The Day I Got Publicly Shamed by a Fitness Influencer

Fitter? No? Happier? No? But more productive? Also, no.

Great news, everybody! Pre-orders for the book are now live outside the US. You can order in the UK via Amazon or support your local indie store with Bookshop.org, and various Amazon warehouses across the world are gearing up to host boxes upon boxes of the book—take a look here and see if your local Bezos megashed has it up for pre-order.

This morning, the book was already at #5 in hot new releases for fatherhood books, and I’m also 171st in the “Family and Lifestyle Depression” chart, so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious. This week, I went live with a rather lovely-looking (if I do say so myself) website for the book, where you can see the endorsements from early readers of the book, find details of all the pre-order goodies, and learn all about what to expect when you’re expecting (to get the book through your letterbox in May). Onwards and upwards!

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Illustration by Tony Johnson

I started the year writing about the curious incident of the dad at the playtime, featuring a dad who only wanted to play with his son for a maximum of 10 minutes a day. It’s worth noting his follow-up showed that he was actually listening, calling out his addiction to his phone and his job. And whilst I didn’t agree with his positioning, I did empathise with the result: hundreds of strangers on the internet lighting up his notifications to tell him he was a terrible human. That can’t have felt good. And I knew it firsthand, because I’d had an internet pile-on of my own a few weeks earlier.

You’ve heard me here, bitching away about how social media is driving global dissatisfaction by drip-feeding us picture-perfect lives of others, or stirring up rage to keep you stuck in the app whilst they fire another four-hundred adverts into your eyeballs. But there’s a dirty secret I haven’t shared: I fucking love TikTok. It reminds me of the old internet: the one where people would literally fuck around (do cool things) and find out (that other people were into them). It scratches that itch that Tumblr once did, many moons ago. It is a constant source of humour in my life, the algorithm “gets me” in a terrifying way, and it’s not a lie to say 80% of what I cook for the kids, I discovered on the app (my recipe collection there now stands 170 dishes strong, and shows no signs of slowing down). I can’t trust myself: I use Screen Time to force a 30-minute-per-day block, knowing that a few more videos are only a “15 more minutes” tap away. I’ve broken free of almost all digital addictions, but this small vice is one I allow myself, as a little treat. It’s like I’ve quit smoking, but am still allowing a little hit on the Lost Mary vape once a day.

Christmas came and went. The algo decided it was time I got into shape. And it wasn’t wrong—after a steady decline in weight and increase in strength and muscle mass during the first half of 2025, the book deadline kicked in and was followed by an onslaught of other deadlines after it. I started eating my feelings (or, more accurately, drinking them in fermented yeast liquids) and finished the year more than a few kilos heavier than I started. As we reached the end of December, at least half of the videos I was being served were fitness-related, promising get-thin-quick plans, washboard abs and “one trick” that could turn my flab into something fab (spoiler alert: it was a GLP-1). The content was better than your average slop, and I started following a few fitness influencers. The mistake I made wasn’t watching their videos. The mistake was writing the comment.

One of the many reasons I started this newsletter was my sheer exhaustion in being force-fed fatherhood success stories that felt impossible to achieve. You know the kind: the only way to be a present dad and successful in your job was to adopt that rise and grind energy; if your kids were making you tired, then just suck it up, or prepare to be overlooked for promotions at work; the only thing standing between you and the best version of yourself was your willingness to sacrifice your sleep in the pursuit of greatness.

And the one thing that always riled me up—and continues to rile me up, as you’ll see—was the idea that if you weren’t doing this as a dad, you were missing your opportunity, not taking your shot, or just not turning up—for yourself, and for your family. I’ve long lived in a house with two children who, from 9pm–6am, could sleep through an earthquake. But, as soon as the sun begins to break above the horizon, a feather hitting the ground in our neighbour’s place would wake them from their slumber.

So one morning, after returning from a rather stressful school run—nothing out of the ordinary, just your regular combination of I don’t want to go today / I hate these shoes / It’s not fair that I have to do these tests / Why is the dog looking at me funny—I was served a video from a fitness influencer I follow, who was telling his two million followers about his “elite morning routine” that anyone could follow, with three simple steps that started innocuously enough:

1. Get up, immediately drink water with electrolytes

2. Spend 60–90 seconds in a cold water shower

3. Take a 15–20 minute walk within the first hour of waking up, which he “pairs with a coffee run, so it’s perfect”

You can see where this falls apart, right? This mistaken assumption that your mornings are still your own when you’re a parent. It takes everything I have to get my two out the door on time and with as few things forgotten as possible. So, twenty minutes to myself for a walk and a coffee? Sure thing, buddy, sounds great. I’ll take a handjob from Scarlett Johansson whilst you’re at it. Man alive, 15–20 seconds to myself in the morning feels like a win. I jumped into the comments to see if any other parents had noticed this minor flaw in the plan. When I didn’t see any, I simply tapped out: “CRIES IN RAISING TWO CHILDREN,” pressed comment, and went about my day.

All done. Or so I thought, until my notifications started blowing up. Said influencer, using the TikTok video reply feature, called me out with my “dumb” comment pinned onto his video, telling me, and his many followers:

“Every time I bring up doing the bare minimum for your health, someone says some dumb shit like this. My brother Kevin, I say this with love: having two kids is not an excuse to not walk for 10 minutes, take a 2-minute cold shower, and drink water. That’s literally what I said in this video. We’re talking 12 to 15 minutes of your life. The bigger problem here is using your kids as a cope to not take care of yourself. There are people with this many kids, twice as many kids, and twice as busy a job, who are way healthier than I am, doing way more for themselves. This is nothing more than an excuse to continue your bad habits.”

Today, two months and almost 1,000 comments later, I’m still getting it in the neck from strangers across the internet. Could I have been clearer? Of course. But all the world and sundry, piling on to tell me that I should stop hiding behind my kids, led me scurrying back to a safe space: I shared the video in the Dadscord, where fellow parent Alex asked, “Does he have kids? No? Then he should definitely shut the fuck up.”

Here’s what I wanted to clap back, but didn’t, because I’ve learned that the comments are not the place for nuance: You’re right. I should look after myself better. I know this. I’ve written a whole book about it. But telling people that a parent who says “my mornings are chaos” is making excuses doesn’t hit right. There’s a huge chasm between “put your oxygen mask on first” and “quit using your kids as an excuse.” One is an invitation. The other is a public shaming. And, if you don’t have kids, you should probably, to quote a fellow parent, “shut the fuck up.”

Let’s help dads get healthier. But rather than telling them the problem is discipline, let’s start by acknowledging the problem is design: their lives are no longer built for elite morning routines, they are built for school runs. There is no “first hour of waking up.” There is only triage. I should walk more? Great. Tell me how to do it while carrying two backpacks, an Olympic torch that I made out of craft paper late last night after learning it had to be ready this morning, and the emotional weight of an eleven-year-old battling with her former best friend, who has just remembered she has a science test this afternoon. The best encouragement isn’t the kind that shames parents for not going the extra mile. It’s the kind that meets them where they are—which is, most mornings, standing in the kitchen in yesterday’s t-shirt, spreading cream cheese onto a tortilla wrap, and wondering where the hell that other shoe went.

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3 things to read this week

1. ”The Rise of FAFO Parenting” by Emine Saner in The Guardian. How did we get from carefully naming every emotion our toddler is feeling to throwing their iPads out of car windows? FAFO parenting — “fuck around and find out” — is the TikTok-fuelled backlash against gentle parenting, and Emine Saner’s piece does a nice job of tracing the arc. The truth, as always, is that the sensible version of both styles looks pretty similar: boundaries, consequences, presence—for them and us. But in a world where clicks mean cash, nuance is out, and polarisation is in. The best line comes from psychologist Emma Svanberg: “What many people have practised under the guise of ‘gentle parenting’ is actually high-intensity, child-centred, permissive parenting with very little attention to adult limits, power or context.”

2. “How to Raise Children” by Mike Monteiro in Good News. A reader asks what every kid should grow up knowing? Monteiro’s answer is simple: that they are loved. Then he tells you why, and rips your heart in two. He grew up in an abusive household, a childhood where love appeared just often enough to let him know what he was missing. The essay is raw and tender and funny—railing against parents who schedule every minute of their kid’s life while complaining they have no time, and reminding us that our children arrive full of love and curiosity, and our job is to nurture, rather than negate, this outlook on life.

3. ”Let Your Kids Fail” by Russell Shaw in The Atlantic. For years, doctors told parents to keep kids away from peanuts to prevent allergies, and allergies spiked. Then they reversed the advice and saw them decline. Shaw, a school head in Washington DC, argues that failure works the same way: shield your kids from every setback and they never develop what he calls “failure immunity,” the ability to encounter disappointment without falling apart. He’s watched parents launch grade appeals, hire sorority rush consultants, and email administrators the moment their kid faces a consequence. Each intervention sends their children the same message: ”You can’t handle this, let mom do it for you.”

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Watch This Beautiful Poem on Raising Boys

As if by magic, as I was putting the final touches to this week’s newsletter, TikTok offered up this powerful poem from Irishman Daragh Fleming titled “If I Ever Have Boys.” This is one minute and twenty-seven seconds of your life that you will be glad you spent here.

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Good Dadvice

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Damn, did you see that book website? And what happens when you click the book? Hella fly.