South Africa

South Africa, Maverick Life

Breaking barriers - I finally found a way to lose weight without injections such as Ozempic

One of the weightlifting areas at the gym. By Sukasha Singh

25 Mar 2025

Weight loss, when done correctly, is hard, tedious, grinding work, but the benefits for your physical and mental wellbeing are significant enough for you to push through the pain.

A conversation with my sister took place more than 10 years ago; my nephew was a skinny teenage nerd back then and I thought he needed to learn self-defence, and I needed to lose weight, so I signed us up for kickboxing at a dojo in Fordsburg, Johannesburg.

Sandy (my sister): So you’re paying this guy to beat you up?

Me: Well, I suppose you could put it that way, but there’s more to it.

Sandy: I’ll beat you up for free.

Me: Oh, shut up! It’s called pain conditioning.

Sandy: Okay, whatever you wanna call it, I’ll do it for nothing.

Me: He doesn’t really beat us up! It’s very methodical. He knows what he’s doing. You don’t.

The classes felt worse than CrossFit, and at the end of each session we’d all line up, raise our arms, tense our stomach muscles (even if we didn’t have any), and the sensei would hit us in a very controlled manner across our abdomens with a thick bamboo rod. It hurt, but not that much — though the purple welts on my stomach made it seem far worse than it actually was.

Needless to say, I have done some unusual things in the pursuit of getting fit and losing weight, and I’ve obviously tried a lot of stupid fad diets, but nothing has worked, until now.

Weight loss drugs

I’ve been overweight, fat, rotund, hefty, corpulent, fluffy, big-boned — call it whatever you want — for far too many years. When my doctor gave me a script last year for Saxenda, a drug similar to Ozempic, I knew something had to change.

Of course, no medical aid will pay roughly R4,000 a month for you to take Saxenda, and I’m a journalist working in the age of disinformation where people stop reading our articles because we have the temerity to publish the ugly truth about their favourite politicians, so I obviously don’t have four thousand bucks to spare every month.

So instead of spending money I don’t have on drugs I don’t need, I decided to give the gym another go. I’m lucky to live in an area where there are about six gyms in a 5km radius of my house, and I’ve tried all of them except for one — the Pirates High-Performance Gym in Greenside.

I signed up for a few reasons: it’s a community gym and it’s affordable; it has heavy punching bags, which I always enjoy; it has two rowing machines; it’s surrounded by trees and looks like something out of Hobbiton; and the trainers (Nathan Morris, Yusri Ally and Neo Ngatane) are friendly, knowledgeable and helpful.

There’s just one goose in this pic, sitting near the mirror, and the writer. (Photo: Sukasha Singh)

A little inspiration on the 20kg barbell that’s used for weightlifting, and proof that the writer’s workout was long and difficult. (Photo: Sukasha Singh)

Of course, signing up at any gym is the easy part; finding the inspiration to keep going back is infinitely more difficult. This is where I believe four important and mostly overlooked factors in weight loss come into play: mental health, traction, support and music.

I’ve been in therapy for two years now and I’m finally starting to understand my relationship with food — I don’t think you can successfully lose weight without some understanding of whatever might be causing you to overeat.

Traction comes in the form of doing the sort of physical activity that you enjoy so that you continue doing it because it’s fun — and not because it’s a chore you need to do to lose weight.

Support comes from family and friends who encourage you, like the time an Egyptian goose wandered into the gym and sat in front of the mirror and I felt bad about sending a pic of myself (and the goose) to my journo pals because I don’t like pics of myself, and they proceeded to quack up our group chat with chirps like: “he’s just checking out the chicks”, “he’s fowlen in love and thought he’d wing it by walking in”, “waddle you do if he comes closer?”, and “you sent us on this wild goose chase, you can’t fly the coop now”.

And music is self-explanatory — when the CrossFit coach at the gym plays his supercool Eighties playlist that includes Eye of the Tiger, no one is standing still.

Getting started

For me, traction came from wanting to be strong. I’ve read several stories about the health benefits of strength training, and because our 35kg Rottweiler-Staffie rescue dog has bad knees and needs to be lifted onto my bed, I decided it was time to pump some serious iron to build strength.

Pirates Gym head trainer Morris is a South African weightlifting champion, and he showed me some powerlifting basics. Ally is also a competitive powerlifter and has given me good advice in this regard.

Be warned that you will undoubtedly experience a fair amount of pain when you start any sort of exercise after being dormant for some time. I was stupid and I trained way too hard for way too long in my first few weeks.

I therefore experienced such excruciating pain that I can definitively tell you that the best thing to ice your aching muscles is a 1kg bag of frozen peas. The gel packs aren’t cold enough and ice cubes melt too fast, but peas from the deep freeze are a goddamn godsend.

I would throw the bag against a wall to break up the large chunks inside, and the first few times those frigid peas said hello to my searing-hot painful flesh I let rip with the sort of profanities that would have anyone within earshot wondering if I suffered from coprolalia. Even my dog shot a few reproachful looks in my direction when I shrieked, howled and swore while icing various painful parts.

The inglorious injuries

Despite having played tennis for many years, I never experienced tennis elbow until I started deadlifting. It was the kind of pain that kept me up at night, and when I eventually figured out what was wrong, strengthening exercises with a Theraband Flexbar helped quite a bit.

One of the weightlifting areas at the gym. (Photo: Sukasha Singh)

In those first few weeks, the blisters on my palms multiplied like politicians at an all-you-can-eat gravy buffet, and then there was the discovery of a possible groin muscle strain to add to my list of inglorious injuries.

I was shopping and reached up for something on the top shelf and felt an embarrassingly sharp pain down there that made me squawk like a surprised hadeda. It felt like an invisible ninja had snuck up on me and kicked me in my nether regions. Thankfully, I have the good sense to shop when there aren’t many people around, so I didn’t have to explain myself to any random shoppers. I lined up an ultrasound with my doctor, but then realised it was indeed a strained adductor muscle, so I started doing exercises with a medicine ball to strengthen those muscles.

There was also a bruised intercostal muscle, because my rowing form is terrible, and then there were those weirdly shaped bumps just above my knees that looked like humungous bee stings. They weren’t painful or discoloured, but they definitely weren’t there before I started powerlifting. After much research and worrying, my snarky inner voice said, “you’re doing 150 squats a week now so your quadriceps are getting bigger, you moron!” Indeed they are.

I was so desperate to alleviate my never-ending pain without using too many non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that I even figured out how to make my own ginger and turmeric tincture to help with the inflammation.

What worked for me

I started off with 20 minutes on a rowing machine, 30 minutes on a punching bag and about 20 minutes of strength training three to five times a week. I’ve done various martial arts over the years and I’ve always enjoyed working up a sweat on a punching bag, so I stuck with what was fun for me to create that much-needed traction.

The Greenside CrossFit club has classes at the Pirates Gym, and the head CrossFit coach, Chris Woolcott, is nice enough to allow regular gym-goers such as myself to use the CrossFit equipment on occasion, and that adds another fun element to working out.

There are also Muay Thai classes at the gym, and coach Henry Madini often corrects my form whenever he thinks I’m doing something stupid on the punching bags.

I moved on from the punching bags after two months because hitting a heavy bag very hard is going to take a toll on one’s wrists and joints. I now focus on warming up on a rather evil contraption known as a deadmill — a non-motorised treadmill.

This isn’t easy

When I first started working out at Pirates, it felt like the definition of insanity, like I was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

I only started to see a bit of a difference after two months, and that was somewhat disheartening because I was working out harder than I ever had before.

And that’s the one thing that all those fitness influencers don’t tell you: this isn’t easy. If you’re like me and you have a lot of weight to lose — 35kg — you need to accept that it’s going to be bloody difficult, it’s going to take a long time and the people around you probably aren’t going to notice the small amounts of weight that you’re losing.

It’s only been about three months and I’ve lost 7kg, but I know I’ve gained a decent amount of muscle, too. And now that gym three to five times a week has become a habit, I’m paying proper attention to what I’m eating because you can’t out-train a bad diet.

What I like about the Pirates Gym is that it’s small, the other gym-goers are friendly and the beautiful trees, Egyptian geese and Indian mynahs make it feel a little less like the sweatshop that it is.

Of course, it goes without saying that you don’t need to sign up at any gym to lose weight. You can walk around in your neighbourhood, or exercise in your backyard, or fire the gardener and mow the lawn every week because that’s a good workout, too.

The point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need to take expensive drugs to lose weight, but you do need to understand that weight loss, when done correctly, is hard, tedious, grinding work, but the benefits for your physical and mental wellbeing are significant.

Lastly, I do understand that many obese people have taken drugs such as Ozempic and have experienced incredible success. There are also studies showing that people who have taken these drugs and have lost weight are now at a decreased risk for many serious diseases associated with obesity. However, scientists are questioning whether these health improvements are because of the drugs or the weight loss. I think it’s the latter. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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