How Dr Mark, a 62-year-old doctor and A-grade competitive cyclist for over 20 years, stopped smashing himself in the gym for zero result and lost 11kg by fixing his diet first, working with health coach Andre Obradovic.
Dr Mark is a 62-year-old doctor and former A-grade competitive cyclist, racing at that level for over 20 years. He’d been fit his whole adult life. But the last several years of study and work pressure pushed his health down the priority list.
Before working with health coach Andre Obradovic, Mark was still training hard – hammering himself on the bike, doing high-intensity sessions on Zwift several times a week – convinced that if the weight wasn’t coming off, he just needed to push harder.
Mark had let his health slide gradually, not suddenly. Years of competitive cycling had built a high tolerance for pain and effort, so when the weight crept on, his instinct was to train harder, not eat differently. He was doing maximal-intensity sessions on the bike, the kind that left him nauseous, barely able to stand under the shower afterwards. He couldn’t manage those sessions more than twice a week – his body couldn’t recover from them. And none of it moved the scale. Not a gram.
He’d also tried the conventional formula everyone tells you works: eat less, move more. It didn’t. He described trying “everything,” using every piece of standard advice, and getting nowhere for years. The moment it broke was ordinary – he looked in the mirror one day and didn’t recognise the man looking back. A lifetime of fitness, and what he saw was, in his words, “a fat old man.” He knew straight away that repeating the same approach and expecting a different result wasn’t going to work. He’d found Andre’s name through Peter Brukner’s site, in a list of low-carb practitioners, and made the call with nothing left to lose.
Andre didn’t ask Mark to train harder. He asked him to eat differently and train smarter – a reversal of everything Mark’s competitive cycling background had taught him.
On the food side, the shift was the same foundation Andre uses with every client: cut sugar, cut refined carbohydrate, stop fearing fat. For a doctor, the physiology mattered – Mark wanted to understand the mechanism, not just follow instructions. Andre walked him through what chronic sugar intake does to insulin: repeated spikes wear down the pancreas over decades, and that pathway ends in insulin resistance, fat storage, and the metabolic disease Mark sees in his own patients. In his own words:
“Insulin is a fat storage hormone. If you’ve been flogging that pancreas for 40 or 50 years, eventually it’s going to wear out… you develop a condition called insulin resistance.”
On training, Andre introduced MAF work – low heart-rate aerobic sessions calculated from the simple 180-minus-age formula. For Mark, that meant training around 120 beats per minute, a fraction of the effort he was used to punishing himself with:
“I get my heart rate at or around 120, and I actually enjoy it. I really, really enjoy it, and I can do it every day. Previously, I couldn’t do those sessions more than maybe twice a week because it just destroyed me.”
Intermittent fasting was layered in as the new habits settled.
In 12 weeks, Mark went from around 75kg to 64kg – an 11kg drop, with the first 5kg gone inside five to six weeks. He’s now lighter than he was racing competitively in his twenties. Every weigh-in reinforced the plan and made what felt like early sacrifice worth it.
The change went beyond the number on the scale. The mid-afternoon crash that used to force him to want to lie down disappeared. In a job with zero tolerance for being under 100%, he found himself sharper and more consistent through the whole day, not just functioning but performing.
And as a doctor, the education became something he could hand straight to his patients:
“As a doctor, the wonderful offshoot of this is that I am now armed with this new information that was never taught to me in medical school that I can help my patients with, I can educate my patients with.”
He was blunt about what made it work: no magic bullet, but a genuinely simple formula, and weekly accountability that didn’t disappear the moment the call ended.
Mark isn’t just a client. He’s a doctor. So when the conversation turned to why his training wasn’t touching his weight, Andre didn’t just tell him to cut sugar; he had to explain the mechanism to a man qualified to check his working. What follows is Mark breaking down insulin resistance in his own words – the same explanation he now gives his own patients.
Sugar and refined carbs spike insulin. Insulin’s job is to move that glucose into storage. Do that daily for decades and the pancreas wears out, the cells stop responding, and the body defaults to storing fat instead of burning it. No amount of cardio reverses that pathway. Only the food does. It’s the same principle behind Mark’s 11kg drop, and it’s why diet comes before training with every client Andre coaches, not after it.
Mark spent two decades as an A-grade competitive cyclist, so “just exercise more” was never his problem. He was already hammering himself on the bike several times a week, hard enough to nearly pass out in the shower afterwards, and still not losing a gram. Here’s Mark explaining what changed when Andre took him off maximal effort and onto MAF training instead.
Twenty years of racing had trained Mark to associate results with suffering. More intensity, more damage, more discipline. None of it moved his weight. Dropping to a heart rate around 120 (the 180-minus-age formula) felt like giving up ground, but it’s what let him train daily instead of surviving two brutal sessions a week. Low-intensity work sits in the actual fat-burning zone, and once his diet had insulin under control, that consistency did more than any amount of suffering ever had.
Fix the insulin problem. Change how you train. Put together, that’s the whole story.
Fix the insulin problem first. That’s what stops the body defaulting to fat storage and starts putting it in reach. Then bring in low-intensity movement, not more of it, less of it, and it extends what the diet change already started. Mark had the order backwards for twenty years: maximal effort first, diet as an afterthought. Reverse it, and the same discipline that never worked on the bike alone dropped 11kg in 12 weeks.
This is not a Mark-specific fix. It’s the sequence Andre runs with every client, regardless of their training background. Diet first. Training supports it. Never the other way around.
When you start recognising the misinformation you’ve been fed, everything about your health begins to make sense. Gain the clarity and confidence to make choices that truly benefit your health.
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