The Carpentry Years

In 2003, I was 22 years old, restless, and pretty clueless about where my life was heading. Up until then, I’d been working in IT — stuck behind a desk, staring at screens, and hating every second of it. I knew I didn’t want to spend my whole life indoors, tapping away on a keyboard. My dad had been in the building trade for years, and I looked at his work with a mixture of respect and envy. He grafted hard, came home tired, but there was something tangible about what he did. He built things. Real things. So I swapped the office for a tool belt and started a carpentry apprenticeship. 

At the time, I was about 13 stone (roughly 180 pounds). Not massive, not tiny, but definitely unhealthy. I had never been sporty — in fact, I hated PE at school and was usually the fat kid getting picked last. The truth is, I’ve always had to work twice as hard just to be bang average in anything physical. If you’ve seen Dodgeball, I was 100% an “Average Joe.” But I was young, naïve, and thought that manual labour would “sort me out.” Spoiler alert: it didn’t.  

For the next decade and a half, carpentry was my life. Long hours on site, heavy lifting, crawling through lofts, lugging tools up and down ladders. It was graft — proper, physical graft. But despite all the activity, my diet was a disaster. Bacon rolls, sausage baps, full-fat Coke, crisps, chocolate, late-night takeaways. I’d convince myself that because I was “active” I could eat whatever I wanted. 

That lie caught up with me in January 2014. I’d just bought a cheap set of bathroom scales after Christmas and figured I’d put on “a few pounds.” When I stepped on them and saw 280 pounds staring back at me, I nearly fell through the floor. Twenty stone. I couldn’t believe it. Somehow, despite a manual job that burned calories all day, I’d eaten myself into obesity.

That was my first real “oh shit” moment.

The very next day I was in the gym, battering the cardio machines. I starved myself. I skipped meals. I obsessed over burning as many calories as possible. For the rest of 2014, I was relentless. Hours on the treadmill, hours on the cross-trainer, week after week. I knew nothing about nutrition beyond “eat less,” and nothing about resistance training. But I was determined. 

By December that year, I’d dropped to 213 pounds. I was 3 pounds away from my ambitious target. I felt like I’d conquered the world. Then I broke my wrist at work, couldn’t train, and it all fell apart. The weight piled back on almost immediately. By early 2015 I was back up to the 220–230 range. 

And that was the story for the next couple of years. I hovered around 210, sometimes 225, never feeling in control. I was leaner than my heaviest days, but I never liked what I saw in the mirror. I was still “thin fat” — smaller but soft, no shape, no muscle. And deep down, I knew the truth: I hadn’t really learned anything.  

January 2017 was a turning point. I’d just had a knee tattoo (yes, it hurt like hell), and I didn’t want to sweat too much while it healed. So instead of pounding away on the cardio machines, I walked into the weights area. A mate from work, Lewis, had been through his own weight struggles, and we decided to try lifting together. 

That decision changed everything. For the first time, I felt like I was building something instead of just breaking myself down. Lewis always followed my lead, which meant I had to research what we were doing. I watched hours of YouTube videos, read forums, tried different programs. We started on classic “bro splits,” but over time we began to understand training principles properly — progressive overload, compound lifts, recovery.

That period lit the first spark of what would later become a full-blown passion.

But don’t get me wrong: the weight battles didn’t end there. By summer 2019, I was back up around 240 pounds. It felt like my whole adult life had been one big pendulum swing between panic dieting and rebounding. I’d work like mad to lose the weight, then slowly (or not so slowly) creep back up. 

Looking back, it wasn’t that carpentry failed me, or that I was lazy. The truth was, I didn’t understand nutrition, I didn’t understand my own relationship with food, and I definitely didn’t understand the mental side of weight management. Carpentry gave me discipline, yes. It gave me a thick skin, yes. But it also gave me excuses. “I work hard, I deserve this.” “I’ll burn it off tomorrow.” “One more takeaway won’t hurt.” 

The years slipped by, and with them went countless opportunities to really get it right. But every failure left me a little wiser, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.