This ‘rejuvenated and refreshed’ businessman lost 34kg and beat his depression

It’s been an amazing journey. I’ve built a better understanding of myself. I have come through this dark tunnel, rejuvenated, refreshed, transformed both physically and mentally.

Excessive eating had become Andrej’s “self-medication” for his depression.

The 44-year-old businessman found himself an incredibly dark place.

At his heaviest, he weighed almost 110kg, and struggled to pull himself out of bed every morning.

But, even worse, Andrej’s unhappiness was affecting his family life. He felt easily agitated, he couldn’t go cycling with his kids, and his performance at work was suffering.

It became an unforgiving cycle – and before long – he realised enough really was enough.

He started working alongside his own Ultimate Performance trainer, and with a properly planned diet and a purposeful training program locked in place, the changes were mightily impressive.

Now, for the first time in his life, Andrej has a six-pack. So good – his wife “can’t keep her hands off”!

He now doesn’t feel as if he’s being judged because of his weight. And, he brings a whole different energy and enthusiasm to work meetings.

Here, Andrej reveals how he made such eye-catching progress in only a few months…

So, Andrej, what motivated you to start training with Ultimate Performance?

Okay. Before I started at U.P., I was in a bad place and in bad shape. The scales had hit triple digits in terms of kilograms. I was in a bad place mentally. I was depressed.

My family life was not great. I was basically self-medicating and self-soothing by eating excessively every night. My entire eating regime was completely upside down: overeating, extremely lethargic, very, very hard to get out of bed in the mornings. It was very hard to motivate myself to do anything, quite frankly, whether at home or at work.

At work, my performance suffered. I could barely muster the energy to get out with the kids and go cycling or kick a football about. And I was taking that kind of personal unhappiness out on my children or my wife, and it was just a bad spot. I knew I needed to do something to kickstart a new way of living and turn the ship around.

What was the catalyst for change? What was the moment that made you put your trust in U.P.?

The catalyst was seeing the scales hit a hundred. I think I peaked at 107kg, and my BMI was off the charts.

Seeing the confluence of weight gain and the impact it was having on professional and family relationships and my marriage was a turning point. I stared at myself in the mirror before getting in the shower, and I didn’t like what I saw.

I didn’t like who I was, and I didn’t like how I was acting. There was nothing I liked about myself.

The physical part has always been the catalyst for mental transformation, so I knew I needed to address that aspect of my life.

What have your friends, family, and colleagues said about your dramatic transformation?

People talk about it wherever I go. Everywhere I go, people comment on what a transformation I’ve been through, whether it’s in work meetings with my colleagues or external meetings with clients who have seen me in periodic intervals over the last six months.

Everyone has noticed, and what really matters to me is that I’ve noticed it in myself first and foremost. I noticed that I bring a different type of energy to meetings. I bring a different type of energy to interactions with my wife.

I’ve changed all manner of bad habits and developed new positive habits, and U.P. was the catalyst for all of that. It’s allowed me to build a foundation to transform my whole life, starting with the physical, which has now expanded to cover mental areas.

I’m in a much better place physically, emotionally, and mentally. And that starts with the fact that I now wake up in the morning, I look at myself in the mirror, and I like what I see, and so does my wife.

The kids are now focused on diet as well. I am tapering their enthusiasm, given their young age, and my wife can’t keep her hands off me, which is nice.

Did you ever think it would be possible to achieve visible abs before you came to U.P.?

I knew it was theoretically possible. I’ve seen videos of people doing weight training, and I’ve seen how muscle groups develop. I never thought I would get there myself, and I certainly never thought I would get there in anything like the timeframe that I got here with U.P.

It’s been truly amazing. You don’t see many middle-aged men with six-packs or eight-packs running around and with finely tuned 10% body fat physiques. It doesn’t happen very often. So, when it does, people do take note, and people do come up to you and say, ‘So how have you accomplished this?’

It is certainly a conversation starter.

Would you recommend U.P. to other people?

Definitely, I’ve become an ambassador for U.P. since joining the program.

Once you make the mental shift and you commit to the process, you start seeing the results incredibly quickly. I’m a results-oriented person. I like to see the progress in the charts. I like to see the cause and effect, and that link was established quickly after starting the program, like a virtuous cycle.

The faster you see the results, the more you commit to the process, and the more you commit to the process, the more results you see. And so that kind of positive loop was super instrumental for me, and it helped me recommend U.P. to other friends who, in some shape or form, we’re going through similar challenges in their lives.

I recommended it to my colleagues, and I know a few of them have already embarked on their U.P. journey themselves.

How has the knowledge and guidance imparted to you at U.P. helped when left to your own devices?

The real benefit of implementing the program while travelling is that it is possible to calibrate. You learn tricks and find ways to make it work when you are outside your U.P. journey. A lot of the tools, tricks and lessons that I learned at U.P. are there with me to stay.

One of the many useful things about U.P. was that it has allowed me to recalibrate my own views around what constitutes a good diet, what constitutes a good exercise regime, and what a good plate of food looks like at different times of the day. And so those are lessons that I think are priceless, and they will stay with me irrespective of the U.P. program.

I found it incredibly empowering!

I go to restaurants, scan menus, and know what is good for me. I adjust my schedule to make sure that I get a decent number of steps in per day to make sure that my activity levels remain up.

These adjustments aren’t for specific business trips. They’re now permanent. They’re part of my life wherever I go. I look for a hotel with a gym that has certain types of equipment.

I’ve now woven it into my life in a way that would not have been possible without the U.P. experience. And, of course, it helped that wherever I went, my trainer would demand video footage of gym equipment and would direct me explicitly as to what equipment to use and for how long. There was no running away.

How have you found the one-to-one training at U.P.?

This would not have been possible without my trainer. The program does push you hard, both in and outside of the gym. And that requires either a degree of self-determination that candidly I didn’t have, or it requires a degree of peer accountability, which I did have with him.

It was one of those love and hate relationships where you have daily accountability for what you’re doing and you own your mistakes and you ride the positives and you live through the highs.

You live through the lows as well, but you do it together. And I would look twice at a bar of chocolate knowing what my trainer would do to me in the gym the following day.

Do you think you could have done this process by yourself?

Definitely not. What is required to stick to the diet is a level of peer accountability.

I get that partially through my family, who now understand what it is that I should and shouldn’t eat. And they helped me along the way. But in order to break the old habits and develop the new ones, it required a level of accountability.

I don’t see how I could replicate that outside of the trainer/client relationship. He has been instrumental in that regard, keeping me honest on a daily basis.

In the end you get out of it what you put into it. If you are not honest with yourself and you don’t log your food accurately, then the only person who loses out from that is yourself as their client. You need someone to question your choices, raise a finger or an eyebrow. Without it, I don’t think it would work.

There is no chance in hell I would’ve pushed myself in the gym the way my trainer pushed me.

How would you summarise your fitness journey with U.P.?

It’s been an amazing journey. I’ve built friendships. I’ve built a better understanding of myself.

I have come through this dark tunnel, rejuvenated, refreshed, and transformed both physically and mentally in a way that I never thought a training program would ever be able to deliver.

I have nothing but good things to say about it, and I will be a proponent and an ambassador for U.P. forever.

It’s been a real pleasure and a privilege to be here.

Give yourself a mental and physical edge over your colleagues, starting today. Work with your own U.P. trainer today and see results in just weeks.  

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