So, the six weeks are up.

If you've been following along, you'll know I've been doing my 6-week health reset, and I've finally got all the results together.

I've repeated my body composition scan, checked my blood pressure and resting heart rate and had a proper fasting blood test.

And overall, I'm really pleased with what's changed. I've actually surprised myself with just how much can change in six weeks.

Here are the results side by side:

There's quite a lot on there, but a few things really stand out to me.

Probably the biggest is my blood pressure, which has gone from 141/85, which was in the higher range, to 113/71, which is an excellent reading. I'm really pleased with that. Blood pressure is one of those things you can't necessarily feel, but we know it matters over the long term.

My resting heart rate has also gone from 65 to 50 beats per minute. I've been doing a mixture of strength training, cardiovascular exercise and generally moving more, so hopefully that's a reflection of my fitness improving too.

Then there's my body composition.

My weight has gone from 79kg to 76kg, but the number on the scales isn't actually the bit I'm most interested in. My body fat has gone from 20.8% to 18.4%, with estimated fat mass dropping from 16.4kg to 14kg. So according to the scans, around 2.4kg of the weight I've lost has been body fat.

My skeletal muscle has stayed fairly stable, going from 35.7kg to 35.4kg. That small reduction doesn't particularly surprise me, as I've been eating fewer calories and my total body water was also slightly lower, possibly due to eating fewer carbohydrates.

At 41, I'm much less interested in simply weighing less. I want to maintain and ideally build muscle as I get older, so losing fat while largely maintaining muscle is exactly the direction I wanted to go.

My visceral fat has also dropped from 7 to 6, and my waist-to-hip ratio has improved from 0.95 to 0.92. That's still slightly above the general healthy reference point, so that's one I'll continue working on.

Then there's cholesterol, which has probably been the most interesting part.

My HDL cholesterol, often called the "good" cholesterol, was 0.88 at the start and has now increased to 1.2, putting it back into the general healthy range. My cholesterol-to-HDL ratio has also improved from 4.8 to 4.2.

However, not everything moved in the direction I might have expected.

My new fasting blood test showed total cholesterol of 5.0 and LDL cholesterol of 3.1, which is slightly above the general reference point of 3.0. LDL hadn't been measured on my original test, so I don't have a starting figure to compare it with.

I'm not particularly worried by one number, but I am curious and want to understand it properly rather than cherry-picking the results that look good. It's also worth remembering that my original cholesterol readings came from a finger-prick NHS Health Check, whereas these latest results came from a fasting laboratory blood test, so they're not completely like-for-like.

I'm considering getting ApoB and Lp(a) tested next. I'm only really learning about these markers as I go, but ApoB can give a better indication of the number of potentially harmful cholesterol-carrying particles, while Lp(a) can identify an additional, largely inherited cardiovascular risk that a standard cholesterol test may not reveal.

I'm definitely not an expert in this area, but that's part of what I'm enjoying about the process. I'm learning as I go and trying to understand what the numbers actually mean rather than simply whether they're inside a reference range.

So overall, I'm really happy with the results.

In six weeks I've lost 3kg, reduced my body fat from 20.8% to 18.4%, lost around 2.4kg of body fat while largely maintaining muscle, reduced my visceral fat, lowered my resting heart rate from 65 to 50, and my blood pressure has gone from 141/85 to 113/71. My HDL has also improved considerably, although there are still a couple of blood markers I want to understand better.

But the numbers are only one part of it.

I've learned a lot about my own behaviour, what helped me stay consistent, what didn't work, how I dealt with things going off track and, probably most importantly, what I want to do now.

I'll share a proper reflection on the whole six-week experiment over the coming week, the biggest lessons I've taken from it, and how it's going to influence the way I work with and support people going forward.

For now, I hope if nothing else this shows just how much can change in six weeks through lifestyle changes alone.

Even as someone who's worked as a personal trainer and now works as a Health & Wellbeing Coach, with everything I know about physical and psychological wellbeing, I can still let things slip. Knowing what to do doesn't always mean we do it!

But with the right strategies, a focus on the fundamentals and an understanding of behaviour change, things can shift surprisingly quickly.

Catch up soon.

Dan