Life Re-Imagined: Celebrating five people who changed their lives for the better

“Fulfillment, for me, is living who you were meant to be to the maximum potential.” —Ed Kang

Ed Kang
Ed Kang has packed a lot into his life so far. He’s 34 years old and has been an animator and an entrepreneur. He worked in marketing and for a dot.com company, making and losing a million dollars on paper through the boom and bust. He got married and had two children, took a company public on the stock market and even worked as a pastor.

Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Kang would be the first to admit that, as of a couple of years ago, he was a burnout with too many loose ends in his life, and too many unmet obligations to work and to his family. “It was a ‘Who are you?’ situation,” says Kang. “You’ve tried all these different things, the spiritual route, the business route and what do you have left, really?”

A friend who had travelled to India with a charity called Impact Nations suggested Kang do something similar in Nicaragua, and that trip in 2009 is what led him to reinvent his life. “It was two weeks of opening medical clinics and feeding centres in the poorest parts of the country,” Kang says. “I was a bouncer; I had to do crowd control; we’d go into a village and set up some tents and awnings, and they would line up and you’d get through as many people as you could.”

On the flight to Nicaragua, Kang says, he knew things were unravelling at home in Calgary, both personally and professionally, and a part of him wished he didn’t have to go back.

“My business was failing because of the economy and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It seemed like there was an unending train of pressure and I felt powerless and with no purpose,” he says.

The trip to Nicaragua was the catalyst. Ten days in, Kang had a meltdown, begged off the planned outing that night and went back to his hotel room where he decided to make a change in his life.

Kang wanted to redirect his life to focus on social change, but decided to do it in a micro way. When he got back to Calgary, for example, he took advantage of his skill in the kitchen, where he makes a mean lasagna. Whenever he cooked lasagna for his family, he would make eight more, freeze them, and look for families in need who could use the food.

“People would ask to come in and cook; we called them impact kitchens,” Kang says. “That idea caught on, I realized there was really no competition for just helping someone in your community, going next door and saying, ‘Can I help you with something?’ I realized that was a niche and it’s fun.”

Out of this, Kang created a community in 2009 called Re:Life, which stands for Regard for Life. Re:Life is a community of more than 100 like-minded people who work for social change. So far, the group has sent people to Uganda, Haiti and Nicaragua on humanitarian projects. It has raised support for an orphanage in Burundi and a mosquito net project in Tanzania. Closer to home, members also regularly volunteer at the Calgary Drop-In Centre. And, of course, they make lasagna, too.

As for his work, the friend who originally steered Kang to Nicaragua is now his boss. Kang works as a corporate chaplain and business manager in Calgary for the Goliath Group of Companies. Kang says he’s now fulfilled, although he doesn’t equate that with being happy.

“Fulfillment, for me, is living who you were meant to be to the maximum potential,” he says. “People come to me and say, ‘I’m not happy.’ I ask them if they think the point of life is to become happy and they say, ‘Yes!’

“I believe the point of life is fulfillment, and the by-product of that it happiness.”

“It’s way easier to eat badly. If you write down what you eat, and if you have a bad day and can see it, but if you have five bad days, then you know that it’s a bad habit." — Tanis Tzavaras

Tanis Tzavaras
If you Google Tanis Tzavaras (use her maiden name: Hill), one of the first things you’ll come across is a set of photos of her from a fitness competition in 2006. Tanned, 24, and posing in a bikini, the first thing you think is: Holy Crap, look at that woman’s body! Lots of muscles, no visible body fat, Tzavaras was very, very fit.

It’s tough to maintain that type of physique, though, and when Tzavaras got pregnant 18 months later, she fell off the wagon. She leaped off the wagon, actually, gaining more than a hundred pounds over the course of her pregnancy.

Every woman who has given birth has had that postpartum moment when she has to face down the damage done to her body. In Tzavaras’s case, that moment came early, in the hospital, just after she had given birth. “There was a shift change, and the two nurses were going over my chart,” Tzavaras recalls. “One said to the other, ‘She’s doing really well; her only risk factor is her obesity.’ That was my reality check. No one else in my life would say, ‘You’re getting too big.’”

Tzavaras says that, even when she was competing, she didn’t follow a consistently healthy lifestyle. “It was really yo-yo at that time, and I think that’s how a lot of novice competitors are; they go really hard for a competition and then rebound back,” she says.

After her moment of clarity in the hospital, Tzavaras decided to leave those extreme habits behind and take a more measured approach. “Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation,” is one of Tzavaras’s favourite quotes, from American televangelist and author Robert Schuller, and it probably best describes how she lost her weight. She thinks weight loss comes more from changing your eating habits than from exercise, although exercise plays a role, as well.

Tzavaras took time to prepare food, so that she wasn’t eating on the go. She kept a food diary to keep track of calories, and she worked out consistently. And it wasn’t easy. “It’s way easier to eat badly,” she says. “If you write down what you eat, and if you have a bad day you can see it, but if you have five bad days, then you know that it’s a bad habit.”

After losing 80 pounds over a six-month period in 2008, Tzavaras decided to turn her success into a career change. She had coached gymnastics for a number of years and branched out into meal planning and boot camps, along with training other women to compete in fitness and other figure competitions. Her website, tanisfit.com, is full of photos of her and her clients, in bikinis, working some serious muscles.

Tzavaras herself is pregnant with her second child right now, but she knows this time she’ll keep her eating under control. “It has to be a priority this time,” she says. “There is a self-discipline component that has to be a priority. You can’t ever think that you’re so good that it’s not going to be a problem for you anymore. It’s always going to be there.”

“You only live once, and I want to do everything I can to make the most out of that life.” — Robb Price

Robb Price
Having your first child is a life-changing experience for just about everyone. But Robb Price took it a step further. After his son was born in 2008, Price was inspired to turn his whole life upside-down and give it a shake. To set an example for his child, he quit smoking, quit his job and quit eating badly. He launched a charitable website and drove an RV across the country, handing out 30,000 pairs of men’s underwear to homeless shelters. Imagine if he’d had twins.

Price is a transplanted American, born in California and raised in Oregon, who was motivated by love to come to Calgary. When he got here in 2003, he did the prototypical Calgary thing and became an entrepreneur, running a marketing business with his now-wife that specialized in community investment.

A few years ago, Price, his wife and their business partner sold their firm to a national public relations company, put in some time at the new firm and then cut loose with a bit of money and lots of time. Price and his wife bought a house, had a baby and Price dabbled in the software business, which he described as hair-pulling. It all sounds nice, right? A very typical upwardly mobile Calgary family.

Scratch the surface, though, and Price wasn’t particularly healthy; he’d smoked for his entire adult life, was Type-1 diabetic and was carrying 40 extra pounds. When his son was about a year old, he began noticing and mimicking what Price was doing, so his dad gave up cigarettes, which, of course, can be brutally difficult by itself.

But then another health issue reared its head. In November 2009, Price woke up in his bedroom surrounded by paramedics standing over him, fire engines in the street and a scared wife and son. “I had a seizure caused by extreme low blood sugar. It was right around the time I’d quit smoking, so there were lots of changes happening in my body,” Price says.

It happened again two months later but, this time, Price started to seize in front of his son. “Later that day, my son said to me, ‘Daddy shaking? Daddy shaking? Daddy fall on floor?’” Price recalls. Giving up smoking wasn’t enough. Price realized his weight was a part of the problem and added that lifestyle change to the mix, with a personal trainer, Kevin Smith of Body Be Fit, and an eating plan.

The final element of Price’s turnaround was his work. After he left the software business, Price had a think about what work he’d found most rewarding so far in his career. He realized the community involvement projects he’d done through his marketing firm had been the most fulfilling, so he spent a year working for a local charity called The Doorway, which helps transition kids off the street and into society.

During his tenure there, a fire destroyed the charity’s office and most of its supplies. Price needed to replace the desks, computers and binders. He didn’t have the money to do so, but he figured there would be a website somewhere that would help him search for donations. “Say you’ve just replaced your computer monitor; you could sell it on Craigslist or Kijiji, or you could donate it to a charity. That scenario happens all the time. But how do you know what charity needs a computer monitor?” he says.

Price created a website called delivergood.org. Charities register at the site and list what they need, such as printer ink cartridges, external hard drives, classroom space or winter jackets and underwear. Speaking of underwear, Price launched delivergood last summer by travelling across the country in an RV, with his mentor and investor Brent King, giving away 30,000 pairs of underwear at homeless shelters. Why underwear? They’re one of things that homeless shelters are most in need of, so King and Price supplied the shelters they visited with enough underwear for a full year.

Price found his big turnaround to be exhilarating, and says anyone with a bit of determination can do the same. “You only live once, and I want to do everything I can to make the most out of that life,” he says. “It’s an uphill battle, but the power is in you to take those steps.”

“I get passed a lot on the bike, and people say ‘you’re such an inspiration,’ but I think that anyone is capable of it.” — Brian Martin

Brian Martin
One day Brian Martin could walk; the next day he couldn’t. Life changes don’t get much more abrupt than that.

It was May 2001. Martin was 28 years old, in his first year of Computer Science at the DeVry Institute of Technology, and he was riding home from work on his motorcycle late at night.

The streets hadn’t been cleaned of winter-ice gravel yet, and he skidded out and crashed. A short time later, at the Foothills Medical Centre, someone offered Martin something for his pain. “I said, ‘there’s no pain; I feel fine, actually,’” he recalls.

It was the next day before Martin was told he couldn’t walk again, and he was initially unfazed. “I was, like, whatever, let’s go. I’ve got things to do. I’ve got my life to live. It’s an inconvenience for now; I’ll figure it out later,” he says.

And live his life, he did. Martin wrote his first-year final exams in the hospital, finished school, and married his girlfriend, who had stuck with him through the hospital and rehab. His brother and father jerry-rigged Martin’s two-storey house with a ramp made of wood and roof shingles, so he could pull himself and his wheelchair up the stairs. “I’d crawl up and pull the wheelchair up behind me,” Martin says.
He and his wife also took in foster children, he got a job doing technical support for Telus, and they had their first child. On the surface, it was a success story. Martin didn’t miss a beat.

In reality, things were a little more complicated. “In 2005, 2006, we started going through some marital issues,” says Martin. “This wasn’t what she signed up for. I mean, it wasn’t what anyone had signed up for. There were lots of challenges. Every time we went out, we had to plan ahead. I couldn’t even go for a walk and hold hands.”

Martin says he was fine right after the accident, but it took time for it to sink in that his life was forever changed. “It came to a head when I was 40 pounds overweight. I had marital issues. I realized, this sucks; this isn’t any fun,” he says.

Martin decided getting active again would be the key to solve his malaise and marital problems. He’d been a gymnastics tumbler and a professional dancer through his 20s. Those options were out of the question, so Martin began with skiing, with a sit ski. Later, he got the funds for a handcycle, from a provincial fund that helps accident victims, and tried racing. He then decided to train for a triathlon.

“I knew that I could do two of the things: the cycling and the wheelchair race. I just had to figure out the swimming,” Martin says, adding he figured it out by simply tying his legs together and getting in the pool.

Martin is now one of two paraplegic athletes competing in triathlons in the Calgary area, and he has completed five in the past two years. Martin admits he pushes himself to see just how much his body can do, but he also pushes society to see what he’ll be allowed to do. “I’m not going to go so far as to inconvenience anyone,” he says. “I’m more curious than anything to see what I can do.”

Ironman Canada is going to see what he can do this summer. Martin is signed up to compete at the Ironman in Penticton in August. By his reckoning, no athlete in a wheelchair has ever completed the Canadian Ironman.

Martin knows he’s an inspiration. He’s certainly an inspiration to his wife, who says he’s her hero. He’s also an inspiration to able-bodied athletes, which he has mixed feelings about.

“I get passed a lot on the bike, and people say ‘you’re such an inspiration,’ but I think that anyone is capable of it,” he says. “You can be an inspiration at different levels.”

Dawn McIntyre
Dawn McIntyre had a difficult start to life. She was a victim of physical abuse and says she was beaten so often she nearly died twice: once when she was five, and again when she was 11. And the physical abuse wasn’t the whole story. “It was drilled into me that I was fat, ugly and stupid, and would amount to nothing,” she says.

McIntyre left home at 18, her self-worth in tatters, and began a long journey to figure out who she was. First of all, though, as McIntyre puts it, she spent a long time figuring out who she wasn’t. Tragedy followed McIntyre through her early adulthood. She had a daughter, who is a teenager now and still lives with her, and ended up divorcing her first husband. She remarried and had a stillborn baby and then a son. When that marriage dissolved, McIntyre agreed to give up her parental rights and let her ex-husband and his girlfriend raise her son, on the understanding it would be an open adoption. Unfortunately, she has rarely been allowed to see the child.

McIntyre says the loss of her son about 10 years ago was the moment she hit bottom. “It was a dark night of the soul. I had to say yes to life, or continue to spiral down,” she says.

McIntyre chose the former and tried an alternative, and somewhat controversial, psychotherapy called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a type of psychotherapy designed specifically to help people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It doesn’t take as long as traditional talk therapy and, very roughly, involves replacing negative memories with more positive feelings. McIntyre credits the therapy with her gradual emotional recovery.

McIntyre decided to use her life experiences and subsequent recovery to create a career for herself. McIntyre describes herself as claircognizant, which isn’t a term that’s well known, but, in the psychic community, it means you simply know things. She created a personal coaching business, called Boldly Beautiful, which was based on that ability and has had some success with it. She wrote a self help book, The New 10 — Redefining Beauty, in which she sets out a 40-day program for women who are suffering from low self-worth, tackling a different self-esteem problem each day, from body image to negative thoughts. McIntyre has had phone calls from readers telling her how the book helped them through some challenging experiences.

The New 10 came out last summer, along with a media blitz during which McIntyre did 19 television interviews in less than four hours. She spent a lot of the summer doing talk radio and television through the United States, a process she found freeing. “There is almost a cathartic experience that happens when you can be so transparent with listeners and viewers about your own experiences and witness the appreciation of such honesty,” she says.

Not surprisingly, given the negativity in her early life, McIntyre now focuses on the positive. She firmly believes everyone is capable of an exceptional life. “Never say never,” she says. “Life can be as great and as fulfilling as we want.”