Coached from the other side of the world.

Half a world away, he was sure it couldn’t work. Sixteen weeks later, Gurpartap was under 100kg for the first time in years.

A world apart.

Gurpartap leads a team at a global hedge fund in Singapore, around 6,800 miles from Tanvir in London. He had been with the firm the best part of a decade and moved out to Singapore in 2017, and as his career climbed his health slid down the list. Lockdown only compounded it. He had followed Tanvir for two years, his family quietly telling him to reach out, before he finally did, and even then he was sceptical. Everything would be remote: the training, the food, the daily check-ins, all of it run off photos and a shared spreadsheet. People living abroad, he assumed, simply don’t get coaching like that.

The penny drops.

At 120kg he was the heaviest he had ever been. The push came from people he respected telling him plainly that this was not okay, and from his own future planning: at 33, with a family he was planning for, he wanted to set himself up for the next fifteen to twenty years. He and Tanvir had actually met in Australia, and on a hike during that trip the penny dropped for good. He struggled badly, and Tanvir turned to him and asked him to picture where he would be sixteen weeks later.

Six thousand miles, online.

Singapore to London is the other side of the world, not a drive across town. There were no joint gym sessions, no shopping trips together, none of the in-person support he watched Tanvir’s London clients get. Every session and every adjustment ran on photos he sent and a spreadsheet they both lived in. What closed the gap was relentless daily contact and a plan built only for him.

Built around his life.

What changed his mind was how little had to change. Rather than tearing his routine apart, Tanvir built the plan around the life he already had. The gym was two floors below his flat. His own local supermarket websites became the basis for meals he would actually eat. Walks were slotted into his lunch break, and he stepped off the train two stops early to walk the rest home. Twelve thousand steps a day became sixteen, then twenty. A job change freed up more time, and the plan simply flexed to use it. Nothing about it felt like a different life.

Held to account.

The engine underneath all of it was accountability. Tanvir checked in every single day, coach and friend at once, and asked for total honesty: if something slipped, say so, not to be made to feel bad but so the next day could be set up to win. The late-night film with popcorn, the unplanned restaurant dinner, all of it got logged and problem-solved rather than hidden.

The vegetarian wall.

Gurpartap is a practising Sikh and vegetarian, and that had been the wall with every other coach he spoke to. None of them knew how to make a vegetarian plan actually work. The trap is a cultural one: high-carb, high-fat eating mistaken for looking healthy, and dal leaned on for protein it cannot realistically deliver. Tanvir, vegetarian himself for more than two decades, rebuilt it around portion control, proper vegetarian protein and food he genuinely wanted to eat, with room left to eat out. When the meal plan landed, Gurpartap was half-convinced it was too good to be true.

More than the scale.

The change was never only physical. The strain of carrying the weight lifted, his mind felt clearer, and the quiet, reserved version of himself gave way to someone trading jokes, trying new things and visibly happier. He learned to cook along the way, which he had always left to others, and it took real load off his wife Nikki and did his relationship good in the process.

Below 100 at last.

The scale moved the way it should, a steady decline rather than a sudden drop and a stall. From 120kg, Gurpartap lost 21.1kg in sixteen weeks and went under 100kg for the first time in years. His waist came down 19cm, his hips 15cm, and he went from a 2XL to a large, with his t-shirt finally hanging straight. He had told almost no one outside his immediate family, so the result landed as a genuine surprise.

Set up for life.

Because none of it was a crash plan, it holds. The habits are built into his week now, eating out included, planned rather than feared. Tanvir’s aim was never to drag him to a number and move on, it was to set him up for life, and the two of them came out of it as friends. Asked what he would tell anyone still hesitating, Gurpartap keeps it simple.