I was over 250 pounds at fourteen.

I was not a little overweight. At my heaviest as a teenager I weighed more than most grown men I knew. I was tired, self-conscious, and already good at hiding. I learned how to make myself small in rooms where I was the biggest person there.

There was no single lightbulb moment. What happened was simpler and less cinematic. I got tired of being tired. I realized that the version of my life I wanted was not going to arrive on its own, and that no one was coming to fix it for me.

So I started. Badly, at first. I did not know what I was doing. I tried the things that were supposed to work. Some of them did, mostly because I was consistent enough that even a bad plan moved the scale. What mattered was not the plan. It was the decision.

I lost the weight. I kept most of it off. I became the guy people asked for advice in the gym, which eventually became a career. For close to thirty years now I have coached men on strength, food, sleep, and the stuff that actually determines whether any of that sticks.

The first thing I learned is that losing weight is not the hard part. Keeping it off is the hard part, and the part that has almost nothing to do with meal plans.

The second thing I learned is that most fitness advice is written by people who have never been the person reading it. It is written for someone with unlimited time, unlimited willpower, no injuries, no kids, no travel, and no anxiety. That person does not exist.

The third thing, and the one that shaped DadBody, is that the men who succeed are not the ones with the best program. They are the ones who figure out why they want it before the scale moves, and who build a life that makes the result possible to keep.

That is why I am skeptical of transformations that end with a before-and-after photo. The after is only useful if it is still true five years later.

You would think once was enough. It was not.

Years after I had become the coach, the author, the guy on stage, I stood in front of a bathroom mirror while I was shaving and did not recognize the eyes looking back. I had let the same drift happen. Work, family, travel, the usual reasons. The weight had not come all the way back, but the man had. I was running on caffeine, sleeping badly, and treating movement like something I used to do.

It was the same loop I had watched clients run my whole career. I had a client once, a successful man with a good family, who hired me to lose twenty-five pounds. He did it in a month. Then life happened, the weight came back, and he wanted to hire me to do it again. I fired him. Not because he failed, because he had proved he could succeed and it had changed nothing.

I did not want to be my own John. So I took my own advice. Small, repeated, boring. I stopped waiting for an hour I did not have and started protecting the first thirty minutes of the day. That is where the 15/5/10 ritual came from. Fifteen minutes of movement, five of stillness, ten of reading something that makes me better. Two percent of the day. Small enough to survive a week where everything goes wrong.

DadBody is not a fitness brand. It is coaching for men who are successful at almost everything except the one thing that determines whether the rest of it matters.

Most of the men I work with are dads, or close enough. They are somewhere between forty and sixty. They have tried programs, apps, gyms, and diets. They do not need more information. They need someone who knows who they are, why they are here, and how they are doing.

That last sentence is the whole product. The technology should disappear underneath the relationship. What the man on the other end should feel is: Dai knows who I am, he knows why I am here, and he knows how I am doing.

We do that through small groups, daily check-ins, and a framework that is built around real life. Not the life you wish you had. The one with the travel, the kids, the bad night of sleep, and the Tuesday where everything falls apart.

The entry points are different depending on where you are. Some men start with the free Power 30. Some are ready for MERGE60. Some should talk to me first. That is why we built the path finder.

This sits alongside the work Christie and I have run for years at CrossFitBC in Vancouver, where the same philosophy shows up in barbells, classes, and community.

Most men I meet have not decided that yet. That is the actual work, and it is the reason I am still doing this after three decades.