I Went From 60KG to over 100KG — Here’s What I Learned.
Seven years ago I embarked on a journey that would change my life forever.
I grew up as a skinny kid and had an undiagnosed eating disorder for many years. This issue plagued my life for so long and I blamed the problem on the reason why I couldn’t get a stable girlfriend.
Four years prior, I was with a girl that was my high school sweetheart and I honestly thought I was going to marry her. She ended up dumping me because my business was taking off and she felt I was incredibly selfish. She was right although it would take me 5+ years to learn this lesson.
I rolled up to the gym that was an hours drive from my home. It was a bodybuilders gym that was open 24/7 — the only one of it’s kind at the time.
“I chose a gym that was far away so no one I knew would see the skinny guy try and pick up dumbbells”
Training next to bodybuilders was also a way for me, I thought, to get some artificial motivation. At this stage in my life, I was incredibly wealthy financially, time poor like crazy and had just got myself a new BMW Coupe.
Going from 60KG to over 100KG felt like it was the final piece of the puzzle. Little did I know the puzzle of life was way bigger than I could ever imagine.
First day.
Let me be honest for a second: This wasn’t my first time at the rodeo — Australia’s first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard said this to me before a function one night after she described what it was like to speak on stage with George Bush, and I still borrow this line to use in my stories today.
I’d been to the gym before with the goal of becoming the incredible hulk before and failed. My friend’s dad was a former boxer and tried everything to help me with my ‘skinniness disease.’ He made me drink a litre of milk with Max’s Protein Powder before bed and eat loads of carbs. It didn’t work.
Then I tried training by myself and that didn’t work.
Rolling up to the gym seven years ago to try it all again felt daunting. I knew this time I needed help and that would involve a personal trainer. Having someone judge me for my weight issue was a scary thought but I was in a dark place. I had to try.
I walked through the door of the gym and was surrounded by bodybuilders drinking caffeinated drinks and consuming creatine. I was about to become one of them. I had a session booked with one of two in-house personal trainers. He walked out of his office to greet me and he was massive. His arms were thicker than both my arms and legs put together. While he looked scary, he was actually a friendly giant.
The first step on day one of the gym is to take measurements. This involves standing on the scales, having your body measurements noted down and having your blood pressure taken. For most people, this was a normal process. For a skinny kid like me that suffered from mental health issues, weight problems and was scared of anything related to blood (like blood pressure tests) this process was daunting, to say the least.
My whole body shook as he took my blood pressure but I made it through. After all, no measurements, no training due to medical insurance requirements. On day one we went up the big long staircase to the boxing cage. This cage overlooked the entire gym and I felt strangely powerful.
This feeling faded quickly when my new personal trainer told me that he wasn’t sure how long I’d last. He genuinely thought this dream would be all over pretty quickly. To make sure I didn’t chicken out I paid for ten sessions up front. This gave me leverage and ensured I would keep coming back.
He started by doing some strength tests and it was clear he thought I was incredibly weak.
The look on his face nearly killed my entire dream of getting to over 100KG.
Tracking results.
Shortly after completing the first session my trainer told me how important it was to track results. He instructed me to buy a training book and in it, I was to record everything I did including my weekly weight.
The first entry went in with 60KG as the starting weight.
The first few weeks were incredibly hard and my results didn’t improve. I woke up every day sore from the exercise and hardly able to move. People at work joked that I was bending over too much and that’s why I was sore. After the first week, I then had to track the results of what I was eating.
What I never understood before was that weight gain and muscle is more about what you eat and less about how you train. My trainer taught me that rest, supplements and food was what I needed. I always thought it was about training very hard — it wasn’t.
I was given a template to track every meal. Here’s the part that nearly killed me:
“I had to eat a minimum of 6 meals a day with a heavy amount of carbs.”
Life became a series of habits.
The goal I’d set for myself seemed impossible.
My trainer helped me see that I had to follow a strict set of habits if I was to have any chance of success. Life became nothing more than:
- Back and Bi’s Monday
- Shoulders and Legs Wednesday
- Cardio Thursday
- Chest and Triceps Saturday
- Sunday rest day
I’d go to work each day and have to eat many meals in front of my colleagues. For a skinny guy with an eating disorder, this was no easy task. I was basically eating in front of people all day. I’d eat in the sales meeting; I’d eat in the board meeting; I’d eat while on the phone; I’d even eat while driving to and from work.
Other than eating and training, that’s all I did. There was no time for girls, messing around or my music career that was slowly going down the toilet.
No matter what happened, I trained and ate.
The first weigh in.
I remember the first time getting on the scales. It was about two weeks in.
I got on the scales and waited for the gym gods to tell me my fate. The scale read: “65 KG.”
I jumped for joy and my trainer was happy. He knew I was following the meal plan he gave me. That meal plan consisted of:
- Tuna and rice
- Boiled eggs
- Grilled fish
- Lean chicken breast
- Three protein shakes a day
- A teaspoon of creatine (for the pump)
- Peanut butter on biscuits
- Lots of bread
- Handfuls of nuts like cashews and almonds
- 3–4 litres of water per day
- An avocado
The list was long and no wonder I put on weight. All this food helped me gain weight, but it led to other problems. Nothing is ever that simple.
The downside.
There were many.
All the food made me incredibly tired. My acne was out of control. I began to crave food every sixty minutes and was always hungry. My body image got worse, not better. My food bill was gigantic. At one stage I worked out that I was spending more than $30k a year. This is fine when you’re rich but my financial situation at the time was going south and I wasn’t sure if I could keep it up.
On the weekends I had a tradition of going out with a group of mates to a bar or nightclub and getting really drunk. A friend of mine was a bartender and he introduced me to shots. There were these Agwa shots he used to give me that got me drunk and helped me forget all my problems of being single, having low self-esteem and many medical issues (weight, tiredness and mental health).
Getting to the dream body weight of 100KG and having some big muscles became a burden, not a dream.
Still, I continued to gain weight. I was now over 70KG and getting bigger. One weekend I was at a nightclub in Chapel Street, South Yarra and I bumped into one of the jocks from high school. I was wearing a tight, fluro green t-shirt and he commented on my arms.
“Yo man your arms look big. You been training?”
“Yep as much as I can. Can’t stay skinny forever right?” That was followed by a fist bump and a handshake.
These conversations were the highlight of my newfound love of the gym. People I grew up with thought I would always be skinny. I was proving them wrong and it felt good. Something was still not right, though.
The compliment that summed it all up.
One Saturday I was in the gym with my trainer.
It was a long weekend and very early in the morning for most. All his other clients had canceled and I was sitting on the bench press pumping out reps while nursing a really bad case of the flu. No matter what I kept training. He sat me down after training chest and said to me the following:
“You may not be the biggest or strongest client I have physically, but I have never seen anyone train so hard, with so much discipline and a heap of heart.
Most people would be at home with the flu, but you’re still training. I admire that about you.”
I got home that night and felt very accomplished. My trainer never thought I would get anywhere and assumed I’d probably quit. He was starting to see he was wrong.
What he didn’t know was that my determination to go from 60KG to 100KG was driven by:
- Loneliness
- The relationship with my brother going to crap
- A severe, undiagnosed mental illness
- A feeling that I wasn’t enough
- Not loving myself
I used my gym addiction to cover up what was really going on in life. His compliment gave me some momentum, but nothing could overshadow the fact that I was mentally starting to lose the plot. My anxiety was becoming so strong that between sets at the gym I’d have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom as I’d have panic attacks. Everything about life scared the crap out of me. My mind was against me and I had no idea why. All I knew was that something was wrong.
Meanwhile, I kept gaining weight. At the end of that Saturday, my trainer weighed me again. I was now 80 KG and my trainer worked out I was now averaging about 1 KG of weight gain per week. He was proud of me. I smiled, but deep down something still didn’t feel right.
The gym tells us so much.
The gym was a great way to gauge what was happening. On long weekends there was no one around except the die-hard losers like me who had nothing better to do. When winter came, the flu spread like wildfire and there was fewer people around.
Then the Australian summer would hit and everyone would flock to the gym to get those washboard abs or that bikini body happening. You could learn so much about how people live their lives by being at the gym.
“Everyone at the gym had their own story and their own motivation for why they would put their body through so much struggle all in the name of ‘Nice pecs bro’ with a fist bump at the end”
Some days I would stare out into the gym from the boxing cage that towered above all the machines and think about those bodybuilders training below me.
Were they really happy? Was the huge amount of steroid containers left in the bathroom really fooling anyone?
These questions would overtake my thoughts and even my dreams while I slept in my bed at nighttime. I knew this gym lifestyle wasn’t perfect, but I kept falling for the lie that once I got over 100KG, it would all be worth it.
One part of life went up while another part went down.
I kept training at the gym and eating my meals.
This new life felt comfortable and I thought I’d never give up. All that changed when one day I got a call. That call was essentially the beginning of the end for my career to date. I was running a business and it had experienced explosive growth. There were issues starting to brew and I felt more and more that I had to leave it all behind. This meant leaving behind a lot of money and even the BMW I drove to the gym every day in.
I arrived at the gym one Monday for Back and Bi’s day at around 5 pm. My trainer weighed me again and I was now around 98KG. I was so close to my goal. During training sessions, I liked to talk with my trainer. He was a simple guy but was very good at what he did. He was the General Manager of a major fitness chain as well as running his own personal training business on the side. I always admired his work ethic and how he made people feel.
I had a heart to heart conversation with him that Monday and told him what was brewing in my business. I wanted him to know that this gym lifestyle may come to a crashing end. I explained the financial implications of what was happening and how the $30k+ per year I was spending on keeping up this lifestyle could come to a stop. My trainer was such a lovely man and was so inspired by what I’d achieved that he offered to train me for free. I told him I’d never accept that offer if it came to it and he didn’t argue with me.
The weeks that followed were some of the hardest in my life.
To numb the pain I trained harder than I ever trained. I changed up every exercise I did to shock the muscles and rapidly increased the weights I was lifting. We started doing negative reps where he’d help me on the way up to drain the muscles even more. There was more grunting, more sweat and even bigger meals.
A few weeks later it was time to weigh in again. I knew this day for some reason was going to be momentous. I got on the scales and waited to hear the reading. I now weighed 101KG. I’d done it!!! With great pride, I wrote down 101KG in my gym diary. We both celebrated that moment. My trainer told me honestly that day that he never thought I’d last more than about two weeks.
He said I was the surprise of his personal training career and showed him just how important mental toughness was. What I never told him was just how weak my mind was. I didn’t want to show him the real me — only the strong side.
That’s what he knew me for and I was not going to give the act up.
Just as I hit this huge milestone, the rest of my world came crashing down.
It was twelve months to the day since I started training with my trainer and all the focus I’d given the gym life had caused me to lose focus on the rest of my life. I was tired, sick, exhausted, hadn’t had a holiday in a long time, faced financial challenges and was about to leave a business I loved.
The hard days came and they came quickly.
I walked into the gym the following Monday and gave my trainer the bad news: I was quitting the gym and going into hiding. He tried to talk me out of it, but there was no stopping me. I had to focus on getting out of this very dark place and I had to make time for myself. Trying to meet everyone’s ideal body image was destroying the very person I wanted to become.
It was now about survival.
I had to quit the gym.
The downhill phase.
Within three weeks of quitting the gym I’d lost 10 KG.
After about three months my weight evened out at 70KG. Not only was my career over, but my financial situation wasn’t good. This was one of the darkest periods in my life. I had no idea what to do and the gym was suddenly the least important thing in my life.
I booked myself in to have a mental health assessment. This idea came about after I called a government helpline telling them I needed help. Somehow, by pure chance, they assumed my problem was related to mental health. I had ten sessions with a psychologist that was partly funded by the government. I explained the crazy gym life I’d created and how everything else had fallen apart. I asked for help and got it.
The recovery process.
After finding out that I needed to start again, I did.
I read lots of books including “Think And Grow Rich.”
I attended a seminar for four days where I got the tools I needed to start again.
I began exercising again to feel good. This took the form of long walks around the neighborhood while listening to podcasts. The recovery took a long time. After four years from that day when I hit the 101 KG milestone, I was finally back on track. The battle in my head was what I had to win not some silly goal to gain weight and look muscley for everybody else.
Getting back to the top required a lot of experimentation. It was this experimentation that resulted in me accidentally finding blogging. It was this same recovery process that helped me see that I wanted to inspire the world through personal development (that’s how I beat mental illness and my obsession with the gym) and entrepreneurship (my legacy from many startups that succeeded and failed).
Final thought.
The lessons I learned from this gym lifestyle and rapid weight gain were many and varied. I learned:
- You have to love yourself first
- Don’t live by other people’s idea of body image
- The gym is not a good way to numb pain
- Your inner world dictates your outer world
So, next time you think about the gym/fitness or muscles or your own body image or your mental health remember my story of going from 60KG to over 100KG.
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