The way my story started probably sounds familiar. In 2014, I was about 10 kg heavier than I am today. I was doing everything “right” – following a highly structured low-fat diet from a nutritionist, eating six times a day, running 70 km a week. I was constantly watching what I ate, constantly hungry, and no matter how hard I trained, the roll around my stomach would not budge.

 

My life was a tug of war between the calories I was consuming and the punishment I was putting myself through to burn them. I was tired, hungry, and overweight. The stress of a demanding corporate career was making everything worse. Hormones out of control. Mental health deteriorating significantly. I had to leave a lucrative career at 48. Not because I wanted to. Because my body gave me no other option.

 

Something big had to change. And it did.

 

What Dr. Stephen Phinney said in 2014

 

At the end of 2014, I went to hear Dr. Stephen Phinney speak about nutrition. What he said stopped me cold.

 

I had not been doing everything right. I had been doing everything wrong.

 

I was insulin resistant. My body was converting excess carbohydrate to fat, and no amount of running was going to fix that while I kept eating the same way. That was the actual problem – not willpower, not effort, not the gym.

 

Prof Noakes had reached the same conclusion and publicly reversed his long-held position on carbohydrate fuelling. He puts it plainly: “If you have to exercise to regulate your weight, your diet is wrong.”

 

That sentence landed hard. Because that was exactly what I had been doing.

 

I was genuinely afraid to eat fat. Low-fat eating had been drilled into me for decades, and I was addicted to carbohydrates in ways I had never examined. Still, a few days before Christmas 2014, I dropped the carbs and committed to an experiment: real food, healthy fats, six months, blood tests before and after.

 

My GP told me not to do it. My cholesterol was already “too high.” When I mentioned Prof Noakes, he became more dismissive. His reaction made me more determined.

 

What the experiment showed

 

Six months later I was surprised. The tummy roll was gone. I could run 15 km and not be hungry for three hours afterwards. I had dropped to two meals a day without effort, despite training 20 hours a week. My mental clarity was stable throughout the day. I had more energy than I had felt in years.

 

I was eating less and feeling better. I had changed nothing about how much I trained – only what I ate.

 

What I found when I started coaching

 

The more people I coached, the clearer it became. People were being given the same wrong information I had been given, from sources they had every reason to trust: nutritionists, fitness institutes, personal training courses. The framework was universal – low-fat, high-carb, eat frequently, snack to keep your metabolism firing.

 

None of it worked. And when it didn’t work, people blamed themselves.

 

As Dr. Jason Fung puts it: “Nobody makes money when you skip meals.” This is not incompetence. It is incentive.

 

Why I now coach men over 40 full-time

 

Today I run a men’s health and weight loss coaching practice. More than 15 years coaching, over 895 clients worldwide. The men I work with are typically between 40 and 65, carrying 10 to 30 kg they cannot shift, and have usually spent years trying the things they were told to try – eating less, exercising more – without lasting results.

 

Where I start is always nutrition. LCHF – low-carb, healthy-fat eating – is the base. Get that right, and the rest gets easier: the training, the sleep, the stress, the mindset. Fix nutrition first.

 

In 2016, I co-authored an article on fat adaptation for endurance athletes with Peter Defty, published in the USA Triathlon Coaching newsletter. But what I do has changed. The men I coach now are not athletes training for race day. Most of them are in demanding careers, pulled in multiple directions, and the last thing that got attention was their own health. That is the work now.

 

Two clients who changed their lives

 

Shaun Matthews came to me with a problem he had been managing for years. His liver function tests had been elevated since 2018, and nothing was bringing them back down. In 12 weeks on the program, he dropped 13 kg. His liver function returned to normal. His doctors were, in his words, “absolutely amazed.”

 

Craig is a retired army officer in his mid-50s who had been working with a dietitian for years without losing weight. Good nutritional advice, he told me – just the wrong nutritional advice. He went from 105 kg to 90 kg in four months. His blood markers improved across the board. “The best feature,” he wrote afterwards, “is that it was easy to stick to the plan. It’s almost embarrassing how easy it was.”

 

Neither of them had trained harder. They had just stopped fighting their own biology.

 

The one thing I want you to take away

 

You cannot outrun a bad diet. That is not just my opinion. This paper by Dr. Stephen Phinney and Prof Noakes covers the science directly.

 

If you are always hungry despite eating frequently, if your belly fat will not shift no matter how hard you train, if you have been told your diet is fine, but the results say otherwise: your diet is not fine. The advice you were given was built on assumptions that have not held up.

 

The fix is not complicated. But it requires questioning what you have been told.

 

Where to start

 

Try the following for one week:

 

• Breakfast: two-egg omelette, mixed vegetables (capsicum, zucchini, cabbage, spinach), cooked in butter with a protein source – bacon, salmon, or similar. No toast. No juice. No added sugar.
• Lunch: salad with avocado, protein (salmon, chicken, lamb, or beef), salad greens, olive oil.
• Dinner: whatever you normally eat, minus the potatoes, rice, and pasta. Hold the wine for the week.

 

Try it for one week. Pay attention to your hunger, your energy, your mental clarity.

 

To go deeper, I’ve written a free ebook that covers what the system got wrong and what to do instead: Break Free from the System Designed to Ruin Your Health.

 

More at andreobradovic.com.

 

Author Bio:

Andre Obradovic is a TNF Ambassador and men’s health and weight loss coach with 15+ years of experience and 895+ clients worldwide. He works exclusively online with men over 40 who want to lose weight sustainably by fixing nutrition first. andreobradovic.com