{"id":9990,"date":"2026-01-15T05:17:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T05:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldbodybuildingnews.com\/?p=9990"},"modified":"2026-01-15T05:17:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T05:17:33","slug":"obi-the-natural-arnold-vincent-on-intuitive-eating-and-overcoming-his-unhealthy-attitude-towards-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldbodybuildingnews.com\/?p=9990","title":{"rendered":"Obi “The Natural Arnold” Vincent on Intuitive Eating and Overcoming His Unhealthy Attitude Towards Food"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There are muscular men and then there\u2019s Obi Vincent. For the uninitiated, Vincent is a former bodybuilder-turned CrossFit enthusiast<\/a> who has the kind of muscles cartoonists would reject for being unrealistic.
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Take one look at Vincent\u2019s Instagram page <\/a>and it\u2019s immediately apparent that this is a man who in fitness terms at least has his s**t together. He\u2019s the brains behind a unique training plan, CrossLifting, which combines his knowledge of CrossFit and bodybuilding, and he clearly has a grip on his diet \u2013 his rippling abs and toned physique suggest as much anyway<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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I don’t count macros anymore, I decided to stop because I was getting into an unhealthy space <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Behind the Instagram pics though, Vincent is a man who has always had a difficult relationship with food. \u201cI was kind of overweight as a kid. I was more interested in food and video games and that’s probably the main reason why.\u201d Vincent tells Men\u2019s Health UK. \u201cI didn’t enjoy PE, and obviously as someone who’s slightly overweight you don’t want to get changed in the changing rooms and stuff like that.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Still, we know how this story ends, Vincent is now Insta famous for having a body that looks like it\u2019s struggling to contain all of his muscles, so he eventually got over his childhood issues with food, right? Well, not quite.<\/p>\n

He explains that he only took up fitness because a colleague made an insensitive comment about his weight, but while his two-fingers up response of going for early morning jogs \u2013 because that\u2019s what he believed fit people did \u2013 can be seen as a positive step, his relationship with food was anything but. Rather than adopt a modest calorie deficit<\/a>, Vincent replaced his junk food diet with a period of massive and potentially dangerous undereating. <\/p>\n

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\u201cDiet wise I had no idea what I was doing, so it was all guess work and it was all the things I would never tell anyone to do now because I was probably eating less than 1000 calories a day,\u201d says Vincent. \u201cI developed quite an unhealthy habit with food, which still affects me, where I eat certain foods and just feel guilty and associate it with being bad. That’s something that I’ve had to try and get rid of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having lost around 15kg in the space of a year, to bring him down to around 85kg, Vincent entered the world of bodybuilding, which is notorious for incubating unhealthy attitudes towards food. A 2006 study, published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry<\/a>, that compared the eating habits of male bodybuilders with male bulimia sufferers found that both groups shared a preoccupation with weight and body shape, a tendency to binge eat, as well as finding high rates of bulimia among the bodybuilders. <\/p>\n

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Dieting down for a show is just the most horrendous experience<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u201cMy relationship with food started to get even more unhealthy [when I became a bodybuilder]. Dieting down for a show is just the most horrendous experience when it comes to what you can eat. Being so low on calories and macros with low energy levels is a constant irritation,\u201d says Vincent. \u201cEverything you eat has to be calculated. It started affecting friendships because you can’t go out to eat in random places because you have to watch what you’re eating, and you have to take Tupperware everywhere with you. Honestly, I did not enjoy the experience of dieting down.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ultimately, the constant dieting and worrying about his weight became too much, so after three WBFF shows Vincent left the world of competitive bodybuilding<\/a>. For a while, he maintained the cycle of cutting in the summer and bulking in the winter, partly because he was in the process of building his impressive Instagram following and partly because that\u2019s what everyone else did.<\/p>\n

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Obi Vincent’s Daily Diet<\/h2>\n