Leo Babauta is a former journalist and creator of the popular Zen Habits blog. He is also the author of numerous books and courses on habits, simplicity and mindfulness.

In 2005, Leo was living on Guam and was a smoker, overweight, sedentary, addicted to junk food, deeply in debt with lots of clutter, a procrastinator, overworked with no time for his wife and kids. In November 2005, he started to turn his life around: he finally quit smoking, then started running, changed his diet, started getting out of debt, decluttering, simplifying and more.

A year later, he had lost 30 lbs. and ran his first marathon, was a vegetarian and on his way to becoming debt-free and a minimalist.

Zen Habits He started Zen Habits in January 2007 to share what he was learning about changing his life, and has been writing the blog ever since.

The blog grew to 26,000 readers by the end of 2007 (and now has over a million readers) and was named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 10 blogs for a few years. It’s one of the largest single-author blogs in the world.

These days, Leo is a vegan, lives a fairly healthy life in California, and focuses on helping people who are struggling.