Most of what they told me about food and lifting was wrong
I grew up on rice. Mountains of it, three times a day, with curries built around lentils and vegetables and the occasional sliver of fish. The Sri Lankan kitchen of my childhood was warm, fragrant, and well-meaning, but it was also, in retrospect, a slow-acting sedative. Not enough protein to build a child into a man, far too many carbs to keep the brain sharp, and seed oils woven through everything like an invisible tax on my future health.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. I was just a boy who couldn’t quite keep up.
We moved to England when I was fourteen. The food changed, the weather changed, but the fog that had quietly settled inside my head came along for the ride. I was a late bloomer. While other lads were finding their voices, their confidence, their first relationships, I was working out how to leave the house without my chest seizing up. Social anxiety wasn’t a buzzword for me. It was a wall, and on the other side of that wall was every version of myself I might have become.
I joined a gym in 2013, mostly because I’d run out of other ideas, and somehow convinced both myself and the qualifying body by 2015 that I could be a personal trainer. There’s a particular kind of arrogance involved in coaching others when you can’t even coach yourself out of a panic on the bus. But I went anyway, because forward seemed marginally better than still.
For years I trained the way everyone said you should. High reps, more volume, more sessions, more everything. The science of the day insisted that hypertrophy belonged to those who suffered most, so I suffered. I got marginally stronger and considerably more tired. The brain fog stayed. The anxiety stayed. Most days I felt like I was watching my own life through fogged-up glass.
In 2019 I tried intermittent fasting, the first dietary lever I’d ever pulled with any conviction. Things sharpened, briefly. Then plateaued. So I dropped the carbs. Better again, slightly. Then keto. Another small lift. Each step felt like wiping a corner of a window without touching the rest of the pane.
The morning the fog lifted
Then, in 2020, I went carnivore.
I wish I had a more cinematic way to describe what happened next, but the truth is just this: the fog lifted, and it didn’t come back. The background hum of anxiety, the one I’d assumed was simply the sound of being alive, switched off. I sat in a quiet kitchen one morning, eating eggs and steak, and noticed that my mind was actually quiet too. I genuinely thought something was wrong.
That was the moment I realised the food the official guidelines had insisted I keep eating had been quietly stealing my life for thirty years.
Less, properly applied, was unmistakably more
Around the same time, I started questioning my training with the same impudence. If addition by subtraction had worked for the diet, why not the gym? I dropped my reps from the standard high-volume sludge to 6 to 8. Then 4 to 6. I went from training twice a day to once. From six days a week to five. To four. The strength didn’t go. It came. Pull-ups multiplied, the big lifts climbed, and recovery stopped feeling like a part-time job.
Everything since has been a long, stubborn act of reverse-engineering. Why did the carnivore diet do what it did? Why did low-volume training keep producing gains long after the textbooks said it shouldn’t? I read, I tested, I argued with the literature in the margins. I pushed every finding out into the open on X, in real time, often with more honesty than tact. The following grew past 150,000, and the more it grew, the clearer the pattern became. The mainstream narrative had been wrong about so much, and a lot of people had been spinning their wheels because of it. I had been one of them.
That’s the spine of everything I do now. Traditional foods, animal-based and unapologetic. Hard, intelligent training that respects recovery instead of bullying it. A mindset that treats the experts as a starting point for inquiry rather than the end of one. The Ruminati was built on those same lines, because the work has stopped being about fixing me. It’s about helping you avoid the years I lost. I’m 32 now, based in Wrexham, and I still train and test everything here before I put it in front of you.
If you’re new here, the blog is where I publish the long, deep, occasionally combative pieces. The X account is the daily noise. For anyone who wants more than reading, there are training plans, diet plans, and the odd t-shirt to wear into battle.
What people who've trained with me say
I have been training with Sama for quite some time now. He is very knowledgable on all things to do with training from the workouts to the diet plans. He is always there to give…
Sama is the sexiest PT I know, helps that he's great at what he does too! He's really logical in his approach and helped me fix a load of bad gym form so I’m not…
I’ve been training with Sama for a few months now and I can honestly say he’s an outstanding personal trainer. He’s motivating, knowledgeable, patient and encouraging, always pushing me to reach my full potential. Sama…
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Long-form, occasionally combative pieces on food, lifting, and the mainstream’s blind spots.
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If you want the whole argument in one place, I put it in a book: The Ruminati, Volume One. Why meat, what to eat, and how to run it for life.
