I’ve been in Colorado since Tuesday night, and today I’m in Colorado Springs with the PWA team and my family. This is the first time that Nicki and the kids have joined me on the Perfect Weight America Tour, meaning the tour bus and the film crew and the hectic schedule. They’ve had fun tooling around the Front Range in the tour bus. Yesterday, on the 90-minute drive from Denver to Colorado Springs, Nicki and the kids took a nap as the 48-foot Featherlite bus motored south on Interstate 25. We have a series of stacked beds—kind of like what submariners must sleep in—where you can “rack out” and get some much-needed rest.

Perhaps I should have laid down for a spell as well, but there’s so much to do. Since Wednesday, we’ve done three great retailer trainings. Two were with Vitamin Cottage, a natural grocery store chain with 24 stores in Colorado and New Mexico. The stores are managed by the children of Philip and Margaret Isely, who, in the mid-1950s, packed their old station wagon full of children (they had seven), lunches, and whole grain organic brain, which they sold door-to-door in Golden, Colorado, west of Denver. They also lent out educational books on vitamins. In 1958, the Iselys opened their first “health food” store—as they were known back then—in Lakewood, one of Denver’s first postwar suburbs. They scratched by for years since living healthy wasn’t fashionable, nor were folks knowledgeable about the right foods to eat and supplements to take. Then, in the mid-1970s, their health food store business started catching on. Vitamin College is now one of the five largest supplement retailers in the country, so I was quite pleased to talk to their employees about Perfect Weight America and what we’re doing at Garden of Life.

I also did an employee training with Whole Foods and Wild Oats employees. You may have heard about Whole Foods, the nation’s largest natural foods chain that purchased Wild Oats—its biggest competitor—in 2007. With its acquisition, Whole Foods has grown to nearly 300 locations, including a gleaming 39,000 square-foot market at the Gardens Mall in Palm Beach Gardens, where Nicki and I like to shop for our groceries—when we’re home. A decade ago, organic food sales represented less than 1 percent of total food and beverage sales, but that figure has climbed to 2.5 percent and contains to maintain rapid growth of 20 percent a year, an incredible development. To meet this increasing demand, natural food markets like Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and Vitamin Cottage are opening by the droves in downtown storefronts and suburban malls.

In addition, I trained the staff at Messenger International, which is a ministry directed by John and Lisa Bevere. John is an evangelist whose most popular work is a book called Bait of Satan, which talks about how detrimental it can be to your health if you hold offense and unforgiveness in your heart. John and Lisa have become good friends over the years, and they’ve been extremely health conscious all their adult lives, and they are bearing the fruit of that.

We trained their staff of about 40 employees, including John’s secretary, Glorie Harris, who has ulcerative colitis. I have been working with her about six weeks, and she’s been following our health program and really showing a turnaround. After speaking to the employees, Nicki and I had dinner with John and Lisa at a nearby restaurant, where we ran into a marriage and relationship expert named Doug Weis. He goes to the same church with them, and he’s written a lot of books, too.

Today, I had an interview with the Denver Daystar station and then I did an interview with the local NBC affiliate in Colorado Springs about the next family we are adopting—the Harden family in Colorado Springs. Tommy and Rosalyn Harden are parents of Xavier and Ashley, and their dog Bear is a pug. When we arrived at their house, we ironically learned that Bear is the only one in the family who eats organic. That’s because we spied a bag organic dog food in the pantry.

Rosalyn had gastric bypass surgery six years ago, and she did lose 100 pounds, but she’s still not at her perfect weight. She’s very much fatigued during the day, and she wants to lose more weight. She has a goal of climbing an incline by the end of 2008 because that’s something that her husband, Tommy, does with the kids, and they are always telling her how it looks when they reach the top.

The entire family has committed to making 2008 a time when they reach their perfect weight. Tommy is an Army recruiter who’s about to retire from the Army, but he has a cholesterol level of 327 and weight to lose, too. Xavier is 14, I believe, and he has migraines and digestive problems. Ashley says she wants to get healthy so she can go to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

We’re excited about helping them. We interviewed the family on camera to get the lay of the land, and then we went through their pantry, their refrigerator, and the dreaded garage freezer. There must have been more frozen pork chops and pork tenderloin in that freezer than in all of Iowa. Tommy is a big pork eater, and his jaw dropped as he watched us throw away a lot of “white trash,” as we call it. (Remember: pork producers are fond of calling their products the “other white meat.”) As I’ve said in my books many times, I do not recommend eating pork because there are barnyard scavengers. Pigs derive nutrition from human excrement dredged from a latrine pit, eliminating a sanitary problem for their rural masters. Even their own waste tastes fine to them. Although it’s anecdotal, I heard the story about the pig farmer who stacked 10 pigs in individual wire cages, one on top of another. All the farmer had to do was feed the pig in the penthouse cage and let trickle-down economics prove itself. As I’m fond of saying in my seminars, “Remember, if you eat the meat of animals, you are not just what you eat; you are what they ate!”

The whole top shelf of the Harden pantry could be named “The Hydrogenated Oil Section” because it was filled with processed and packaged foods that contain partially hydrogenated oils, which is where our trans fats come from. Trans fats are horrible, artery-clogging fats that are produced by heating liquid vegetable oils in the presence of hydrogen to make hem solid at room temperature, a process known as hydrogenation. They are found in potato chips, snack foods, pancake syrup—you get the picture. What I told them was that the worse off some of your foods are now, the better results you’re going to get. That should encourage them.

We filled up a good half-dozen black trash bags with pork chops, brownie mix, greasy chips, boxed crackers, store-bought cookies . . . you get the picture. During our rummaging, we found two cans of wild-caught salmon in their pantry, covered with dust. Someone must have been put that healthy food in their pantry inadvertently, which explains why they were collecting all this dust.

The Hardens attend the Church for All Nations, which is the host church for our Perfect Weight Weekend. This afternoon, they’re on their way to Sammy’s Organics, which is a Colorado Springs health store that is partnering with us. The good folks at Sammy’s are going to help the Hardens shop for the right foods they need. They are going to replace the junk with healthy things, and they are excited to see how their lives will change.

We’re also “adopting” another family from the church tomorrow—the Wendlings. Both the mother and the daughter each weigh over 300 pounds, so we’ll be working with both those families to get them back on the right track toward their perfect weight. We’re looking forward to spending a few days with them as they will be attending the seminar tonight as well as the Saturday sessions.

Let me fill you in on a few things that the family and I have been doing since we arrived on Tuesday night. It had snowed the day before, so when Joshua got all excited to see snow—remember, he’s spent all his life in Florida—he didn’t realize how cold snow would be when he grabbed a handful. A good lesson to learn early in life!

We had a great day on Wednesday. The entire family visited the Denver Zoo, and although a lot of the animals were not out because of the cold, we still saw some neat animals. I saw a polar bear for the first time, and Joshua gazed on his favorite animal—the giraffe. We were fascinated by the hippos and elephants. Then we went to the Science Museum because Joshua loves dinosaurs. I lost track of how many dinosaur bones and skeletons we saw, and then to round things out, we relaxed with an Imax movie called “The Living Seas,” which was an undersea adventure. A great day all away around, and our infant daughter Alexis has some nice rosy cheeks from some windburn.

All three days, the weather has been awesome, and the snow-capped Rocky Mountains are in full view. When the PWA Weekend seminar is over, it will be nice not to take a red-eye flight on Saturday night. On Sunday, though, we’re leaving at the crack of dawn and flying home to West Palm Beach. It won’t be easy getting everyone out of the hotel on time to the airport, but I think we’ll manage somehow.