About Me

I remember the date vividly: August 1, 2006. That was the day I stepped on my bathroom scales and decided I'd had enough of being overweight - by 40 pounds - and it was time to change. No more Mr Jelly-Belly.

I joined Weightwatchers.co.uk (I was still living in the U.K. at the time) and followed their program closely, but at the back of my mind I realised I wouldn't be able to keep up with a diet that was so restrictive. I would often feel hungry just minutes after finishing a main meal.

Despite appearances, I'm not attempting to breastfeed
my granddaughter, who was one year old at the time.
This picture was taken about a year before I stepped
on that scale.

Around the same time I joined a local gym to help burn some calories. I trained on my own - i.e. without a personal trainer - but I taught myself how to exercise safely by reading magazines like Men's Health. From reading its articles, I also started to learn about nutrition and after a couple of months I stopped doing Weightwatchers in order to follow a diet that was a better balance of lean protein and very little starchy carbs (the healthy fats came later).

Shortly after I moved to Canada I started working out every Saturday with a personal trainer - the extremely talented and knowledgeable, Paul French - at a local gym, ABsolute Fitness and Personal Training. I trained with Paul for more than five years; now I have two different trainers - Cosmo and Ben - who use different techniques. My training methods change periodically, varying the intensity and adding new routines. Part of my training regimen used to be based on CrossFit (Olympic lifting and metcons), whereas now I do a lot of conditioning along with lower weight/high rep routines.

This has been helped in no small part by my trainers' advice on refining my nutrition, too. I'm now at a point where my daily diet is pretty consistent and quite disciplined (mostly Paleo).

As well as the one day of training each week I would also workout on my Bowflex three days, plus a timed metcon (metabolic conditioning) routine midweek. In August 2010 I got to the point where I felt my progress was limited by what I was able to do in my home gym so I started going to ABsolute Fitness four days a week, on top of my usual personal training sessions.

I often tell people I eat to be healthy, but I exercise because I enjoy the challenge. Not bad for a formerly chubby ex-smoker whose wife used to refer to him as her "Little Buddha".

I'm 5' 4" and for the past couple of years my weight has consistently been around 140 lb. I eat whenever I'm hungry - typically every couple of hours - and I eat as much as I want without being accurate about measuring the amount I consume. However, I am pretty strict about what I eat, severely limiting the processed junk.