You are not lazy and you are not uninformed. You have been training for years and you have done what you were told. The advice was generic, the ranges were wrong, and nobody looked properly. I find the cause, in your own numbers, and write it down in plain English.
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Most people arrive with some combination of the same handful of things.
Waking up tired after a full night. Flat by mid-afternoon. Brain fog, poor focus, relying on caffeine to function.
Training consistently, eating reasonably, and the weight creeps up anyway. Or it shifts and comes straight back.
Bloating that has become so normal you have stopped noticing. Irregularity. Reacting to foods that never used to be a problem.
Low libido. Low mood. Irregular or difficult cycles. The drive you used to have has gone somewhere.
Falling asleep fine and waking at three. Or never really getting deep sleep. Or lying there wired after a long day.
Running on adrenaline. Short-tempered. Permanently switched on and unable to come down.
A back that goes now and then, a shoulder you work around, hips that do not move like they did — and the assumption that this is what your forties feel like.
You have symptoms, you got tested, you were told everything is fine. This is the one I am most often the answer to.
I do not diagnose and I do not treat disease. I find what is driving the symptoms, using your own numbers, and I work alongside your doctor rather than around them. Already have a diagnosis? Here is what I have worked with.
Score yourself across 18 body systems and see it on one page. Most people have never done that — which is exactly why the picture never made sense before, and why a ten-minute appointment looking at one thing at a time kept coming back clear.
If your score comes back low, I will tell you that you do not need me.
More cardio, fewer calories, longer stints. It felt like the responsible thing to do. But chronic cardio on an already-stressed system raises cortisol, and high cortisol tells your body to hold fat and give up muscle. So you did more, got less, burned out, and concluded you had not been disciplined enough. You had.
The protocol was wrong, not you.
Standard reference ranges are built from the general population and set wide enough to catch disease. You can sit inside them and feel terrible, because “not ill” and “working properly” are two different questions and only one gets asked.
Nobody told you there was a second set of ranges.
Supplements in the cupboard you cannot remember buying. Gluten cut for a while. Magnesium because a podcast said so. None of it chosen for you, because nothing was measured.
Guessing is expensive and slow, and it is the default when no one will test you.
You delegate your tax. You delegate your mortgage. You run systems for a living, then run the most complicated system you own off podcasts and good intentions. By six o’clock you stop deciding and start defaulting.
Willpower is not the missing piece. A plan built from your own data is.
Every long stint of cardio-and-restriction took muscle with the fat. Muscle is where your blood sugar goes and where your metabolic rate lives, so each attempt left you slightly worse equipped than the last. That is why the fourth attempt is harder than the first.
You did not fail four times. You were dismantling the solution.
You had bloods done. You were told they were fine. And you walked out still bloated, still foggy, still waking up tired — quietly wondering whether you were imagining it.
You weren’t. Here is what actually happened.
A reference range is not a target. It is a net. Standard ranges are built by taking a large sample of the general population and drawing a line around where most of them sit. That’s it. The range describes what is common, not what is good — and the population it was drawn from is not a healthy one. Being inside it means you resemble everybody else. It does not mean you are working properly.
Your doctor was not wrong. They were answering a different question. A GP is looking for disease. That is the job, and it’s the right job. But “have you got a diagnosable condition?” and “is your body working the way it should?” are two separate questions, and only the first gets asked in a ten-minute appointment. You were told you didn’t have the first problem. Nobody ever looked at the second.
Think of it as a smoke alarm. It is excellent at telling you the house is on fire. It will never tell you the room is cold.
Which is why “in range” and “fine” are not the same sentence. A marker can sit at the very bottom of an acceptable range and be technically normal while you feel nothing like yourself. Thyroid, iron stores, vitamin D, testosterone, inflammatory markers, blood sugar regulation — every one has a band where you are not ill and not working either. That band is where most of the people who come to me are living.
Optimal ranges are narrower. They are drawn from where people actually function well rather than from where the average person happens to sit. That is the lens I read your results through.
Then I rank what is driving it. Almost every case comes back to some combination of four things: chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, accumulated toxic load, and nutrient deficiency. They interact and they rarely arrive alone. My job is to work out which are yours, which is loudest, and what order to address them in — because sequence matters. Doing the right things in the wrong order is most of why previous attempts did not hold.
And you get it in writing. Marker by marker. One plain line each — what it is, where yours sits, what it means, whether it matters. Not a PDF export with a traffic-light chart. A written read you can go back to at eleven o’clock at night when you want to check you understood it.
That document is the thing people actually come to me for. It is the answer to the question their doctor did not answer.
Almost everyone wants to start at phase three. The longevity protocols, the supplements they heard about, the clever stuff. I understand why — it is the interesting part.
But you cannot optimise a system that is still carrying a load. Doing the right things in the wrong order is most of why previous attempts did not hold. So we go in sequence, and we do not skip.
This is not about how you look. Excess weight is a signal, not a cosmetic problem — a healthy body does not carry it, and when it is there it tells you the system is out of balance.
Fat tissue is not inert storage. It is metabolically and hormonally active: it produces inflammatory signals of its own, and it is where the body puts what it cannot currently clear. So it feeds the very thing that put it there.
Until this shifts, nothing else reads clearly.Now we make the body run the way it is supposed to. Deficiencies addressed. Toxicities removed. Markers brought into their optimal ranges rather than merely inside the standard ones.
In practice that means sleep that restores you, energy that lasts past three o’clock, digestion that stops dictating your day, and hormones that behave. This is the phase where “not ill” finally becomes “working properly”.
This is the phase most people have never actually had.With the foundations in place, the question changes. Not “how do I feel better” but “how do I add ten or twenty good years to the end of this”.
Healthspan, not lifespan. Strength held into your sixties and seventies, muscle kept rather than lost, metabolic reserve built, markers held where we got them. This is the phase the work was always heading towards.
Add life to your years, not years to your life.Weight loss. Wellness. Anti-ageing. It is written on my logo because it is the whole method — and phase three is where the next two sections come in.
You have been sold muscle as a look. It is not. It is the largest metabolic organ you own, and almost everything you came to me about runs through it.
It is where your blood sugar goes. Skeletal muscle takes up the large majority of the glucose you eat. Less muscle means fewer places for that glucose to go, which means more of it circulating, which means more insulin, which means insulin resistance — one of the four things driving nearly every case I see. You cannot fix insulin resistance from the plate alone. There has to be somewhere for the fuel to go.
It talks to the rest of your body. Contracting muscle releases signalling compounds that act directly against inflammation. Training is not just burning something off. It is an anti-inflammatory signal you cannot get from a supplement.
You are losing it right now. Muscle mass declines from your thirties onward and the rate accelerates. Nobody tells you, because the scale does not show it — you can weigh the same at 45 as you did at 30 and be carrying considerably less muscle and considerably more fat. That is what “my metabolism has slowed down” actually means.
And this is why the harder you tried, the worse it got. Chronic cardio on a restricted diet strips muscle alongside fat. Less muscle means a lower metabolic rate, which means the weight comes back faster and easier than it left. You were not undisciplined. You were dismantling the exact tissue that was going to solve it.
Strength and grip are among the most reliable predictors of how long and how well people live. Not weight. Not BMI. Strength.
So no — I am not going to make you a bodybuilder, and I am not interested in a transformation photo. Three sessions a week, forty-five minutes, strength-led, with mobility and corrective work for what a desk and a laptop have done to your hips, thoracic spine and shoulders. Enough to change your metabolism, restore the tissue, and still be there in twenty years.
Twenty years at a desk does something to a body and nobody warns you about it.
Hips that have been at ninety degrees for eight hours a day, five days a week, stop being able to open. Glutes stop firing, so your lower back does their job instead — and that is where you feel it. Your mid-back stiffens until you can no longer get your arms overhead properly, so your shoulder finds a way around it, and that is the shoulder that now aches. Your head drifts forward towards a screen and your neck holds it there all day.
None of this happened because you got old. It happened because you sat down for twenty years and nobody ever addressed it.
Which is why the place it hurts is usually not the place that is wrong. The stiff knee is often a hip that stopped moving. The aching shoulder is often a mid-back that stopped rotating. Treating the painful bit alone is exactly as effective as reading a symptom without reading a marker — which is to say, it is guessing.
So we earn the range before we add the load. You cannot safely load a joint that does not move properly, and most programmes skip straight to loading it anyway. That is where the injury comes from, and it is why “I started training again and my back went” is such a common story. Mobility and corrective work is not a warm-up tacked on the end. It is prescribed for your restrictions, and it is the reason the strength work is safe to do.
I am not building you a transformation photo. I am building you a body that works — one that gets off the floor easily, lifts what it needs to lift, carries what it needs to carry, plays with your kids without paying for it the next day, and is still doing all of that in twenty years.
Look better, yes. But mainly: no pain, no injuries, no restriction, and the capacity to do what you want with your day.
“I’ve been living with both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis for around 20 years… Within just two weeks, I noticed a remarkable difference. My joint pain and stiffness reduced significantly, my mobility improved dramatically, and I started to feel like myself again.”
“At 42 years old, I honestly feel like I’m 20 again. My energy levels are through the roof, the pain in my knees has completely disappeared, my focus at work has improved massively.”
I work alongside your doctor. I do not diagnose and I do not prescribe.
Functional and optimal ranges, not the ranges that told you you were fine. IHP Level 2, currently studying High Performance Health under Dr Stephen Cabral.
Around your actual results and how you actually eat, including South Asian and vegetarian households. Precision Nutrition.
Strength, conditioning and mobility, written for your restrictions, not pulled off a template. Level 3, twenty-plus years, started at nineteen.
A functional practitioner who cannot programme will tell you to move more. A personal trainer who cannot read a blood panel will tell you to eat less. You have already tried both.
Thirteen years as an IT consultant in investment banking. Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, the London Stock Exchange, BNP Paribas. Ten to twelve hour days and a body I was running into the ground without noticing, because everyone around me looked the same way I did.
I was thirty. My sleep went, my digestion went, my drive went, and I put on weight I could not shift. Thirty is not the age at which you expect to feel like that. So I went to the doctor. My bloods came back normal.
A functional practitioner found it in an afternoon. Same body, different lens — adrenal fatigue, cortisol all over the place, testosterone on the floor, every marker sitting inside a standard range. Read against optimal ranges, the picture was obvious.
I left the career, the salary and the identity that came with it, and I retrained.
Down in three months — body fat, visceral fat and metabolic age all reduced, and kept off after the programme finished.
Six months, muscle maintained. At 42: “I honestly feel like I’m 20 again.”
To significant reduction in joint pain and stiffness after twenty years of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis.
On Google, from clients writing under their own names.
“When I started, I weighed 98kg… I’m now down to 78kg while maintaining my muscle mass. At 42 years old, I honestly feel like I’m 20 again. My energy levels are through the roof, the pain in my knees has completely disappeared, my focus at work has improved massively.”
“I’ve been gym-going consistently for years and have always considered myself pretty health-conscious… but no matter what I did in the gym, it just wouldn’t shift.” … “By the end of my 3-month programme, I’d lost 9kg and substantially reduced my body fat, visceral fat, and metabolic age.”
“I’ve been living with both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis for around 20 years… Within just two weeks, I noticed a remarkable difference. My joint pain and stiffness reduced significantly, my mobility improved dramatically, and I started to feel like myself again.”
“My exercise regime is no longer soul destroying cardio but effective paced strength training… my nervous system is no longer in fight or flight… I am no longer suffering from constant bloating. I am for the first time in my life genuinely happy.”
“He completely changed my perspective by showing me that I didn’t need endless cardio, HIIT sessions or running to achieve my goals.” … “He’s very hands-on when you’re getting started… before gradually encouraging you to become confident and independent.”
“After having two children, I never thought I’d feel this confident or strong again… I’m in the best shape of my life. He’s taught me the importance of building sustainable eating habits rather than following restrictive diets.”
“My medical needs and physical limitations were understood and I did not feel overwhelmed by the changes he implement to adjust my training, nutrition and lifestyle. We worked closely on changing some key life habits and 3 months on they’re still firmly in place.”
“After my recent heart procedure I wanted to improve my fitness, strength and overall wellbeing… I feel stronger, fitter and more confident, but perhaps more importantly, I have a much more positive mindset towards exercise and looking after myself.”
“I wanted a change in my eating habits and energy levels. Having Sonny guide me every step of the way and encourage me to get through some challenging days made me realise how resilient I was. This has been a lifestyle change.”
Hover to pause · Verbatim, as published on Google
You keep going. That is the honest answer — most people do, for years. But tired becomes normal. Foggy becomes normal. The photo you did not know was being taken becomes the version of you that everyone else already sees.
And the thing actually driving it — inflammation, insulin resistance, toxic load, a nutrient you have been short of for a decade — does not stay still while you wait. It gets more expensive to fix, not less.
The version of you that got to this job did it on energy you no longer have. That is the part worth protecting.
You will answer a few questions before we speak, so I am not spending your fifteen minutes on things you can type in three. Then we talk: what is going on, what you have already tried, what you were told.
At the end you will know whether I can help. If I do not think I can, I will tell you and point you somewhere better. And if I think you need a doctor rather than a practitioner, I will say so — before you have paid me anything.
Opens my calendar. Pick a time that suits you.
Not ready to book? Ask me anything first — I answer these myself.
Standard reference ranges are built from the general population and set wide enough to catch disease. They answer “are you ill?” — the right question for a GP to ask. Optimal ranges answer a different question: “is this working properly?” You can sit comfortably inside a standard range and feel terrible, and that is not a contradiction. It is two different questions, and only one of them usually gets asked.
Usually yes — a lot of my clients are in exactly that position. Here is what I have actually worked with, so you can see whether you recognise yourself.
These look like unrelated problems. They are not. Running through nearly all of them are the same few drivers: chronic inflammation, blood sugar that will not stay flat, a gut barrier that is not doing its job, and nutrients that have been short for years. That is the ground I work on.
What I am not doing is treating the condition. Your doctor manages that, and they should stay in the loop. I do not diagnose, I do not prescribe, and I will never ask you to stop or change a medication. What I work on is everything around it — what you eat, what you are short of, what is driving the inflammation, how you train, how you sleep. For some people that makes a significant difference to how they feel day to day. For some it does not. Anyone who promises you more than that is selling something.
One practical note, because it matters most with blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol: if what we change starts working, your numbers move — and if you are on medication, that medication was dosed against the old ones. So keep getting tested. Ask your GP to re-check your bloods and your blood pressure regularly while we are working together, and take the new numbers back to whoever prescribes for you. Measured beats assumed, every time.
If what you are describing needs a doctor rather than a practitioner, I will say so on the first call, before you have paid me anything.
“I’ve been living with both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis for around 20 years… Within just two weeks, I noticed a remarkable difference. My joint pain and stiffness reduced significantly, my mobility improved dramatically, and I started to feel like myself again.”Stephen B., 52 · Google review
I work alongside your doctor. I do not diagnose and I do not prescribe. Individual results vary.
I am a Level 2 Integrative Health Practitioner, a Precision Nutrition coach and a Level 3 personal trainer, and I am currently studying High Performance Health under Dr Stephen Cabral. In practice that means I read functional lab work against optimal ranges, work out what is actually driving your symptoms, and build a plan around it — nutrition, supplements and training. I am not a doctor. I do not diagnose and I do not prescribe.
After our first proper conversation I will tell you exactly which panels I want and why, and from which provider. You order them and pay the lab directly — that cost sits outside anything you pay me, so there is no markup and nothing hidden. Then I read the results marker by marker and write up what they mean in plain English.
It is strongly encouraged, because it is the difference between knowing and guessing — and you have probably done enough guessing. We can start from a detailed symptom assessment if you would rather, and add testing when you are ready.
Everything is virtual. I work with clients across the UK and the US. Calls are by video, and everything I write for you comes to you in writing so you can go back to it.
Yes, and I would want to know about it. I work alongside your doctor, not around them. I do not diagnose and I do not prescribe, and I will always tell you to speak to your prescribing doctor before changing anything. If I think what you are describing needs a doctor rather than a practitioner, I will say so — including on the first call, before you have paid me anything.
It varies, and anyone who gives you a fixed number is guessing. Some people feel a shift in the first couple of weeks. Others take a few months, usually because what is driving it has been driving it for years. What I can tell you is that you will know what is going on within weeks, because you will have it in writing, from your own numbers.
I write it. Three sessions a week, forty-five minutes, strength-led, with mobility and corrective work for what sitting at a desk does to your hips, mid-back and shoulders. Twenty-plus years of coaching people in gyms sits behind it. This is the part most functional practitioners cannot do, and it is the part that makes the results hold.
No, and it does not matter where you are starting. Most people I work with have trained for years and were doing the wrong things well. Some have not trained in a decade. The programme is built for your body and your restrictions either way.
Usually yes, and it is often the reason to start rather than the reason not to. We work around what is genuinely off-limits and address what is actually causing it, which frequently is not where you feel it. If something needs a physio or a doctor rather than me, I will tell you and work alongside them.
No. Training is part of it. But if all you want is a programme and macros, I am not the right person and there are cheaper people who are.
