Sandip

I am a 42 year old father of 2, currently working in the world of IT Consultancy within the retail sector.

Throughout my childhood, I was the fat, introverted, shy kid, lacking in confidence with a really bad relationship with food. I loved all junk food over and above Mum’s Indian food! Peers bullied me about my body, but when family members made jokes, it hurt even more.

I was never into fitness, although I wanted to be. I grew up watching movies like Kickboxer, Bloodsport and looked at the physiques of martial artists and wanted to be like them, but I never had a reason to.

In October 2012 I was at my heaviest at 100KG (16 Stone, 220lbs, and I’m only 5’ 6”), and I had surgery for a procedure under GA. I hated my body and myself and 2 nights later my then wife told me she wanted to leave me!

It was at this point that I decided that I needed to do something, else I would just continue to grow and all the stress that was soon to come upon me would probably have made things a lot worse. So I bought a X-trainer, and started to see weight drop off. However, my relationship with food haunted me. I would crave junk and some nights I could quite easily get through a box of 3 full size Magnum Ice Creams and chocolate bars on top. I would feel rubbish, but thought that I would just work a bit harder the next day (trying to out train a bad diet).

Bhavini

I am a 39 year old neurologist working in a busy hospital and mother of 2.

I am passionate about fitness and have been doing some form of training since I was 16 years old. I was an overweight girl and had low confidence in myself. At 16, I started to diet, reading loads of magazines and following random calorie restriction diets. I lost a lot of weight and by 18 I was officially underweight and developed bulimia. I then spent the next 6 years battling this condition, without much support as in those days it was a taboo subject and doctors were also not good at addressing the condition. I did it, with lots of rebounds, and then suddenly on 14th February 2005, I stopped! Since then, I have spent all my life reviewing my relationship with food and what works for me and what doesn’t. Fitness has been my key to helping me in all aspects of life. It has been my anchor and I cannot imagine living without doing something requiring movement. I have run half marathons, the London marathon, cycled the London Bridges event and London to Brighton event and eventually a mini-duathlon in October 2016. However, despite all of this, I wanted to look toned and have great muscle definition. While I was doing some weight training, I just needed some help and focus to stick to a program which will help me with obtaining the strength I desired. Diet was always my “issue”. While I was healthy, I used to eat the calories I burned.

In August 2016, we both came together after our divorces and the lessons we had learned along the way. Our first date took place with both of us at completely different stages of our health journey.

In September 2019 whilst on holiday in Singapore to watch the Formula One, while lounging by the pool, Bhavini signed the two of them up to join RNT Fitness for the January 2020 intake!

Process & Working with RNT

We were both a bit nervous but excited about the new challenge. We armed ourselves with the knowledge via the RNT website, and read the articles multiple times, and decided to not wait until January. From October 2019, we made up our own nutrition program based on the RNT articles, and increased our step count. We started to food prep our meals for 3 days at a time. We still didn’t understand the difference between muscle building (requiring calorie surplus) and fat loss (calorie deficit), and we felt we were doing both! But the journey from here taught us a lot.

We realised we needed to look at our 3Ss to ensure we hit the ground running in January 2020. To help enable us to do that, we changed gym membership to a 24 hour gym, and joined the 4am club and to be honest, we have never looked back

The results

We had completely bought into the philosophy of RNT. For us, the RNT education has helped us stick to the training and nutrition program. We are good students if nothing else and always met deadlines. Therefore, we set another one for ourselves … and booked our photoshoot immediately. Keeping our workouts early meant that nothing got in the way of our journey, while also being able to work and take care of the children. Even when COVID closed the gyms, we had accumulated a decent amount of home equipment over time, so we never looked back, and went full steam ahead into the photoshoot.

For us, this was not about the ticking of boxes as such, but more showing ourselves that we can do whatever we set our minds to. We did something challenging together early into our marriage and this has helped us understand each other better.

We now look forward to learning more about building muscle and increasing our metabolism in the long run.