I overeat for a living. Can I get fit in 100 days?

Friday 10 July 2026 4:45 am  |  Updated:  Thursday 09 July 2026 12:45 pm

City AM’s Deputy Life&Style Editor Adam Bloodworth reviews restaurants for a living. Can he get fit while still doing his job?

Can I get fit in 100 days?

I eat for a living. Not like those viral food challengers who eat 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes, but still in a quite ridiculous way that means I can be in a restaurant every night of the week.

As a luxury lifestyle journalist, I get paid to eat rich food. The best new openings, Michelin starred restaurants, places people go once a lifetime: these are my bread and butter. Spare a thought: it really is tough.

Although, recently it kind of has been. In my twenties I laughed off my dad bod, thinking I’d worry about my weight later. But by my mid-thirties the worries crystalised. Aesthetic concerns about moobs turned into fears about my health when a screening confirmed I was technically obese. Like trying and failing to save money as a Millennial, this problem wasn’t going away.

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I can’t stop going to fabulous restaurants and champagne parties because that’s my job. I also can’t stop going to fabulous restaurants and champagne parties because, dear reader, I do not want to.

So, what to do? Virgin Active offered to help me get in shape in 100 days, despite the fact that, for financial reasons, I must carry on indulging.
To finally make me exercise I need someone to stand behind me and shout at me and make me do it.

Namely, a polite chap called Sam Bannell. With Sam now employed to do just that, as my personal trainer, here are some high and exceedingly low-lights from a restaurant critic of fifteen years’ first attempt at getting fit.

Day 1: What the hell do I want?

Sam is sitting opposite me in a meeting room at Virgin Active near Bank. That in itself feels weird. My boss doesn’t take me to lift weights in a board room, so why am I having a meeting at the gym? Shouldn’t we be pumping iron? I also didn’t expect to feel like I was in a therapy session.

“What do you want from this?” asked Sam, who is 26, from Essex, and muscular, but not in an intimidating way. “I have no idea,” I told him, feeling out of my depth. Sam started using terms like “body composition”, “body fat ratio” and, most alarmingly, “calorie deficit.” I am anxious just being in the gym, and, wanting this experience to be over, I come up with something half convincing about generally ‘getting fit and in shape’.

“Let’s do it,” I said at the idea of cutting the joy out of my life. My daily calories were nearly 3,000 per day but Sam wanted me to consume 2,200. Still loads, but at six foot two, I’m a big guy. I’ll be training twice a week with Sam and once a week at a Virgin Active weight lifting class. I’m terrified.

Day 8: Soon I’ll be pro

Lifting weights is a doddle. I merely show up and friendly Sam shows me what to do. I lift heavy things while he watches, then he adapts my technique. It hurts a bit, but only for ten seconds, then we chat while I rest in-between exercises.

Sam and I are quite different. He started lifting weights aged 13. At the same age, as an LGBTQ kid at an all-boys school, I started comfort eating. He gets up at 5am and goes to bed at 9pm and I do the opposite: I’m often up at 2am on a Monday night following a boozy event.

But he makes me feel at ease, genuinely non-judgemental, and we bond over our love of a pint. For Sam, like for me, pints get in the way. Despite his job, he’s open about how he sometimes drinks too much. As for the calorie deficit, it’s easier than I thought. I’m predisposed to an all-or-nothing mindset, so for two weeks I find it a thrilling challenge to eat below the deficit to see how much weight I can lose.

Two nights running I have raw carrots for dinner. I’m hungry but the thrill of the challenge usurps the cravings. I’ve made my deficit part of my personality and everyone at work is suggesting food hacks so I feel full on less. We discuss where and when this becomes toxic, and occasionally I fear that my obsession could go the other way and that I’d develop a problem with eating too little.

Mostly it feels healthy exploring something new. I am down a kilogram after the first week! Surely getting fit can’t be this easy?

Day 13: I’m ill

I’ve got a stinking fever. I bail on the gym. It’s the beginning of week three but I have a rotten lergy. I’m shivery. Sam tells me off for eating carrots for dinner. What I’m experiencing, he says, is “the crash”: I have restricted too much and my immune system has borne the brunt. I am no longer allowed to eat carrots for dinner.

For the first time, Sam is a little stern. I have f*ed this up. Now I can’t lift weights and all I want to eat is complex carbohydrates. So I do. They taste great. Weight be damned, I’m ill and I’m done with this st. My fight or flight is somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and I am reclining in a multi pack of Penguins to allay the shivering. Everything sucks.

Day 20: the admin is worse than the lifting

I’m better now and have learned my lesson. The weights are still fine. I sweat a lot and wince when I “squeeze,” which is the word Sam uses to describe the hard bit when you lift them up. But with Sam telling me what to do it isn’t too mentally challenging – yet.

The hardest part, by far, is that the novelty of doing the calorie deficit is wearing off. The admin is also a killer. I forget to write down what I’ve eaten and three days go past and I can’t remember any of it. I lose bits of paper and can’t bear the thought of downloading a calorie counting app as I’m tech-averse.

Other than drinking, another way that I am classically Millennial is that I am self-prescribed ADHD. While there is definitely a culture of over diagnosis, my friends who work in mental health tell me I’m a gold star case. The thought of doing admin makes my head scream, and that makes calorie counting my Everest.

I get into a feast-or-famine mindset, bingeing at the weekend and relying on low-calorie supermarket meals deals during the week. It’s working, I think. Diets used to feel scary because they were abstract: would I have to cut everything out?

Now I wasn’t shooting in the dark: If I wanted to eat very little at lunchtime and have a pizza and three beers at night, I could, and still be within the limits. Nutrition is out the window — that’s for another day – right now all I can think about is keeping below the deficit.

Read more House of the Dragon’s Abubakar Salim dreams of Kenyan kebabs for his last supper Day 40: Exploding heads

Sam is upping the pressure. We’re hammering the machines and hand-held weights. I like Virgin Active: while gyms like Third Space are fancier, Richard Branson’s gyms feel more fun. A sign in the changing room says “no paparazzi”. And most of them have hot tubs in the spa area.

Mostly the exercise is still fine. It’s getting tougher, but trusty Sam is still showing me how to do everything. He makes me lift or “squeeze” until I get fatigued, which is when you can’t lift anymore because your muscles give in.

I am still surprised that I don’t find it as difficult as I thought. Firstly, I’m lucky I have what one colleague calls “Tigger energy,” and secondly because weights are in short, sharp bursts, you know that the set of lifts (‘reps’) will be over soon. It is also invaluable having Sam shout “one more!” and “you’re doing great!”.

Flattery helps me lift one more than I thought I could. Without him, I’m almost certainly out of here. This theory is proved when he has to leave after an hour and asks me to do a few more exercises. Sometimes I do them, but sometimes I wait until he’s out of sight then run to the changing room and hope he doesn’t see.

Everything changes when I try to learn a one-leg squat. It’s so much harder than any of the machines. It involves my entire body weight weighing on my flabby thighs. I close my eyes and wince with every dip. Sam tells me that I look pretty funny when I wince midway through. “I’ll get a pic of you like that for your article, mate.”

He tells me that breathing will help alleviate the need to tense my facial muscles. I don’t listen and try again, but this time I feel faint and am forced to stop. “I feel like my head is going to explode,” I tell Sam.

He sits me down and tells me that my head is not going to explode, but I feel anxious and worry about returning to the exercise. I also hate with a passion the Romanian Dead Lift. Again, it isn’t that it’s too physically taxing, I just cannot get my head around the weird movement, which involves sticking my bum out but also leering over my feet like a drunk person looking for a fiver on the floor.

The exercise is ramping up, but so is my progress: I am down to almost 91kg, a four kg loss!

Day 50: Booze

At the beginning of this new get fit regime I was still within my ‘dry phase’. I took three months off the sauce earlier this year for a mental health break but then I went to a cocktail party and a martini looked nice. “It f*cks everything up,” Sam warns me.

He’s more serious than ever. I know he isn’t judging: he hits up Hackney Wick’s breweries if West Ham win. The next day I fall asleep at a posh film premiere after guzzling daquiris at the pre-drinks. I’ve put two kilograms back on from hangover eating and pints. Sam’s right, booze f*cks everything up.

Day 60: Does anyone enjoy getting fit?

Sam looks disappointed when I say I might stop going to the Wednesday class. I’m disappointed too. I still want to train three times a week but I’m struggling to find the time. I’m not a morning person and I’m out for work most evenings so lunchtimes are the only time I can go.

The trouble is, at lunchtime I quite like to have lunch. Sam looks surprised when I make a throwaway comment about not enjoying exercise. Maybe he doesn’t grasp that some people don’t find this fun, that getting fit is purely a necessity.

This period coincides with a mental crash. The novelty is over and for the first time I am confronted with whether I actually want a permanently healthy lifestyle. Anyone can do something for a month but what about forever? It feels huge. I feel a bit panicked with the dawning realisation that I may never be able to rely on food for comfort again in the way I have before.

I consider getting therapy around that topic, because it’s fascinating. What I eat – and the ability to eat it – is an essential part of me. Now it feels like it’s been taken away. This is why people become PTs, Sam says, because they have a story to tell about how exercising and diet came to define them. Embracing this stuff shapes you.

The upside to the panic of not being able to indulge is how profound it feels to even consider a full lifestyle change. Could this be me? Maybe not. Maybe I’ll go back to Penguin biscuits again.

That night, for work, I get drunk. A new restaurant. Fried food. Martinis. Difficult decisions about whether I want to sustain this new life. The next morning I have my weekly weigh-in, which is humiliating. I feel like meat being sold at the market. I am convinced that I have put all the weight back on after a week which has felt hard… But I am at my lowest ever.

Day 74: I can do thirty press ups

Once, a teacher at school made me shower in my underwear, alone, in front of the whole class, and that was one of the things that cemented my fear of exercise. He also shouted and screamed in my face until I cried, which he said was his intention. This, I assume, is inextricably tied to my fear of sport, and the exercise that I feared the most was the press up.

As a larger kid, they felt impossible. They hurt. But Sam incorporates them into my workout regime for the first time because it’s good to have multiple exercises to work out each muscle group. I manage to do nearly thirty. To say I’m delighted would be an understatement. I’m absolutely over the moon.

Day 85: I must be over again

The most fascinating part of all this journey to getting fit has been how much I’ve learned about my predisposition to assume the worst. It’s a crazy week for restaurants. One day I do a big boozy lunch followed by a big boozy dinner.

“I’m definitely over this time,” I say to Sam, taking my socks off for the demeaning weigh. But I’m down again. I’ve lost nearly five kilograms. He reaches out to shake my hand. I can tell he knows I’m putting a lot of effort into this, and his acknowledgement feels incredible.

I was fuming that I’d eaten a rich sauce with my steak the other day, I tell Sam. If I’m thinking like that, he says, I’m probably doing something right. A steak sauce isn’t that bad, and what this really shows is the beginning of a perspective shift. I suppose I should try to stop doubting myself. Or at least start realising how big a role that doubt is playing in my life.

Anyway, I’ve smashed it: must be time for another martini.

A session with Sam costs £81.50; go to virginactive.co.uk/clubs/bank. A monthly membership at Virgin Active costs £160 per month for 12 months

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