Richard Gibson, a busy UK executive who couldn’t get through a day without snacking, swapped it for two meals a day and a walk – and dropped from just under 104kg to 86kg, coached by video call from 13,000 miles away.
Richard Gibson runs a demanding executive career in the food service industry – one of the biggest companies in the world, based in the UK. Before we started, his days looked like most men his age. Three meals, and everything in between. “You couldn’t get by the day without breakfast, lunch, dinner,” is how he described it once we started comparing notes. “And you were eating in between. Terrible. Up and down.”
When Richard first got in touch, I told him straight: we’re going to drop 15 kilos in 12 weeks. He didn’t buy it.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he told me later. “I didn’t want to believe it. I mean, obviously I wanted to believe it, but I thought – that’s not going to happen.”
Fair reaction. Most people hear a number like that and assume it’s what a coach says to close a sale.
We started on weekly video calls – Richard in the UK, me in Melbourne, sometimes him visiting family in Perth. At one point he worked out we were talking across roughly 13,000 miles. Distance never came up again after that. Nutrition came first, same as it does with every client: cut the carbs, cut the sugar and processed food. No extra gym work required – walking was the only exercise on the plan.
The snacking went first.
“I don’t snack,” Richard said, months later, like it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing. Snacking had been the whole problem. Within a couple of weeks he’d gone from three meals plus grazing all day to three meals, no snacking in between. Then he dropped a meal altogether.
“Now you’ve gone to two meals a day,” I said to him on our last call, “and you’re not hungry.”
“It’s been incredibly, incredibly easy,” he said.
Twelve weeks after that first call, Richard was down to 86kg. Not 15 kilos lost. Nearly 18.
“I’m really pleased with that,” he told me. “That was an amazing achievement for me, given that I really struggled to shift any real weight, let alone that much, in a period of time.”
Ask Richard what actually made the difference and he doesn’t point to the meal plan first. He points to the questions.
“Andre’s advice has always been good advice – not autocratic in what he says. Always, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to improve?’ Always pushing the question on what your habits are like, because it’s those little subtle changes that can help things.”
On whether it was worth what he paid for it, he did the maths out loud on our last call: “Break down the cost of the coaching and you’re looking at pence a day. What would you pay to lose the weight, get fit, get healthy, get in control of your life? It’s nothing.”
And on what’s waiting for him now the weight’s gone:
“If you’ve got any old clothes in your wardrobe from when you were a teenager, get them out – they’ll come back in fashion. I’m about to throw my flares away. But this t-shirt, I’ve had for about 15 years.”
