You don’t look and feel how you want to

And the fitness industry isn’t helping

You’ve been trying to do the right things. You’ve bought the supplements influencers swear by, cleaned up your diet (or so you thought), and you’re putting in the hours at the gym. But somehow, you’re still not seeing the progress you expected. Frustrating, right?

The truth is, the fitness industry is a mess, and a lot of what you’ve been led to believe is either exaggerated or flat-out wrong. It’s not necessarily that you’re lazy, unmotivated, or doing it all wrong – it could be in some part that the system is deliberately stacked against you.

Here follows eight ways in which it’s screwing you over and what you can do about it.

1. The supplement scam

Scroll through fitness TikTok, and you’ll see the same cycle: young influencers swearing by the latest protein powder, greens powder, or fat burner. When I worked with a major supplement manufacturer between 2016-2018 we would roll our eyes at the number of products paid influencers would say they “use” and yet would be clearly unopened in their posts and videos – and you can still spot this today. If you see “commission paid” or “ad” on the post, they’re profiting from you on views and sales and, sadly, might not actually have your best interests at heart.

If they’re tweenage with glowing skin and slim physiques, they might just be young and fit rather than fuelled by the things they’re shilling…

Most supplements provide marginal benefits at best. A solid diet, good training, and decent sleep will always outperform a cupboard full of powders. Are some supplements useful? Sure – but only if your basics are already locked in. Prioritise protein from real food, proper hydration, and recovery before wasting money on another tub of BCAAs.

Supplement companies market their products as the missing piece to your fitness puzzle when they’re, at best, an enhancement, not the foundation, and don’t get me started on protein bars, cookies or cakes 🤦🏻‍♀️

2. The ‘Healthy Eating’ trap

You think you should be eating healthier, so you swap out the processed ‘junk’ and start adding more ‘clean’ foods. Great start – until you find yourself gaining weight instead of losing it.

The problem? Many ‘healthy’ foods are still calorie-dense. A 200g bag of nuts? That’s an extra 1,200+ calories on top of your day’s meals. Granola? Super delicious and difficult to stop eating, right? Smoothies? Healthful and tasty, but often less satisfying than sitting down and eating their constituent ingredients – it’s far too easy to drink 500 ‘good’ calories on top of your meals and not realise.

High-protein bars and cookies that have twice as many calories as the Snickers you actually wanted? The industry banks on you believing that ‘high protein’ means ‘better for you,’ while quietly ignoring calorie balance.

Ultimately, healthy eating isn’t just about what you eat – it’s also about how much. A calorie surplus is still a surplus, leading to weight gain, no matter how ‘clean’ or ‘high protein’ the food is.

3. Gym pain isn’t just bad luck

You hear it all the time in the gym: “My back’s killing me from deadlifts” or “My shoulders are fried from bench press.” And yeah, lifting can put stress on your body – but most injuries aren’t from the exercise itself. They’re from poor form and bad habits.

If your back hurts after deadlifts, the lift might not be the problem – rather your technique is. If your shoulders feel wrecked after every workout, it might not be overtraining – it could be crappy exercise selection or terrible posture.

But let’s bring this into real life: if you work in an office, sit at a desk all day, and don’t get many steps in, lifting weights can actually make your existing posture and mobility issues worse if you go at them with no technique or awareness.

• Hunched at a desk? That’s terrible prep for bench press, as rounded shoulders and a weak upper back mean poor positioning under the bar.

• Rounded spine from your chair? Loading a bar up on top of that could result in (bigger) back pain rather than juicier glutes.

When you take detrained or underused muscles and joints and throw them into heavy lifts and exercise classes that demand form awareness, you’re potentially setting yourself up for frustration, plateaus, and injury. The solution? Prioritising effective technique and helpful movements before chasing heavier weights or signing up to multiple HIIT classes in a week.

4. Why HIIT might not be helping you

High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is often sold as the best way to burn fat, but for many people, it can actually work against their long-term fat loss goals.

The main reason? Hunger and recovery. HIIT is more demanding on the body than say walking or even light jogging, and, for some people, it drives hunger so high that they overeat without realising it. If you’re burning 400 calories in a HIIT class but eating an extra 500-600 calories because you’re ravenous afterwards, you’re not in a calorie deficit – you’re in a surplus.

Additionally, HIIT is high-impact and exhausting. If your recovery isn’t on point, it can interfere with strength training progress and overall daily activity levels. Some people find that after a brutal HIIT session, they unconsciously move less the rest of the day, offsetting any calorie burn from the workout itself.

If fat loss is the goal, consistent resistance training, moderate cardio, and increasing daily movement (like walking) are far more sustainable approaches.

5. Fat for fuel versus fat loss – understanding the difference

A common misconception in fitness is that any exercise that burns a higher percentage of fat for fuel must be the best way to lose body fat.

Reality check: You only lose fat if you’re in a calorie deficit. If you eat 500g of chocolate a day, 20 minutes of cardio isn’t going to do anything to help you lose fat. Your body burns a mix of fats and carbohydrates for energy, but it’s your overall energy balance – calories in versus calories out – that dictates fat loss.

For example:

• If you burn 200 calories from a 30-minute low-intensity jog but then eat an extra 300 calories, you’re still in a surplus.

• If you burn 400 calories from weight training but remain in a deficit overall, you’ll lose fat, even though lifting weights doesn’t burn fat directly.

The key takeaway? Fat loss is about long-term energy balance, not the type of fuel your body is using during exercise.

6. The fat loss ‘shortcut’ culture

Again, when it comes to fat loss, going quicker or harder often isn’t better. Everywhere you look, someone’s selling a new way to lose weight fast or attain an hourglass physique without having to exercise for it – detox teas, extreme calorie cuts, waist trainers.

You can lose weight quickly – but the problem is, most people don’t learn how to keep it off.

A study of The Biggest Loser contestants found that most had regained all of their lost weight – and in some cases, more – within a few years of the show ending (Fothergill et al., 2016).

Many people will tell you that this is because extreme calorie deficits cause metabolic adaptation, making it harder to maintain weight loss long term. Better to say would be lighter bodies need less fuel, so, if you go back to eating the amount you did when you were bigger without sustaining or even increasing your activity or muscle mass that helped you to lose weight in the first instance, then you are eating too much for your actual daily needs and this food will have to be stored as fat.

A sustainable plan doesn’t just help you lose weight – it helps you keep it off as part of your lifestyle rather than a daily, sometimes demoralising, to-do list.

The more you have to lose, the more you can lose but this should always be relative to what you weigh. My clients who weigh upward of 100kgs are reliably able to drop 10kgs in 10 weeks; my 65kg clients, however, might “only” manage 6-7kgs in this time – both groups see significant improvements in their general health and self-confidence as both are losing around 10% of their body weight in one clearly defined phase. They then use the habits and training plans they’ve become experts in to keep the weight off or push again.

This is what my 10kg in 10 weeks challenge, launching in March, is all about – it’s not a gimmick, it’s a structured fat loss plan backed by science – 2.5 months of making lots of little concerted and repeated changes and efforts and never about taking shortcuts. But more on that in a bit.

7. Big names, big problems

The fitness and self-improvement world is full of contradictions, and some of the biggest names are adding to the confusion.

Take James Smith – despite being a dad and training inconsistently, he's made some of the best gains he has in recent years. This is amazing, right? We’d all love busy parents to be able to make these changes.

The thing is, he’s been on TRT (testosterone replacement therapy).

He sells fitness plans, his body and his methods get him clients, he’s previously called out the problems with undisclosed drug use in the fitness community and yet it took him a year to disclose his prescribed hormonal support.

Hiding performance-enhancing drug use is a rabid problem in the fitness industry and has been rampant in Hollywood for decades, and it’s not uncommon to see household names like Chris Hemsworth and The Rock juiced to the gills but selling ab routines and supplements to get into “superhero” shape like them.

Using medical intervention when necessary for ‘normal’ health is something more people should consider if they can access it. I live and love the lifestyle I preach but if I had statistically low testosterone despite ticking all of the general activity, diet, training and sleep guidelines we know to positively correlate to healthy lives, knowing the difference increased testosterone could make to my training, my confidence and my mood, one hundred percent I would accept my doctor’s prescription.

Then there’s Steven Bartlett – a business mogul who presents as a health expert. He’s on BBC shows as a respected entrepreneur, but behind the scenes, BBC Worldwide is investigating him for spreading misinformation in his podcast (BBC, 2025). On top of this, in pervasive social media ads, he promotes products like continuous glucose monitors and meal replacement shakes – devices and supplements most people simply don’t need.

All of these figures have put in the graft to get where they are, and each will walk away from these ventures having impacted millions of people’s lives – for better or worse – they’re popular, they’re platformed, they have aspirational physiques and wealth – why wouldn’t you trust them?

8. Up-and-coming with no actual coaching experience

The fitness industry rewards confidence, great, not competence, boo.

A young woman who has managed an incredible confidence transformation has no coaching experience, no PT qualification and so no legal standing to prescribe exercises but, because of how she looks, is rapidly building a following. She’s currently training for a qualification but, right now, has no clients, no practical experience, and yet is reaching tens of thousands of people with her posts.

She recently shared this glute day routine:
• Barbell good morning – 4 sets x 8-10 reps
• Dumbbell step up – 3 sets x 12 reps
• KAS hip thrust – 4 sets x 10-12 reps
• Dumbbell RDL – 3 sets x 8-10 reps
• Hip abductors – 4 sets to failure

And the comments are supportive and complimentary and suggestive of wanting to give it a go – but none of them are critical.

She’s not yet a PT. And there’s no actual training research to support her prescription. In fact, there’s an amount of recent evidence to suggest that further to eating enough protein and being at calorie maintenance or even a slight calorie surplus – which she hasn’t described – six to 10 sets of exercises in one session taken towards failure would be more than enough to see significant growth of your target muscles (Schoenfeld et al., 2019). Anything past this we could fairly describe as “junk volume”.

Just one paragraph earlier this same influencer has stated that training twice per week is most effective for building muscle – which is supported by research – but had she paid attention to the advice she’s given, she would have split this routine into at least two sessions across the week.

This is the state of the industry – social media amplifies the loudest voices, not the most knowledgeable ones. And it’s not your fault.

The reality? Real, meaningful, sustainable fitness isn’t about overly long booty workouts, expensive gimmicks, magic powders, or biohacking tech – it’s about consistency, real food, movement, sleep, and recovery. Until the fitness industry starts prioritising transparency and the effective implementation of actual, good, research that exists over selling dreams, people will keep wasting their time, money, energy and, ironically in some instances, health over-indexing on the things that neither work nor matter.

Are you ready to make real progress that sticks or even gets better over time?

In March, I want to take 10 people through 10 weeks of one-to-one online coaching to drop up to 10% of their bodyweight.

My 10kg in 10 Weeks Challenge is for you if you’re ready to:

✅ Lose up to 10kg sustainably
✅ Eat foods you love without feeling guilty (yes, you can still have a life while losing fat)
✅ Train smarter to see actual results – let’s ditch those two-hour workouts!
✅ Trust someone to keep you accountable and on track
✅ Feel great about your body and what you do in it!

So, if you’re ready to stop swallowing the nonsense the industry gets away with force feeding you, hit the link below to get on the waitlist. Spaces are limited, and the challenge starts in March.

👉 Sign me up!

Let’s get this right—no gimmicks, no wasted effort, just results.

And that’s it from me!

Much love, and I’ll see yas on the challenge or in the next one
Jack x

References & Further Reading

• Fothergill, E., Guo, J., Howard, L., Kerns, J.C., Knuth, N.D., Brychta, R., & Hall, K.D. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition. Obesity, 24(8), 1612-1619. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4892402/

• Schoenfeld, B.J., Grgic, J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J.W. (2019). Strength and hypertrophy adaptations between low- vs. high-load resistance training: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 49(5), 715-725. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31136302/

• BBC News. (2025). BBC Investigation into Steven Bartlett’s Misinformation. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gpz163vg2o

• BBC Panorama. (2025). BBC Programme on Steven Bartlett’s Misinformation. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0026q5x

• YouTube. (2025). James Smith’s TRT Announcement Video. Retrieved February 20, 2025, from