I'm 40. I've spent fifteen years in a job made of airports, hotel breakfasts and client dinners, and for most of that time I trained four or five days a week. Early, late, in hotel gyms with two dumbbells and a broken treadmill. I've always liked it. I still do.
So when the weight went on, I couldn't work it out. I was doing the hard part. I was the one going for a run at 6am in a city I'd landed in at midnight.
The hard part wasn't the part that mattered. Training was never my problem. Food and drink was.
At my heaviest I weighed around 100kg, carrying it in all the wrong places: my face, my belly and a rather unflattering chest.
I eventually used a GLP-1 to break the cycle. More on why later, because the interesting bit isn't the medication. It's what I had to fix while I was on it.
Over 16 weeks I lost more than 20kg, then intentionally regained a little in the right places. Today I feel better than ever.
If you're in a similar job, some of this will be familiar.
You can't out-train a corporate calendar
An hour of proper training is worth having. It protects muscle, it manages stress, it keeps you functional at 50. It is not a calorie budget.
A client dinner with wine can comfortably run to 1,800 calories. That's most of a day, and it takes about ninety minutes and no effort at all. Four of those a week and the training becomes irrelevant to your weight, though it's still doing everything else for you.
I spent years trying to earn dinner in the gym. It doesn't work, and it makes you resent both.
Fix lunch and you've fixed dinner
The single biggest change I made had nothing to do with dinner.
I used to skip lunch, or eat a meal deal in a taxi at 3pm. Then I'd arrive at a 7:30 dinner, sit down in front of bread and butter, and make every decision from there in a hole. Nobody makes good calls hungry, tired and three hours from bed.
Now I eat a real lunch every day. Protein, vegetables, a proper carbohydrate. It takes fifteen minutes I used to claim I didn't have, and I can prepare it in advance for days away from home. Dinner then becomes a normal meal rather than a rescue.
Decide before you're in the room
I order first. It sounds trivial. It isn't. It means I choose from the menu rather than from what the person next to me just said. I've been known to check the menu before I go and plan my food during the day with that meal in mind.
If it's a standing reception, I eat beforehand. Canapés are the worst calorie-per-satisfaction trade in professional life and you'll have eleven of them without noticing.
One bad day doesn't have to become a bad fortnight
I stopped restarting on Mondays. A bad Tuesday is now just a bad Tuesday.
And I stopped treating a week away as a write-off. Four write-off weeks a quarter is a third of the year.
Look at the drinking honestly
This is the one nobody in corporate life wants to examine, so I'll be plain about it.
Alcohol is calorie-dense, it isn't filling, it lowers the quality of every food decision after it, and it wrecks the sleep that makes tomorrow's training and tomorrow's judgement possible. Two glasses of red is roughly the same as a decent snack you didn't count.
I'm not asking you to be the person with sparkling water at the awards dinner. But I decide in advance what I'll drink and roughly how much, before I'm in a room where someone else is topping up the glass. That one change did more than anything I did in a gym.
Learn to cook, and cook for the people you live with
I love food. That was never in question, and I'd be suspicious of any plan that required me to stop.
What changed is that I learned to use it. I cook for the family as often as I can when I'm home: the same meal for everyone, no separate sad plate for Dad. We're vegetarian, so that's usually beans, rice, a pile of vegetables. Chilli with beans in it. A curry that takes twenty minutes.
Cooking is the highest-leverage habit available to a busy executive, and it's the one that gets outsourced first. When you cook, you know what's in it, you eat with your kids rather than after them, and the default option in your own house stops being whatever's in the cupboard at 9pm or the fastest option on Uber Eats.
Eat carbohydrates. Eat fibre.
The market wants to sell you "protein this, protein that": bars, coffee, crisps, powders. Protein is important, particularly if you're training and particularly if you're in a deficit. But the current conversation has cast carbs as the enemy and left fibre as an afterthought, and that's simply wrong.
Fibre does a lot of the work of keeping you full, and it's the thing most busy people are badly short of. I eat oats, potatoes, rice, and bread. Alongside protein and vegetables, not instead of them.
Why I used a GLP-1
Because after fifteen years, the habits weren't going to break on their own.
I tried. Repeatedly. Every attempt ran fine until a heavy quarter arrived, and then the environment won, because the environment always wins a straight fight with intention.
Mounjaro curbed my appetite and quieted the constant thinking about food. Even in those environments, I physically couldn't eat the volumes I was used to. When the old urges kicked in, I simply couldn't act on them the way I used to.
What it gave me was distance: enough space to eat less without spending all day thinking about it, and enough to actually build something different. It doesn't teach you to cook, it doesn't order for you at dinner, and it has no opinion about the wine. Those are still your job, and mine.
Everything above is what I built inside that space. Sorted lunch. I learned to cook properly. Decided about drinking. Kept training, but for the right reason: to hold onto muscle rather than to earn dinner.
The honest summary
I didn't need more discipline. I had plenty. You don't do this job without it.
I needed to point it somewhere useful. The gym was already handled. The food wasn't, and the drinking definitely wasn't, and those were the two things my working life was quietly optimised to get wrong.
The medication broke the cycle. It didn't build the replacement.
I still train because I enjoy it. I still eat well because I enjoy that too. The difference is that I now know how to use food rather than just like it.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's exactly what we work through at GLP Approach. You’ll work with me, Robbie and Joe for real coaching, accountability and customised nutrition to help you create new habits. www.glpapproach.com
Chris Angus is a certified Sports Nutrition Coach and a co-founder of GLP Approach: training and nutrition coaching for people on, coming off, or living beyond GLP-1 medication.