A woman sat in my office last year and told me she’d been eating 1,100 calories a day for six months and hadn’t lost a pound. My first response: “You’re not eating 1,100 calories.” She didn’t like that answer. But after a week of weighing and logging every single thing she consumed, the real number […]
I had a client tell me last month that he’d been “doing everything right” for two years and still couldn’t get lean. Training five days a week. Eating “clean.” Doing lots of cardio. Drinking protein shakes. The whole playbook or so it seemed. Then I asked him to track his food for one week. Actual […]
I had a conversation with a new client two weeks ago that perfectly captures where we are right now in the weight loss conversation. She’d been on Ozempic for five months. Down 26 pounds. Thrilled with the scale. Then she showed me her DEXA scan results. Twelve of those 26 pounds were lean mass. Muscle. […]
A client texted me at 6 AM this week. Three words: “Scale went up.” A bit of background: She’d been on Ozempic for four months and lost 18 pounds in the first twelve weeks. Then the scale stopped. Then it started climbing. Two pounds. Then four. She was frustrated. Confused. And ready to quit the […]
A new client walked into my gym six weeks ago looking like he’d aged five years overnight. He’d lost 22 pounds in two months on Mounjaro. By the numbers, a success story. But his face was gaunt. His shoulders had narrowed. His grip strength had dropped so much he could barely hold a 40-pound dumbbell. […]
Three different clients on three different medications causing three very different conversations in the past month alone. The first was a 46-year-old man on Ozempic, prescribed for type 2 diabetes, who wanted to know why his gym performance had dropped off a cliff. The second was a 43-year-old woman on Wegovy, losing weight rapidly, but […]
I’ve trained clients in New York City for over two decades. Hedge fund managers, Broadway performers, new parents running on four hours of sleep. And here’s what I’ve noticed across hundreds of body transformations: the leanest people in my gym almost never touch a treadmill. That should have woken you up. Good. The fitness industry […]
I can usually tell within ten minutes of a first consultation whether a new client over 40 has been through the cycle. The cycle looks like this: restrictive diet, aggressive cardio, fast initial weight loss, plateau, frustration, quit, regain everything plus a few extra pounds. Most of them have done it three times. Some five. […]
I watched a guy in my gym grind out a set of barbell curls until his face turned red, his lower back arched like a bridge, and the barbell was moving about an inch per rep. He racked the weight, looked at himself in the mirror, and said to his training partner: “That’s how you […]
I watched a woman in my gym spend 55 minutes on the elliptical. Heart rate locked at 128 beats per minute. Eyes glued to the screen that read “Fat Burn Zone.” She’s been doing that four days a week for the past three months. Same body. Same frustration. Same misplaced effort. The fitness industry has […]