Garth Williams

Personal Trainer, Nutritional Guide & Student of Nutrition

Eating Is For Living: Over 30 years of getting food wrong (and right).

I am really lucky in that I grew up in a family, that for all our travails, prioritised sitting down and eating together. We ate home cooked food most nights. All sorts of recipes. We lived abroad a lot as I was growing up, in France, Switzerland and Belgium, and collected recipes from friends, travels, and a really internationalist revolving door of house and dinner guests. By age 12 I was cooking once a week, albeit probably not the best spag bol you’ve ever tried. Lucky for me, my Dad was a decent cook, and my Mum and older Sister are both excellent cooks. Both are also amazing bakers. By 18 I left home with a small batch of recipes and enough confidence to want to learn how to make some of my favourite meals. My spag bol had improved. Moving into a house share with a bunch of older housemates who shared cooking made me have to up my game. And I became a vegetarian.

Over the years I have struggled with managing my diet, and my appetite. At 6’6″ I can eat a heck of a lot. But eating a lot doesn’t mean you necessarily eat the right things. At one point in my late teens and again in my mid twenties I was very very overweight at about 117 kg, 259 lbs, or 18 and a half stone. I had gotten to be rather fat. Partly side effects of medications which caused me to balloon. Partly my lack of self control around food. I was almost 2 stone heavier than I am now which is now regularly around 107 kg, 236 lbs or 16 stone 12 lbs. I have been more or less the same weight for a number of years now, though within that timeframe managed to recomposition myself and completely overhaul my body. I still have quite a bit of fluff as bodybuilders like to call it, and then some. But I would rather that than go to the other extreme. I tried that in my very early 20s in response to having been obese. At one point my Doctor thought I had an eating disorder as I was under 80 kg, 175 lbs, or 12 and a half stone, almost 2/3 of the weight I am now. The fact was they hadn’t taken into account my context – I was working as a Life Model at Edinburgh Art College about 30 hours per week and had dropped weight rapidly while doing that job partly in response to being naked in front of hundreds of people for a living and not liking my love handles. Fair to say I wasn’t losing weight in a sensible way. I also didn’t know anything about nutrition. That was over 25 years ago.

Over time I have learned a lot about how to have a good diet, so much so that I am currently studying to become a Royal Society for Public Health accredited Nutritionist with an additional qualification in Advanced Nutrition for Sports. In the meantime I cannot give you mealplans but I can certainly guide you, based on my extensive research. I like to geek out on my food stuff but at the end of the day life is for living and food is one of its biggest pleasures for me and many I know and love.

I have tried all sorts of diets. I was vegetarian and then pescatarian for over 18 years. I would love to be a vegan on the moral front as I am a big animal lover, but for various health reasons and due to the scale of diet I need to consume given training volume, I find I need to eat meat. So I do eat meat now, though if cooking at home I am very selective about where it comes from, and how it is farmed. I also eat less than I used to and ideally try to have one vegetarian, one vegan and one pescatarian day per week.

I have since gone from Intermittent Fasting, to Keto, Calorie Restriction, Juicing Diets (not good for insulin sensitivity so beware!), Low Carb / Healthy Fat, to Whole 30, to the 800 Gram Challenge, to the Primal Diet Pattern, to Protein Maxxing, as well as learning how to track your macros and how to plan around that, without sapping the joy out of eating good healthy food.

I also have researched extensively into supplements and can point you in the right direction as to what you might be interested in trying to help boost your workouts and recovery and overall health.

The right food can make the difference of everything from how you sleep and recover to how you feel when you are working hard, in the gym or chilling out at home. Learning to find what works for you takes some trial and error. I can help with this in the form of nutritional guidance.

Want help finding what works for you?
No meal plans, no faddy rules. Just practical guidance to help you eat well, recover better and still enjoy your food. Click here.