to locker room language...it was just rare enough to be effective (and funny!) not offensive to me at all - the person who wrote the curriculum is Krista Scott-Dixon and she has written some pretty damn funny things on her own, including a book called "Why Me Want Eat: Fixing Your Food F*ckedupitude" LOL.

For me it was the content of the lessons, deeper articles, and the format of getting a little reward via clicking that you read the lesson/did the workout/did the habit that was the thing that worked for me. I never thought about getting a little swag at the end and now that that person mentions it, yeah it would be a good thing for them to add. The shaker bottle is nice and comes at a good time. My coach also sent little things personally so maybe I just got one of the good ones. From what I could see on the various conference videos, they all seemed like good coaches so not sure what the gripe was there, mine would contact me when I didn't "show" up for more than a few days so ??? It may go the the variability of needing attention, personally I didn't need too much - an occasional question answered or the light nudge to get back on track if I hadn't been around. I tended to ask things like specific info for movements I couldn't do. The workouts were customized for my crap knees and beginner status, but occasionally I didn't know what the instructions meant (workouts would have written instruction plus videos to follow but sometimes they didn't seem to quite mesh and I can get bogged down in those kind of details instead of just doing something close LOL)

Tell me more about your free program, maybe I should check that out for a few months while I wait and decide about reupping to PN in January. I have made some good permanent changes to the way I eat, but working out regularly has not stuck (other than swimming which I love and do almost daily in the summer) and with the knees I sure as hell haven't been riding much anymore (one of my real goals - to get back to riding).