Jacob Thomas

Three countries and a profession

I was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1949. My father, a Malayali from Kerala, had come to Malaysia in 1935, and unlike many families of that community at the time, my parents gave my three brothers and me considerable freedom.

In 1971 I left for England to train as a Chartered Accountant, and I worked there as an audit senior before returning to Malaysia in 1978. Over the next eleven years I held increasingly senior roles, as group internal auditor of a large conglomerate, general manager of finance in sugar refining and plantations, and company secretary of a listed company, before establishing a consulting business of my own.

In 1989, approaching forty, I arrived in Melbourne with my wife, Josephine, and our three children, all under six. In Australia my career took me through the food industry and eventually into my own accounting practice, which my sons later joined.

The account I never examined

Professionally, I was rarely short of work, and I was good at what I did. My health was a different story. The years brought success, setbacks and grief, and alcohol was part of my life through all of them. Again and again I tried a new diet; I usually lost weight, and I never kept it off. In November 2020 I stepped onto the bathroom scales and watched the display settle at 120.2 kilograms (265 lb).

By June 2024 I could no longer pretend that I was managing my drinking. The months that followed were not a straight line, but on 30 December 2024 I stopped.

Starting at seventy-five

On 29 January 2025, a month after my last drink, I walked into Injury Active Clinic for my first structured strength-training session. I was seventy-five, with years of inactivity behind me, and far from sure that I had not taken on something unrealistic.

For the first time in my life, training became consistent rather than an occasional companion to the latest diet. I now train at home, and one question has run through everything since: how strong can I become?

From private investigation to book

Alongside the training I changed how I ate, moving through ketogenic eating to a carnivore diet, and experimented with fasting. I also brought many years of my own blood results together in one place. Each change raised questions, and the questions sent me to the research.

What began as an attempt to understand my own health became a book, and the book has become this website. I write particularly with readers over fifty in mind, but the questions themselves are not confined to any age.

I am not a doctor, and nothing here is advice for any individual. My hope is simply that it helps readers have better conversations with the professionals who look after them.