TikTok star Edgar Kirby: From weight loss to gaining a new zest for life
Edgar Kirby from Dungarvan, pictured with his 'Overnight Oats' dish. Picture: Howard Crowdy
Following a difficult time in his life, Edgar Kirby decided to make a change and began documenting his weight loss efforts on TikTok. The Waterford man has since cultivated a very special online community and in turn, has found a place where he can truly be himself.
Like a lot of people, Edgar Kirby first downloaded TikTok as a source of entertainment. However, through sharing unique recipes and words of wisdom, the 34-year-old quickly became a much-loved face on the app and now has more than 126K followers and 1.8M likes on TikTok to date.
“I started taking it seriously in the past two years when I began the weight loss,” he tells me from his home in Dungarvan.
As a dance teacher for almost 14 years, Edgar had always been fit, but it was a combination of grief as well as a difficult childhood that led to his weight gain.
“I hadn’t processed things and I didn’t give myself a chance to figure out what happened in childhood and through my earlier adulthood,” he explains. “We came from a home that was a really difficult place to be. My sister Becky and myself were fostered [when] I was aged four — she would have been six — by my sister Joanne. That was a lifeline and I’m very grateful and thankful to Joanne.”
The online personality points to Joanne as the source of his love for food and cooking. From the age of nine or ten, he was “stuck” to her side in the kitchen.
“It was very much all hands on deck, and it certainly wasn’t anything half as sexy or glamorous as I do on TikTok,” he laughs.
If you were to look up the definition of 'bubbly' in the dictionary, it would be no surprise to see a picture of Edgar Kirby alongside it. Comments describing him as a “breath of fresh air” and praising his upbeat energy frequently appear under his TikTok videos.
His positivity even radiates through the phone and it's hard to imagine the dance teacher com- TikTok chef ever having a down day.
However, in 2015 the death of his sister Becky had a huge effect on Edgar who admits he became “very depressed”. Following the difficult loss, he says the weight gain happened “really, really quickly” over a three-year period.
“It all kind of bubbled up to the surface… I just had a really, really bad downward spiral and Becky passed away in 2015 and I attempted to take my own life three years later. That was an incredibly dark and difficult time,” he says.
After seeing a photograph of himself at his 30th birthday, Edgar decided to make a change. “It wasn’t even so much my physical appearance, it was just looking at it and knowing how I felt in that photo,” he explains.
From there, he found an “incredible” trainer and crucially, he began to work on his relationship with food and went on to lose more than 105lbs. Edgar tells me that the “lightbulb” moment was realizing that no diet was going to help him — he needed to get to the root of the problem.
While a TikTok chef who tracks his weight loss journey may sound like a recipe for boring, bland food, Edgar is quite the opposite. He still eats “everything” and is all about flavour.
Edgar makes “food that people actually want to eat” and his recipes range from a McDonald’s Big Mac wrap and a “boujee” chicken fillet roll to a high-protein brunch sandwich.
He started by posting a couple of recipes and as he says himself, he “never thought it in a million years that it would go anywhere”. But it seems people couldn’t get enough.
“They [my followers] know my story, they know where I’ve come from and it’s a real person in real life that could be them. I think that’s what a lot of people like,” he says of the popularity of his TikTok videos.
“Turning up as yourself a just being yourself on there is what makes people warm to you, I suppose. Being real is really important to me and I’m fully honest on [TikTok] and open.” As for his infectious positivity, it’s all about finding “little bits of joy” throughout your day.
“For me, that would be going to the gym and working with my trainer, it would be cooking a really good meal, going to my friend’s house and just having a chat. It’s those little things that just add up to the bank of happiness at the end of the day.”
With a firm fanbase now in place, Edgar is hoping to satisfy that hunger for his followers who are “crying out” for more. He tells me he is currently working on his own cookbook which naturally, is all about food — and fun.
For him, the best thing about what he does is the community he has found online.
“I just absolutely adore the interaction with people, and I love coming up with and creating new recipes for people to enjoy. I get so excited when I post something new,” he says.
But of course, it has been a long road to get to this point. What has he learned about himself since starting his weight loss — and TikTok — journey, I ask?
“Nothing is ever final. Even when you’re going through the crappiest of times, the darkest of times, there’s still life in you.”
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