How Fixing His Gut Built This Body (Osaki’s Full Story) From the Inside Out

Watch the full video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R17Pb44V3IU

Osaki walked up to me in the gym five and a half months ago and asked if I was a personal trainer. I was wearing a shirt that said so. He looked at the shirt, laughed, and that was how it started. He was looking for a trainer and a mentor, and the gym where we both train has all of its trainers on a wall with no way to contact any of them. So he asked the man in the shirt.

Before he left Budapest, we sat down to record his full story. This article is the written version of that conversation: what was going wrong, what we changed, and why the biggest change turned out to be his confidence. It was a different approach from what most people expect from a fitness transformation, because we started from the inside out.

Start here: the short version

If you only have two minutes, here is what changed for Osaki. He stopped eating whenever and wherever, and started eating at set times, away from his desk. We ran a process of elimination to find the foods that did not agree with him. He bought real food from a butcher instead of frozen products from the supermarket. He swapped tap water for mineral water. He stopped drinking during the week. He fixed his sleep, started walking after meals, trained in cycles instead of flat out, and added real recovery. His afternoon energy crashes faded within the first month, and he bench pressed 100 kilograms for the first time in his life.

The full conversation is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R17Pb44V3IU

Where he started

Osaki works remotely on a US schedule. From Europe that means working from around half past three in the afternoon until midnight. On top of that, he was travelling from country to country, roughly one new place every month. When he came to me he had been living in Latin America, going out a lot, and he had no routine at all.

He told me himself that his health was not in good shape and that he was not consistent with the gym, even though he had worked out in the past. When I asked him what the biggest problem was, he did not say training. He said consistency. He did not eat at set times. He ate whenever he had the chance. He slept at random hours. He was going out and drinking with nothing holding him to a standard.

He was also having energy crashes at two and three o'clock in the afternoon, and he was struggling to stay awake for work. I recognised them straight away, because I used to have the same symptoms myself.

What I went through first

I want to be honest about why I coach the way I do. For years I competed in bodybuilding. I looked fit. And I often felt terrible. I was bloated after every single meal. I crashed at two in the afternoon. At some point I asked myself whether this is what a fit person is supposed to go through every day just to look good. That question bothered me a lot.

So I did my blood work to see exactly what was happening in my body. I was eating what you are supposed to eat, according to everything I had read, and yet many of those foods were not having a positive effect on me. I came to the conclusion that the gut is the second heart of your metabolism, and I decided to do a process of elimination. I wanted to see how each food behaved in my own body.

I did the same thing with Osaki at the start. Some days it was the tomatoes. Sometimes it was the avocado, the eggs, the chicken, the fish, or the spices. You do not know how a food affects you until you look at it properly, and you do not know where that food really came from until you ask.

Structure first: the first two hours and the last two hours

Anything you want to tackle in life needs a structure. If you want to open a business, you need a business plan. Your health is no different.

With Osaki, I kept coming back to the same idea: lock in the first two hours of your morning and the last two hours before you sleep. If you get those four hours right, the rest of the day goes much more smoothly.

He gave me an example of how it worked in practice. Because he knew he had to be at the gym at ten in the morning, he had to wake up around nine, which meant he had to go to bed on time. That one fixed appointment disciplined his whole day. It stopped him going out late. It gave him more time in his day. And it made it easy to say no.

The meal plan gave him the same thing. When he arrived he ate whenever he had a chance. Now he has a system for what he eats and what time he eats it, so there is no unpredictability left. That, he said, was probably the biggest thing.

No alcohol during the week

When I sat Osaki down, one of the first rules was no alcohol during the week. He said it was the biggest shift for him, because he never had any accountability on that side before. Once someone held him to it, he made sure it never slipped. He told me it helped his overall performance and his ability to get the things done that he needed to get done during the week.

I always say that consistency and accountability are the hardest things. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Everybody has a plan. Almost nobody follows it.

The 2pm crash and when you eat

Osaki's crashes faded within the first month. In my experience, two things did most of that work: the process of elimination, and the timing of his meals.

Eating as soon as you get the chance is not a plan. When your meals land at random times, your energy lands at random times too. Once he had a regular rhythm, the afternoon slump stopped being part of his day. I am not claiming that timing is the whole story. I am telling you what I saw with him and what I have seen with many other clients.

Real food, not supplements

When Osaki started, he asked me whether he could take whey protein, and a few other things. My answer was no. We stick to proper food. I have the same approach with most of my clients. Many people in the fitness industry reach for supplements first. I would rather you get the food right first.

That led to the next point, which was where he bought his food. When I told him to buy vegetables, he came back with frozen vegetables and frozen meat. I told him that was one of the first things we needed to fix.

He started going to a butcher and buying real meat. Over time he noticed a difference in how he felt after eating it. He is an American, and he said it himself: in the United States it is extremely easy to get processed food. It is shoved at you. He described the supermarkets there, with the cupcakes at the entrance and the whole foods around the edge of the building, so you have to walk down every aisle of processed food to get what you came for. In Budapest it is less convenient to buy processed food, and he thinks that environment helped.

I also told him my number one rule: I avoid the supermarket and buy from local businesses. Today everything has the word protein stamped on it. Cookies, yoghurt, pudding. Even a stick of celery or broccoli gets a protein tag. That made me a lot more aware of what I was buying, and I tried to make Osaki more aware too.

Stop eating when you are stressed

This was one of the habits I pushed hardest. Osaki used to eat at his desk, in front of the TV, or while scrolling his phone. He was distracted every time he ate.

I explained to him that, in my view, our number one enemy in health is cortisol and stress. If you are eating on calls, or while you are working, your body is in a stressed state while you eat, and I believe a stressed stomach does not take in food the way it should. In my experience it becomes a domino effect. You do not take in the food well, your performance drops, your sleep suffers, you feel bloated, and the next day starts worse than the last.

So I told him to take thirty minutes out of his day to sit down and eat properly, away from anything that stresses him. If he wanted to watch something funny while he ate, that was fine. The point is a calm state while you eat, even when the food is healthy and comes from the local market.

Water, minerals and electrolytes

Osaki was drinking a lot of tap water. I told him we needed to change that, because tap water is not rich in minerals, and in my experience water without minerals does less for you than you think. We even tried it as an experiment. I drank mineral water, he drank tap water, and we compared how we felt. He noticed a difference, including in the taste.

If you do not want to buy mineral water, you can drink filtered water and add a pinch of Himalayan salt, or use a mineral supplement. I keep one that has over a hundred minerals in it. You can also get hydration from food. Watermelon is a great one, and it is rich in electrolytes. We both love it. Osaki is from Jamaica and I am from Africa, so watermelon is basically a family tradition.

When I get my hydration right, I feel it straight away. My thinking is sharper. And we were both sweating a lot, with the workouts and the saunas, so we needed to replace what we lost.

Training in cycles

One of the biggest mistakes I see is people pushing to the limit every single week. With Osaki, we trained in cycles. Four weeks where we went all in, locked in and very heavy. Then a deload week, where the sessions are light and you do not push hard.

You can only go flat out for so long. You cannot train six times a week for a whole year. Your nervous system has to recover, and Osaki did not understand that when he started. He was constantly lifting, walking, and being physically active, and all of that needs rest. Knowing when to push and when to pull back is one of the biggest things you can apply to your lifestyle.

It all operates from the gut and the nervous system. That is my approach, and it is different from what most trainers do.

100 kilograms, and a broken wrist

I did not expect how fast Osaki's strength would grow. In a short time he bench pressed 100 kilograms, which is 225 pounds, quite easily. He told me it was the first time he had ever done it. Even before his injury he had never been able to lift that.

The injury matters here. He broke his wrist in Switzerland, in June of last year, while riding a scooter down a mountain in Grindelwald. He braked at the front, the back wheel spun out, and he went down on concrete. His helmet broke. Thank God he had it on. He came out with a broken arm and not much else, and he is lucky it was not worse.

When it came to rehab, our approach was to strengthen all the muscles around the injury: the forearm, the biceps and the triceps. If you work the whole area, the recovery gets smoother, and if you want to heal something, you want to increase the blood flow to it. The goal was to make the wrist stronger, which also makes the result more sustainable.

I had my own injury this summer, and I healed much faster than I expected. I credit the habits I had built before it happened. If you know exactly what you are doing, you handle an injury with more confidence. Osaki said the hardest part was the mental side, and I agree. You sometimes have to take one step back to take two steps forward.

Sleep

When we started, Osaki's sleep was all over the place. One day he woke up at two in the afternoon. The next day nine. Then one, then twelve. The jet lag from travelling did not help.

We locked it down with the schedule I described earlier. A fixed training time in the morning forced him to go to bed at a sensible hour, and a regular wake-up time followed. I do not think you can build a good body without good sleep. Sleep is where the recovery happens.

Recovery and walking

Before we worked together, Osaki had no recovery routine. He just got to the gym, did the session, checked it off, and moved on with his day. So we added things: sauna, cold plunges, and stretching, which is still a work in progress for him.

We also added walking. I recommend a morning walk and a ten-minute walk after every meal. Osaki did not do that before, mostly because of his work schedule. In Budapest he started walking because the city made it easy. He even had a walking challenge for work in his first month. In America, he said, most cities are not walkable, and you have to make a deliberate effort to get your steps in. Here, he walked every day because there was always something new to see, and it helped his mental state too.

The confidence changed first

This is the part that matters most to me. I asked Osaki what the whole programme did for his self-belief, and he told me it was probably the biggest thing.

He had never paid for a trainer before. He said most people have an ego about it. His friends asked him why he needed a trainer when he already looked great. But he told me he always believes he can be better, and that mindset is what let him invest in himself. It was more than the training. It was the accountability, and it was the self-belief that came with it.

I told him in the beginning that he was meant to do big things in this world. I do not usually say that to people, and it really came from my gut. A couple of weeks into training, he had an idea, and I pushed him to make a video about what it is like to be a Black man in Budapest. He went out the same day, shot it, edited it and posted it. He knew that the longer he waited, the harder it would be.

That is what separates people. Lots of people talk. Very few put their money where their mouth is. Even if it is not perfect, taking action gets you much further than most people ever go.

Content as personal development

I think content creation is one of the best forms of personal development there is. It puts you out there. It makes you comfortable being vulnerable and relatable. I see it as a personal diary, not just a business tool.

I have been making content every day for almost three years. Only after three years did some of my videos start reaching millions. For a long time I was sitting there thinking about what people would say, embarrassed by what I posted, and getting almost no engagement. I was trying things, failing, and trying again.

Failing is what most people are not comfortable with. The people who succeed are usually the ones who fail the fastest. But consistency alone is not enough. You can put a thousand hours into the wrong path and still be on the wrong path. I learned that in the gym. Every time I do a rep on an incline press or a bench press, I look for a way to perfect the execution of that rep. The same goes for videos. Every video should be one percent better than the last. Put in the reps, and ask yourself the right question at the right time: what can I improve in the next one?

Osaki saw the other side of it too. When his videos started doing well, people he barely knew supported him more than people he had known for years. Some of the ones who had never liked his posts suddenly told him they loved his videos. That is just how it goes, and I think it is a good filter.

The people around you

When you start taking care of yourself, your environment changes. Your friend circle changes. The quotes you see online can sound cliché, but the older you get, the more some of them start to resonate.

I told Osaki that being lonely is not a red flag. It is better to be on your own than with the wrong company. And I told him how much I value honest friends. A while ago, I was a bit rude to someone at the gym, and Osaki asked me why I was talking to her like that. He was right. I went and apologised. Having someone around who has the guts to tell you that you are wrong is what separates a great friendship from one that is going nowhere. If you have been with the same group for a year and nothing has changed, it is time to ask the right questions.

The gym community matters here too. That is why I chose the gym I train in, because I knew I could build a community there with like-minded people. If you are asking where to meet people, I would rather you meet them where everyone is working on themselves than at a bar at midnight.

Why you should invest in yourself

Michael Jordan had a coach. LeBron has coaches. If they do, why would you not pay for someone to help you improve? Osaki said the biggest returns in his life have come from investing in himself.

It is hard to convince people of this, because it is abstract. If you buy a property, you can see it and touch it. Investing in yourself, in a book, a mentorship or a coach, is harder to see. It was the trickiest part of my job when I started. But the return is not only physical or financial. It is mental, and you carry it with you for the rest of your life.

I am also not a typical trainer. I teach the exercises, of course, but I also want to help someone get better by one percent every day in every part of their life. When someone gives me their time, I want to give them as much information and as much fun as possible. Self-care should be enjoyable. In the gym, if you could hear us from across the room, that was normal.

What changed the most

At the end of the conversation, I asked Osaki what he thought had changed the most since we first met. He answered without even thinking about it: my confidence.

I agree. He believes in himself more. He is less dependent on other people's input. He makes decisions faster, and he manages his time better. When something in his life was not going anywhere, he cut to the chase and made the call. He is sharper. He dresses better. He talks differently. I told him he is not the same man who came to me on the first day.

He also described what the structure gave him. He felt like he was going with the wind before. Now he has someone keeping him accountable, and a set of things he knows he has to do each day to become a little bit better. His hardest lesson was delayed gratification, and trusting that if he sticks with it long enough, he will get there.

I learned a lot from him too. I gained a friend and a brother out of these six months.

Questions people ask me

**Did Osaki need supplements?** No. We stuck to proper food, and he did not need anything else to get his results.

**What was the first thing you changed?** His structure: set meal times, a fixed morning, and a proper bedtime. After that, the process of elimination for foods that did not agree with him, and no alcohol during the week.

**Why did you stop him eating at his desk?** In my experience, eating while stressed works against you. I wanted him to sit down for thirty minutes, away from calls and work, so he could eat in a calm state.

**Is tap water really a problem?** I think it is worth testing for yourself. Osaki and I compared mineral water with tap water, and we noticed a difference. If you do not want to buy mineral water, you can add a pinch of Himalayan salt to filtered water.

**Do I have to live in a walkable city to walk more?** No. The point is the habit: a morning walk and ten minutes after meals. Budapest just made it easy for him.

**How often should I train hard?** Not every week. We did four weeks all in, then a deload week. You cannot go flat out six days a week for a whole year.

Final thoughts

Osaki's story is not really about a new workout. It is about the inside. Structure for the first and last two hours of the day. Food that suits your gut and comes from a real source. Water with minerals. A calm state when you eat. Training in cycles. Real recovery. And the self-belief to take action and keep going.

Fix the inside, and the outside follows. If you want help with your own version of this, start with the free 30-day recomp plan below, and come back and tell me how it goes.

Get your free 30-day recomp plan here: https://azermahdi.com/

Watch the full video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R17Pb44V3IU

Disclaimer

This article is for general information and education only. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a qualified doctor or other licensed healthcare professional. I am sharing my own experience and what I have seen with my coaching clients. Reading this article does not create a doctor-patient or coach-client relationship.

Bloating, low energy, brain fog, poor sleep, low libido, and constant stress can have many causes, including medical conditions. If you have any health condition, are pregnant, take medication, or have symptoms that are severe or do not go away, speak to your doctor before you change your training, nutrition, supplements, fasting, sauna or cold exposure, breathing practice, or sleep routine. Never ignore or delay professional medical advice because of something you read here. If you think you have a medical emergency, contact your local emergency services right away.

The client stories and results mentioned here are real examples, but they are not guarantees. Results vary from person to person and depend on many factors, including your health, effort, consistency, and circumstances. Supplements, calorie targets, and training programmes are mentioned only to describe what I do and what I have seen, and they are not a recommendation for you personally.

You are fully responsible for your own health decisions and for how you use this information. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Azer Mahdi disclaims liability for any loss, injury, or damage resulting from the use of, or reliance on, this article.