150 kilograms.
Then I shut up
and listened.

An "On This Day" notification came up on my phone. Me asleep on the couch with my newborn daughter on my chest. My wife thought it was the sweetest picture in the world. I looked at it and went cold. My chest was huge. My face wasn't mine. Then I worked out the photo was already months old, which meant I wasn't even that size anymore. I was bigger.

I got on the scale for the first time in years. 150 kilograms.

I'd spent over twenty years in kitchens by then. Started at fourteen. Gleneagles, London, Cape Town, Glasgow. Fourteen hour shifts, thirty thousand steps a day, dinner eaten standing over a bin. I put the bottle down for good in February 2022, went back to university, got out, and landed a desk job in IT. It felt like winning. My feet stopped hurting. I had evenings and weekends for the first time in my adult life. And I got heavier every single month without clocking it, because I had stopped moving and I had not stopped cooking.

A friend put me on to a coach called Steph. I turned up expecting a drill sergeant. A spreadsheet, six days a week, weighing everything. He gave me a list of normal food instead. Meat, potatoes, rice, veg. Eat from the list. No scales, no apps. Two or three sessions a week. It felt far too slow, and I did it anyway.

I gave him one rule. My family comes first. I wasn't cooking two dinners or eating out of tubs while they ate properly, so we all ate my dinner. Same food on every plate, smaller portions on theirs. My wife lost 15 kilograms without ever going on a diet. My daughter still gets her cake, because she's a child and she needs it.

Eight months later the 40 kilograms were gone. I did it through buying a house, gutting it, a full time job and a toddler. None of it was extreme. That's the part nobody tells you.

That's why I want to coach. Not because I found something clever, but because what worked was simple and I had to be 150 kilograms before anyone showed me. I'm getting qualified properly first.