Let me be honest about something most people skip over in their fitness transformation posts.
The before photo. The after photo. The “I decided to change my life” caption. Clean, inspiring, shareable.
What they leave out is the part in the middle where everything was falling apart at the same time and food was the only thing that asked nothing of you in return.
That is the part I want to talk about.
What Actually Happened
I came back from Ireland carrying more than just luggage. We were supposed to settle down in Ireland for good. We uprooted everything from Singapore along with our pet – Smokey and moved to Ireland at the peak of Covid.
I was still in the middle of a full-time MBA at Trinity College Dublin. Simultaneously — because apparently I do not believe in doing one thing at a time — I was also finishing a Postgrad CIPD UK Level 7 Masters in HR. I was managing the APMEA region in a demanding Regional Talent Leader role, clocking well over 12 hours a day, most of it sedentary, most of it high-pressure, almost none of it involving sunlight or movement.
At the same time, my dad was having multiple strokes. My mom was navigating osteoporosis, bronchitis, and asthma that kept cycling back. I was the person holding things together at home while also trying to hold things together professionally.
My body kept the score. I just was not reading it.
When I returned to Singapore, I had packed on weight like it was a full-time job that I had to perform. And if I am being completely honest with myself, which is the whole point of this post — I was going through mild depression. I did not call it that at the time. I called it stress. I called it being busy. I called it a difficult season.
But it was depression – Samant witnessed everything and I kept denying it. Quiet, functional, well-dressed depression that showed up to meetings and submitted assignments on time and still could not get out of bed without a reason.
The Job That Paid Well and Cost More
I made a career decision during that period that I still consider one of my biggest professional regrets.
The German company I had joined was acquired. I moved into an RPO role. The base pay was close to SGD200K. On paper, that is a success story. In reality, I was miserable every single day.
I worked with someone whose operating mode was a superiority complex wrapped in gaslighting delivered with a smile. If you have ever worked with someone like that, you know exactly what I mean. If you have not, consider yourself lucky. It is the kind of environment that makes you question your own memory, your own judgement, your own value and self worth — slowly, methodically, almost imperceptibly.
The day that professional relationship ended, I felt a relief and joy of happiness, I could really feel – it was almost like I won the lottery.
But relief is not recovery. I was still carrying everything else.
The Weight Was Never Just About Food
I want to be clear about something because I think the fitness industry does a disservice to people when it reduces weight gain to calories and laziness.
Yes, I was not moving enough. Yes, I was eating in ways that had nothing to do with hunger. But the weight I was carrying was grief, and pressure, and a career that was hollowing me out, and watching my dad deteriorate, and watching my mom go from active to partially wheelchair bound over the course of a year.
The binge eating was not a discipline problem. It was the only reliable release valve I had access to at 11pm after a 14-hour day when everything else demanded something from me and food just didn’t.
Understanding that distinction did not make the weight disappear. But it changed what I was actually trying to solve. Note: I was a pescatarian switched to vegetarian, and oh boy how much I lacked knowledge about food.
Losing My Dad Changed Something
After I lost my dad on 26 Jan 2025, something shifted.
Watching my mom in a wheelchair — a woman who had always been so physically present in my life — made the abstraction of health suddenly very concrete. This is what happens when the body is not looked after. This is where the road leads if I keep doing what I am doing.
I was not motivated by aesthetics. I was not chasing a number on a scale. I was genuinely afraid of becoming someone who could not carry their own life.
That was the real starting point.
Tsquared Lab, Firdauz, and Why I Touch My Biceps More Than I Should
A friend — Rajesh Sabari, who is one of those people who advocates loudly for the things he believes in — pointed me toward Firdauz at Tsquared Lab.
I will be honest about my hesitation because I think it is important.
I have done Krav Maga. I have done CrossFit. I have always been someone who moves and danced a lot. But the gym floor, with its weights and its machines and the people who seem to know exactly what they are doing, has always felt slightly hostile to me. Intimidating in a way I could never quite articulate. And I had a specific fear about strength training — that it was going to make me bulk up when I was already, in my own words, chubby.
That belief was wrong. I know that now.
Firdauz and Asyraf (who trained me when Firdauz couldn’t) changed how I understood my own body. They are extremely empathetic and patient with me. Strength training is not about becoming bigger. It is about becoming more capable. The muscle I am building is not decoration. It is infrastructure.
Six kilograms down. I am proud of that. I will not pretend otherwise. But more than the number, I notice that I walk differently. I carry myself differently. I look forward to the gym in a way that genuinely surprises me every time I feel it because for a long time I was the person who found a hundred reasons not to go.
And yes — I do touch my biceps more than is strictly necessary. I am not apologising for that. LOL
The Podcast Connection
It was during this period — while I was training, while I was rebuilding, while I was thinking more clearly than I had in years while doing rowing before my strength training — that the idea for Unfiltered Room HQ stopped being an idea I was sitting on and started being something I had to actually build.
I had been wanting to do this for a long time. If you want the full story of why it took me this long to start, it is on my LinkedIn. The short version is that I kept waiting until I was ready, until the timing was right, until everything was in place — which is another way of saying I kept not doing it.
The gym, oddly, broke that pattern. Showing up when you do not feel like it. Doing the work before you see the results. Trusting the process when the mirror is not cooperating yet. Those are not fitness principles. They are the only principles that have ever actually worked for me in anything.
What This Is Not
This is not a transformation story with a neat ending.
I have not arrived anywhere. I am six kilograms lighter and a long way from where I want to be. My mom is still in a wheelchair. Building a business is still hard. Life is still throwing things at me that I did not plan for.
What has changed is that I now have somewhere to put the weight — literally and otherwise. The gym is not a solution to everything. But it is a practice. And practice, consistently, is the only thing I have ever seen actually move the needle on anything that matters.
If you are in the middle of your own version of what I described — the accumulated pressure, the body keeping the score, the gap between what you earn and what you feel — I am not going to tell you to find your motivation or trust the process or believe in yourself.
I am going to tell you to find someone like Firdauz. And show up. Even when nothing in you wants to.
The biceps come later. The clarity comes first.
And thank you to dearest Samant, for joining me in this fitness journey. #143 – pagercode hint hint
Got it.
The Three People In That Room With Me
When I first met Admond virtually, he told me almost apologetically, that his English was not very good and he was not sure he could do justice to a podcast. And then he said something that stopped me completely.
He said he wanted to tell his story about who he is — not what he does.
He said every podcast that had ever featured him focused on what he does. The federation. The competitions. The sport. Nobody had ever just asked him who he was.
That sentence is the entire reason Unfiltered Room HQ exists.
We did not build this platform for polished success stories. We built it for people like Admond — modest, understated, carrying a life that most people would not survive and not once leading with it as a credential. He does not call what he has built an empire. His exact words to me were: calling it Empire is a bit too much leh. But to anyone paying attention, what he has built with WNBF Singapore — alone, underfunded, largely unrecognised, clean in every sense of the word — is exactly that. And it deserves more than the doubt it keeps receiving.
Yuan Kai struck me differently. Here is a man who spent few years working with hospital patients as a dietitian — people in vulnerable states, people who needed guidance — and he never once imposed his personal beliefs about food on any of them. His veganism is his choice. His professionalism meant it stayed his. That kind of integrity is rarer than people think, especially in a space where everyone with a dietary conviction seems to believe their job is to convert you.
And Firdauz. Sixteen years of personal training. Sixteen years of early mornings and late sessions and clients who show up inconsistent and leave transformed. And he still smiles — widely, genuinely — at every single one of them. I have been in that room. I have seen it. It is not performance. It is just who he is.
What Nobody Saw On Camera
If you watch the episode till 26:29 and you pay close attention to the background in between before 26:29, you will notice me on an iPad tracking the time.
Here is what you did not see.
The air conditioning in the recording venue failed. Nobody told us. We arrived, set up, and slowly realised the room — a bombed shelter door room with lights so bright they could interrogate a confession out of you — was turning into a sauna. We were all sweating through what was supposed to be a composed, professional recording.
Those lights overheated our camera.
Our 4K files corrupted.
We stayed until almost midnight trying to fix it.
The venue provider has, to date, not refunded the money we formally requested. They have also not been booked again and will not be.
But here is what I will say about that night. Three men who had every reason to be difficult about the situation — tired, uncomfortable, sitting under lights like in an ‘interrogation room’ — were completely gracious. Nobody complained. Nobody made it about themselves. We fixed what we could, we lost what we lost, and we got the episode done.
That, honestly, told me everything I needed to know about who was in that room.