Pat Divilly on how he hit rock bottom and climbed his way right to the top

So,” I squint, channelling my inner David Frost while simultaneously trying to hold my stomach in – as one tends to do when meeting a health and fitness guru for the first time, “what’s your guilty pleasure? And don’t say sweet potato brownies.”

Pat Divilly laughs before revealing that he may have had a pizza last weekend, which is kind of reassuring. Gurus – even ones with 120,000 Facebook followers, two books and a targeted turnover of €1m by the end of year three in business – are human too. The 27-year-old from Barna, Co Galway, is nothing but honest when it comes to sharing the low point at which he found himself before starting his business with just €200, 5,000 flyers and access to his local beach.

“It was a point of desperation,” he acknowledges in a quiet voice. Apparently people always tell him he’s much shyer than they imagined.

“I was in such a painful place, I said: ‘I need to get out of here.’ I had no other option. I had nothing to lose, everything to gain.”

On Christmas Eve 2011, Pat returned to Galway from Dublin, in his eyes a failure – he even had to ask his dad for the bus fare home. A qualified personal trainer with a master’s in exercise and nutrition, he had moved to the capital with the plan of becoming a celebrity fitness coach and worked with some of Ireland’s top models for free in the hope the publicity would bring in business.

The reality, however, was there were many times he found himself scrabbling under the couch for lost change for the bus or a sandwich, and despite the brave face he put on, he was crumbling.

“My friends back home thought: ‘Pat’s doing really well, he’s training all the models,’ and on social media you can put on this facade,” he acknowledges.

“I remember nights in Dublin where I would just go for a walk at 10 o’clock at night and I’d be walking for hours, crying and feeling so lonely up there and just at my wits’ end. I just didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

One last shot

That Christmas, he didn’t leave the house because he was afraid of what people would think. He admits he was “hard work” for his parents, Colm and Carol, who only wanted security for him and encouraged him to study physiotherapy. Indeed, he was accepted to a course in Britain, but a week later got a call that it was not going ahead.

Rather than sink further, Pat saw this as a turning point. Deciding to give it one last shot, he used €200 he had saved from a part-time job in a pizza place to print flyers for a boot camp on the local beach.

“I had five people,” he says of his first class in May 2012. “And people think you’d be demoralised with that, but I was so happy.

“Every day, I’d have one or two more and I’d be nearly crying with joy telling my mother: ‘I have an extra person today and my name is in the local paper.’ Looking back, I always tell people who are starting fitness classes, don’t skip by that stuff. Don’t be dying for the big victories.”

As word spread – primarily through Facebook – Pat soon had 100 people turning up to the beach. A year to the day of his first class, he opened his gym in Barna and shortly after signed a book deal. Interest beyond Galway led to Pat developing online courses. He currently has 800 clients as far as Dubai, Australia and Japan. Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has used his story as a case study.

Pat has achieved some incredible results – one woman lost 10 stone in 10 months – though he is also keen to emphasise successes with clients who have come off cholesterol medication, or improved their bone density scan results. His fitness plans focus on strength training, movements like squats, step-ups and lunges – especially important for women to maintain muscle mass as they get older. Keeping things simple, but consistent, is the key.

“I’ve women in their 70s who have done push-ups consistently for the last two years and they are stronger than a lot of men. What’s the secret? It’s just push-ups three times a week. There’s no complexity to it,” says Pat.

“And that’s crazy for me to say as somebody trying to sell something, but that’s the reality.”

He is not a fan of calorie counting – though is an advocate of the paleo plan – but his approach is as much about achieving a healthy mind as a healthy body. As part of the online programme, participants write a “gratitude post” every day, naming one thing they are thankful for. He believes many people beat themselves up, expecting to go from “A to Z” instead of “A to B to C”.

“People underestimate what they can do long-term and they overestimate what they can do in a month.”

Rather than starting January with an overambitious plan, Pat recommends making a list every night of three simple things you can do the next day.

“So I might say: ‘I’m going to eat a handful of blueberries, I’m going to go for a 10-minute walk and I’m going to call up a friend who I haven’t spoken to in a long time,’ because that’s going to make you feel good. And they are tiny things, but if you do that every day for a month, that’s 90 things you’ve done for your health, and over the course of a year that’s 1,000 things you’ve done for your health. It’s a compound effect.”

Inspiring lives

Pat does not set goals for himself by halves. As an ambassador for Cystic Fibrosis Ireland, he assembled a team of over 500 people for the Tough Mudder adventure challenge with the goal of raising €100,000. It raised €160,000. This spring, he’s bringing another team to Rome for a Spartan race to raise awareness for suicide prevention, in keeping with his latest role as youth ambassador for Console.

In the last year, Pat has been in demand as an inspirational speaker, addressing groups including jobseekers under 26 who are in the same slump that he was in three years ago.

“Everybody has got this negative thing with Ireland: ‘You can’t do this, that and the other in Ireland’,” he says. “It’s just trying to show people I had access to the local beach and an internet connection and that’s how [my business] grew. It will hopefully do €1m this year. And if I can do it with fitness, there’s no reason anyone can’t do it with anything else. I just want people to see it’s a simple formula. It’s decide what you want, have a game plan, break it down and just do the things every day that make it happen. I think whatever you want is so much closer within your reach than you think it is.”

Aims for 2015 include a DVD, a new membership website and a seminar in New York in March, with similar plans for Dubai and Australia. Switching off is hard. Monday to Friday he’s up at 5am, he tries to study two hours a day and he has a whiteboard half the size of his bedroom wall where he constantly sets new goals.

“I always bring myself back to that Christmas,” says Pat. “I promised my mum and dad at that stage and I promised my brothers and sister, literally to their face, that I’ll never be in this position again, I’ll never be this low again, I’ll never be this broke again. And I won’t.”

Despite his success, he says the biggest thrill is still to see his name in the local paper, or hearing a neighbour remark: “Pat’s doing well”, to his mother. He names his dad, an accountant, as his hero for instilling in him a work ethic and real values, and jokes he wouldn’t be long bringing him down to earth if he got carried away.

But no matter what, Pat Divilly is adamant he will always be “the guy on the beach” and he wants other people to realise that you can “be your own hero”.

“It’s very easy for me to see potential in people around me,” he concludes. “I was the guy who had nothing.”