David Wales went from just under 88kg to 77kg in eight weeks by changing what was on his plate, not how hard he trained – and why the result held after coaching stopped.
David Wales was already doing the work. Regular gym sessions, consistent effort. The scale wasn’t moving anywhere close to what that effort should have bought him.
“I was going to the gym quite regular, but I just wasn’t decreasing my weight considerably, which I wanted to do,” he told me.
A trip to Queensland was the trigger. Great time, good trip – and it left him looking at himself differently when he got back. “I thought it was time to knuckle down and make a challenge,” he said. “That’s what I did.”
When we started, David set himself a conservative target: lose around 7 kilos, get as close to 80kg as he could before Christmas. He was just under 88kg at the time.
He didn’t stay conservative for long. A couple of weeks in, he moved his own goalposts – 78kg. Then he floated 75kg and second-guessed himself on it. He asked me straight if that was unreasonable. I told him it wasn’t.
He didn’t want to log food on a computer either. “Can I just write stuff in a book, and bring it in every week?” he asked. I told him that was fine – on one condition. If the results didn’t show up, we’d have to do it differently.
They showed up. Every week David walked in and stepped on the scale down a kilo or more, almost every single week, off a handwritten book and a verbal check-in. No app. No daily logging.
“I really liked your flexibility,” he told me. “If it was the other way and you pushed me to what you probably wanted, I might have kind of pushed back a bit.” That’s not an accident. I’m there to serve the client, not run everyone through the same system. Being flexible about the method was never the same as being flexible about the outcome – and he still hit every number he set.
The mechanism itself was never complicated. Cut the bread, keep the rest. “As soon as you introduce a vegetable with your eggs, and you can still have your bacon, you still have your mushrooms, and your avocado – you have all that. But by replacing the bread with a veggie, a fried veggie, it just goes a long way. And you don’t miss it.”
That’s the part David keeps coming back to when people ask what he’s doing. “People say to me, how’s your diet? I said, it’s not a diet.” No, what is it then? “It’s a way of life. It’s just the way we should be eating.”
Eight weeks after his first call, David was 77kg. Not 7 kilos lost. Eleven.
“11 in about eight weeks,” he said. “And the thing that I’m loving is that I’m never hungry.”
Most weeks weren’t a grind toward that number either – he was down a kilo-plus almost every time he stepped on the scale, straight off a book and a conversation.
That’s where most testimonials stop. David’s didn’t. Three weeks after coaching ended, still eating this way with no one checking in on him, he’d set himself a new rule: 78kg, and not a gram past it. “I will not go past 78,” he said. For the past month he hasn’t needed to enforce it. “I haven’t really tried that hard, but I haven’t exceeded 76. And I haven’t been hungry.”
Ask him what actually changed and he doesn’t point to the food first. He points to being accountable to someone. “When you’re accountable to someone, you’ve got so much more chance of achieving what you want to achieve. If you’re left alone to your own devices and you don’t report to someone, I don’t think I ever realised how important that was.” He’s 55. This was the first time in his life he’d ever reported to someone to hit a goal – and the first time it actually stuck. Three weeks unsupervised, and it’s holding: “I know where I’m at, and I know what I can do, and what I can’t do. If I have a big night, I know I’m going to get back on track the next day.”
Ask him what’s actually different day to day beyond the scale, and he leads with energy. “Even productiveness around the house – my garden’s improving, the stuff done there. I would previously probably get out of bed later, I’d probably not be as productive.” He runs a demanding, high-pressure job. The energy shows up there too, without adding a single extra gym session to get it. If anything, he’s doing less structured training now than when he started. “It could be swimming, it could be anything you do – running’s easier, swimming’s easier, work’s easier.”
The proof shows up in smaller ways too. David cleared out a wardrobe’s worth of old clothes – “they’re out of style anyway,” he said, which is exactly what I told him would happen back when he first set the goal. Not long after, his wife sent me a text: David had been down the street buying a full new set of clothes. Small detail. It’s the kind of proof a testimonial can’t manufacture.
