My Story

My story didn’t begin with a diet, a gym membership or a plan to transform my life.

It began with a major heart attack in 2023.

Until then, I had spent my whole life believing I was strong and fearless, someone who could face whatever came my way. Suddenly, my own heart made me feel vulnerable. I hated that feeling.

But what happened next changed far more than my health.

Recovery taught me that I didn’t need to become somebody else. I needed to build a healthier version of the person I already was.

There was no perfect diet. No perfect exercise programme. No magic solution.

Instead, I began making small decisions, building routines and learning what worked for me.

Those decisions eventually became something much bigger:

Recovery by Design.

October 2022 — with my grandson Robbie, just a few months before my heart attack

The Day Everything Changed

In January 2023, everything changed.

What began as an ordinary day became the day that divided my life into two parts — before my heart attack and after it.

I survived. But survival was only the beginning.

The physical recovery mattered, of course, but nobody could have prepared me for what happened inside my head. For the first time in my life, I felt vulnerable.

I had spent my whole life believing I was strong and fearless, someone who could face whatever came my way. Then my own heart suddenly made me feel vulnerable. I hated that feeling.

For me, losing that sense of strength and feeling vulnerable was one of the hardest parts of what happened.

Recovery Wasn’t Just Physical

I expected recovery to be about my heart.

Medication. Exercise. Food. Getting fitter and stronger.

What I hadn’t expected was having to rebuild my confidence.

Slowly, I began to realise that being strong didn’t mean pretending nothing had happened. It meant accepting what had happened and deciding what I was going to do next.

I couldn’t change January 2023.

But I could decide what happened from that point forward.

Taking Back Control

After my heart attack, there were many things I couldn’t control.

But I could control what I did next.

I could learn about food instead of simply following another diet.

I could exercise with purpose instead of chasing quick results.

I could build routines that worked around my life rather than trying to make my life fit around them.

Most importantly, I could stop searching for perfection.

I began to understand that recovery wasn’t going to come from one enormous change.

It would come from hundreds of small decisions, repeated often enough to become part of who I was.

That was when recovery stopped being something that was happening to me.

I started designing it.

Building a Life I Could Sustain

I didn’t suddenly become perfect.

I didn’t give up the foods I enjoyed, spend every day in a gym or allow recovery to take over my life.

I simply started paying attention.

I learned more about nutrition and began to understand what I was eating and why.

Exercise became something I did with purpose, but also something I genuinely enjoyed.

I built routines because routines made the right decisions easier.

And when life didn’t go according to plan, I learned that one meal, one day or one setback didn’t undo everything that had come before it.

The goal was never perfection.

The goal was to build a healthier life that I actually wanted to live.

One of my earliest recovery goals was simple — I wanted to play golf with my son again. The thought of never being able to do that again would have genuinely broken my heart.

Recovery Needed a Reason

Recovery is much easier when you know what you’re recovering for.

For me, it was never simply about losing weight, eating better or becoming fitter.

Those things mattered, but they weren’t the reason.

The reason was my family.

It was playing golf with my son again.

It was being there for the people I loved and being physically capable of enjoying those moments with them.

Numbers gave me a way to measure my progress.

But the people in my life gave that progress a purpose.

More Than Recovery

I once thought recovery meant getting back to the person I was before my heart attack.

I was wrong.

Recovery gave me the opportunity to become healthier, stronger and more aware of the life I already had.

It taught me to appreciate ordinary moments that I might once have taken for granted.

Family. Holidays. Walking. Training. Golf. Laughter. Simply being there.

I still enjoy food. I still enjoy a drink. I still have days when things don’t go according to plan.

That is life.

Recovery by Design was never about creating a perfect life.

It was about making sure I was healthy enough to live mine.

If you’d like to hear more of my story in my own words, you can listen to my NHS podcast below.

Feel free to click the link below to listen to the Podcast I did for the NHS team.

Want to Have a Look at the Dashboards I Use?

Throughout my recovery I’ve used spreadsheets and Dashboards to help me keep track of what I was doing and, more importantly, understand what was actually working for me.
And I currently use the advanced dashboard everyday myself

I’ve now developed some of those ideas into the Recovery by Design Dashboards.

There’s absolutely no obligation to buy anything. I’ve created demos of the Dashboards, so if you’re interested you can simply have a look at how they work and see whether any of the ideas might be useful to you.

View my Dashboards