I was 106kg. Not in a "I let myself go over Christmas" way. Properly overweight, for years, telling myself I'd sort it out. Monday was always the day. Monday came every week. Nothing changed.
It wasn't laziness. Looking back I understand it better now. Food was noise I couldn't turn off. A bad day at work, a hard week, anything stressful and I'd come home and eat. It wasn't even enjoyment, it was just what I did. That cycle ran for a long time.
12 week fight camp. A charity bout, but I treated it like it was real. That camp taught me more about discipline than anything I'd done before. I got down to 89kg. I stepped in the ring and won by TKO in the first minute.
Then I went home and plateaued. Got comfortable. Stalled. The fight had given me a deadline and without one I didn't know how to keep going. So I went looking for something that would help.
I'm not going to dress this up. I found Retatrutide, a peptide that among other things significantly reduces appetite and food noise. And it changed everything.
That constant pull towards food, the noise that had been there my whole adult life, went quiet. And when it went quiet I realised something. I wasn't someone who lacked discipline. I was someone fighting a battle in my own head every single day that most people around me weren't fighting. When that battle stopped, I had space. Mental space I hadn't had before.
Bad day at work. Come home. Instead of eating, I went for a run. That sounds small. It wasn't small. That was the moment the compounding started. One good decision led to another. It snowballed.
I got down to 72kg.
I got my bloods done properly and my testosterone levels weren't optimal. Not dramatically low, just not where a man my age doing what I was doing should be. So I self prescribed TRT to bring myself into the optimal range.
I gained 8kg. Good weight. The kind where things start working properly, where training has an actual effect, where you wake up feeling like yourself. The difference was noticeable in everything, not just the gym.
I know some people will read TRT and peptides and immediately form an opinion. That's fine.
But the fitness industry is full of people showing you results and hiding the tools they used to get there. Selling you the idea that it was just discipline and hard work when the full picture is more complicated than that.
I'm not interested in that. If I'm going to document this journey then it's all of it or none of it. These were tools I researched, made informed decisions about, and used deliberately as part of an obsession with getting the best out of myself. I'd make the same decisions again.
Every time I built momentum, something would go. A niggle here, a setback there. I started using BPC-157 and TB-500, peptides with strong evidence for accelerating tissue repair. They kept me training when I'd have previously stopped. Staying in the game consistently, even at reduced capacity, turned out to matter more than any single training block.
I also started MT2, which affects melanin production. My skin tans better, my beard went from bright ginger to dark brown. Some people would call that looksmaxxing. I call it becoming the version of myself I always wanted to see in the mirror. Something I'd been chasing for a long time.
I run a tree surgery business in the Midlands. I train every week around a physical job and a full life. I play Premier League cricket. I'm chasing running PBs and strength goals at the same time because I don't see why you have to pick one.
The obsession with optimisation that started with Retatrutide and bloodwork hasn't stopped. Sleep, HRV, nutrition, recovery, training structure. Everything is a variable. Everything can be improved. That's not a burden, that's just how I think now.
I'm not selling a 12 week plan. I'm not promising a transformation. I'm documenting what actually works for a real person with a real life, using every tool available, hiding nothing.
Follow the journey @jackwilliamx_