Thank you, Bernie.Thank you for sharing your journey with such honesty and humility.Your story is a powerful reminder that lasting change doesn’t come from perfection—it comes from consistently choosing to be just a little better than yesterday.We’re incredibly grateful to have you as part of the Coastal CrossFit community and hope your story inspires others to take that first step towards better health.Sometimes, one person’s story is all it takes to change another person’s life. Better Than Yesterday: My CrossFit JourneyBy Dr Bernard Tamba-Lebbie In 2023, I reached a point where I knew something had to change. I weighed 120 kilograms. Around the same time, two of my fellow surgeons underwent coronary artery bypass surgery because of severe heart disease. Then, after returning from Sierra Leone, where I had celebrated the 75th anniversary of my high school, one of my closest friends—a mining company CEO with whom I had spent much of the reunion—collapsed at a roundabout in Freetown and died suddenly from a heart attack. Those events became a crossroads in my life. I had a choice: continue down the path I was on, or change direction before it was too late. Ironically, my first solution wasn’t exercise. As a surgeon, I looked for a surgical solution. I spoke to one of my colleagues who performs bariatric surgery and asked whether he would perform a gastric sleeve operation on me. He smiled and said he would happily do it, provided I obtained a referral from my GP. When I asked my GP for that referral, I fully expected him simply to write it. Instead, he refused. He told me he would only refer me if I first committed to six months at his gym and genuinely failed. Looking back, that refusal may have been one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me. My journey wasn’t completely straightforward. There came a time when I felt I wasn’t making the progress I had hoped for. I went back to my GP and asked whether medication might help. He agreed, and I started one of the newer weight-loss medications. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t for me. I struggled with significant nausea and found the side effects difficult to tolerate. After giving it a genuine try, I decided to stop taking it. Rather than continuing to search for another shortcut, I went back to what I knew I could control—turning up at the gym, listening to my coach, and continuing to improve my eating habits one meal at a time. That decision became another turning point. For the first time in my life, I heard about CrossFit. When I told people at the hospital that I had joined CrossFit, most thought I was crazy. Some laughed. Others simply couldn’t imagine that someone weighing 120 kilograms would survive a CrossFit class. Then I met my coach, Marie Saliba. On the very first day, I told her that I had only one goal. I wasn’t there to be better than anyone else. I simply wanted to be better than my yesterday. That philosophy has guided me ever since. My journey certainly hasn’t been perfect. One of my biggest failures came when I ignored Marie’s advice. I tried to progress too quickly and attempted to jump from one pull-up bar to another before I was ready. I dislocated both shoulders and eventually required surgery on both of them. It was a painful lesson in patience, humility and listening to someone with more experience than me. But despite that setback, I never stopped. When I first arrived at CrossFit, Marie would often ask me to run only 50 metres because that was all I could comfortably manage. Today I regularly run 400 meters. I still don’t particularly enjoy running, and plenty of people run past me, but that doesn’t matter. I’m not competing with them. I’m competing with the man who walked through the CrossFit doors three years ago. The biggest transformation has probably been my relationship with food. Initially, I simply adopted intermittent fasting, eating only between midday and 9 p.m. I still follow that routine most days. Over time, my eating habits evolved naturally. I became much more intentional about the food I brought into my home. For many months, around 80% of my meals were seafood. Most weekends I would drive to Mooloolaba, buy fresh seafood straight from the trawlers, meal-prep it for the week and keep it in the fridge. Coming from Sierra Leone, rice was deeply embedded in my culture. In fact, if you ask someone back home whether they’ve eaten and they’ve only had bread or potatoes, they’ll often answer, “No.” What they really mean is they haven’t eaten rice. For most of my life, white rice was central to every meal. Today, I’ve largely replaced it with quinoa and, more recently, brown rice. I also became much more conscious about eating foods in their natural form. I steam vegetables instead of frying them, buy fresh fruit from the local farmers’ markets, and carefully read ingredient labels so that my soy sauce and fish sauce contain no preservatives. When I season food, I tend to use simple ingredients like black pepper, white pepper and Himalayan salt rather than highly processed seasoning mixes. There is no sugar in my house. If visitors ask for sugar in their tea or coffee, they’re usually disappointed because I simply don’t have any. Instead, I offer them honey. I actually have several different varieties, much of it generously supplied by one of my closest friends on the Sunshine Coast, Paul Secho, who has his own honey farm. It’s one of those little pleasures that reminds me how wonderful natural food can be. You’ll also never find soft drinks like Coke, Sprite or Fanta in my refrigerator. The only bread I normally keep is dark rye bread. I know it’s an acquired taste and not everyone enjoys it, so I also keep spelt bread for friends who visit. Over the years I’ve realised that what I…
