Four years ago, Westhill dad Paul Cummins was in Aberdeen’s Hazlehead Park playing with his infant daughter when he lifted her up, spun her around… and felt a sharp pain shoot through his back.
“She was six months old,” the 43-year-old says ruefully. “She wasn’t even heavy.”
The experience was a wake-up call for the Irishman, who lives in Westhill. He considered himself fit and healthy. He went to the gym, he worked out — he even did the occasional pull-up.
But since his daughter’s birth, he’d put on some extra weight, and the gaps between gym visits were getting longer.
“I said to myself, no, no, no, no,” he recalls, “I’m not going to be this soft dad. I’ve got a kid here. I need to get fitter.”
A lesson from Paul’s past
In his quest to lose his dadbod, Paul could rely on one thing.
He’d lost weight before.
When he went to university in Edinburgh, he was 17 and boasted a six-pack.
But, after some extremely fun university years and time working in Wales and Ireland as a rally car designer, his weight ballooned to nearly 16 stone.
“I was so unhealthy,” Paul remembers. “I had to do something to lose the weight.”
In a bold gambit, he decided to cycle the length of Ireland for charity — a grueling 435-mile trek over four days.
“I didn’t even own a bike at the time,” he admits with a laugh.
But it worked. He raised money for charity, and rediscovered his love of exercise.
A few years later, after moving to Aberdeen for a job maintaining offshore cranes, he’d lost about five stone.
Sudden changes in Westhill dad’s life
But then a couple of things happened that changed Paul’s outlook on life.
The first was he lost his job.
“It was devastating,” he says. “I was literally crying.”
It was 2014 and the global oil price had cratered. Oil and gas businesses in the north-east were laying off workers in an attempt to stay afloat.
Paul says his company sacked everybody on the first day back after Christmas.
“I’d worked my arse off for years and now I had nothing,” Paul remembers. “I just thought, you work hard and things figure themselves out, right? I was devastated.”
Then, in 2020, right at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, his daughter was born. Paul’s fitness regime, already more fragmented, suddenly took a back seat.
He needed help.
Paul meets Sam and goes on fitness journey
Paul had seen Sam Milne’s Instagram feed and initially thought the fitness coach and personal trainer wouldn’t even consider taking him on as a client.
“I genuinely thought, because of how ripped he is, he would only coach someone to be a better bodybuilder,” Paul laughs. “But not at all.”
Sam, from Bridge of Don and a former international taekwondo competitor with a background in bodybuilding, does indeed look good in a muscle top.
Sam remembers Paul asking for help in getting over his back injury, but also to drop weight, pack on muscle and generally “just have that confidence in what he does”.
They chatted and Sam quickly realised Paul’s biggest weakness was the food he ate.
“He won’t be shy in saying that he definitely likes a snack,” Sam says. “He struggled to come to the realisation that you’ve really got to stick to things. You have to put in the work.”
Paul agrees.
“The biggest difference Sam implemented was a meal plan. This is going to sound like a really weird thing to say, but it was a life-changing experience.”
Paul was used to coming home from work, having skipped lunch because he was too busy, and eating a cupboard full of crisps and chocolate while cooking dinner.
But Sam gave him a meal plan, and made sure he stuck to it. It was food that Paul could batch-cook at the weekends; food that he liked. But it was less about what he ate than having a routine. All Paul had to do was follow it.
“Because I have a meal plan, it’s planned,” he says. “I don’t have any choice.”
Staying away from the sweet cupboard
Paul says it took him about a year to “really get” the new eating regime, which he supplemented with gym workouts and CrossFit.
“It didn’t really change what I ate, it changed the amount,” he explains. “Before, I would eat a lot of processed foods, as well as what I cook, whereas now I eat two rotisserie chickens a week, and two kilos of chicken on top of that.”
Sam’s meal plan included four ‘tokens’, which allowed Paul to mix in a few treats. But eventually Paul even ditched those.
“Now, when I go to the sweet cupboard, I ask myself, is what you’re about to eat something you actually want to eat?” he says. “Are you going to use one of your four tokens a week on this? Because it’s mainly just crap.”
Amazingly, Paul’s new-found commitment was having an affect on his life outside of the gym.
After being made redundant, Paul started a property redevelopment company called Love Life Properties.
He now started implementing some of Sam’s meal plan mantras into his business.
“For the first time ever, I made a five-year business plan, and that came off the back of the meal plan,” Paul says. “It was the consistency I’d been missing.”
Says Sam: “Everything worth having takes work. If you want a Lamborghini, if you want a nice holiday, you have to work hard to achieve it.
“But that’s what excites me about fitness as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re a playboy philanthropist or if you were brought up in a household and on benefits — you have to put in the work.”
A new life for Paul
It’s been 15 months since Paul had his first session with Sam and he is delighted with the results.
He’s lost a stone and a half and is as fit as he has been his whole life. What’s more, his consistency means he spends even more time with his daughter.
Before, work would get in the way. But now he sets aside time for the family and sticks to it.
“It’s just choices,” Paul says. “Her need for attention doesn’t go away but because she’s a priority for me, that’s not a problem.”
His back is also better. He’s still undergoing rehab for it, but it’s on the mend.
And nowadays when he picks his daughter up, he doesn’t think twice.
“It’s a massive difference,” says Paul, who recently had her on his shoulders for the entirety of a music gig.
“I’m picking her up and running around, like no problem at all.”
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