When Tom Kellett woke up after a particularly heavy night of drinking with his work friends, he had that awful dread in the pit of his stomach.
Some people call it ‘the fear’. Others call it ‘hangxiety’.
Whatever the term, that certainty that he’d done something embarrassing while under the influence the night before just wouldn’t shift. But after doing the rounds of everyone who had been at the party, Tom assumed it must just have been a case of alcohol-induced worry.
“I called round everybody and they all said, ‘No, you’re completely fine,’” he told news.com.au podcast I Swear I Never.
“I didn’t bother calling my boss because I’d hilariously tucked him into bed that night. But when I came into work on Monday, my friend asked, ‘Have you heard about what’s happened?’
“He basically said, ‘Oh, have you not heard about the Phantom Crapper?’ I said, ‘Who’s that?’ but by that point, I already knew. The beer fear was correct. It was me.”
Tom learnt that while heavily intoxicated, he’d sleepwalked into the room where his boss and his boss’s girlfriend were asleep.
“I had essentially tried to go to the toilet on the end of his bed,” explains Tom. “It’s harrowing to find out that that’s what happened. Luckily his girlfriend woke up before I did anything, but it’s really bad nonetheless.”
But then, a funny thing happened. Instead of letting the horror and embarrassment consume him, Tom faced up to what he’d done – and got a reality check about the way his life was headed.
“It was a really dark day for me, to be honest with you,” he says, “but what’s really strange about it was that it was as though it was a bit of an epiphany. It was like the rose-tinted glasses came off. And I saw myself for who I really was in the mirror.”
Since moving to Melbourne from the UK after the loss of a close friend to suicide, Tom was almost immediately plunged into lockdown with the rest of the city, as the pandemic changed the fabric of the world as we knew it. During lockdown, he says he began drinking to excess and generally neglecting his health.
“I realised I was heavier than any of the heavyweight boxers on the planet, which really hit home,” he says.
But worse, Tom’s health was suffering. He was having severe indigestion in his sleep and his mental health was at a low point as well.
“So I decided at that moment to take a ‘before’ photo,” he says. “I had to change my life. I realised I couldn’t live like this anymore.”
Tom began meeting weekly with his boss – yes, that boss – to create ‘accountability goals’.
“I’d go in and meet him at 2pm every Wednesday, and we’d talk about my goals – health and otherwise – and what I needed to do to get there. If I hadn’t done what I’d said I was going to, the sessions would get quite brutal. He was kind of my excuse eraser.”
From there, Tom joined a gym and set up an accountability group with two friends, where they pledged to do a workout each day and post a photo to their group chat. If one of them failed, they had to pay the other two members $10 a piece.
“It wasn’t really about the money,” Tom says. “It developed into this real support system – we actually wanted to see each other succeed.”
Tom says something else happened through the group. The daily photos served as evidence for how much his body was changing.
“I realised that by taking these photos, I was seeing the results that most people don’t see. Most people will go to the gym for around three weeks, and then they’ll give up because they haven’t seen any results,” he says.
“What’s really funny is that you don’t see results, because you’re so used to seeing yourself every day. So by taking those photos and seeing my change daily, I could actually see that there was a massive transformation under way.”
These days, Tom has totally transformed his health, fitness and outlook. He no longer drinks “to the point of total annihilation,” no longer eats meat, and has lost 30kg – although he says the mental health benefits are far and away the most rewarding.
“My mental health is now the best it’s ever been. I can deal with absolutely anything that comes in my way,” he says.
“You know, I used to have to go to counselling weekly, because I had severe anxiety with OCD and intrusive thoughts. I thought my life was going to be like that forever. And, you know, now it isn’t like that at all. Because now I just know how to manage and deal with my mental health, and a big part of that is because of fitness and wellbeing.”
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He has completed several half-Ironmans, Ironmans and ultra-marathons in amazing feats of endurance, with no plans to slow up.
Tom has an app in development based on the accountability model that worked so well for his own lifestyle overhaul, and he has committed to completing one endurance event each month for the next 10 months in order to raise money for mental health charities.
You can find out more about his efforts by following him on Instagram or donating here.
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