Jozef Môstka

From two years of my life I don't have a single photograph.

Those are the years 2018 to 2020. It wasn't that I never left the house — I went to work, sat among people, did what I was supposed to. But I was ashamed. Of how I looked, and of how I spent my evenings.

Those evenings looked the same every day. A room, drugs, pizza and crisps, The Simpsons on repeat. The schizophrenic delusions I had under control by then, the worst was behind me. What remained was shame, and it went nowhere.

When the pandemic came and with it remote work, it was a relief. Finally I didn't have to go among people.

Nobody in that state takes photographs. When I look today for what I looked like back then, I find nothing. That person left behind not a single image of himself.

A lightbulb in my hand

My name is Jozef Môstka, I'm thirty-nine years old and I live in Tvrdošín in Orava. I've been working as a programmer for fourteen years. I trained as a cook-waiter and taught myself to program — without school, without courses, just reading and trying until something worked.

That's the part of the biography that sounds decent.

The second part: in 2011 I spent half a year in Bratislava using methamphetamine every day. I used in a flat where the walls were covered in mould and an old mattress lay on the floor. Me and a lightbulb in my hand.

Then I stopped. It lasted for a while. Over the next nine years I kept going back to it, each time convinced I had it under control. Last time in 2020.

I lost weight and it didn't help

In 2017 I lost weight from 130 kilograms to 100. I exercised every day, kept to a diet. It worked.

I was just solving the wrong question. I was solving how much I eat. Not why I eat.

In February 2018 I weighed 109.6 kilograms. Then I stopped weighing myself. Not because I forgot — because I didn't want to know.

The box on the staircase

On 8. June 2020 a treadmill was delivered to my home. At half past eleven in the morning a box stood on the staircase; at five in the afternoon the treadmill stood in the living room. One hundred and ten kilos of steel for 944.90 euros, capable of going twenty-two kilometres per hour.

I bought it so I could walk on it for fifteen minutes a day. That was all I had back then.

Three days later I stepped on the scales. 155.3 kilograms. It's the most I have ever measured, and it was the first number I had found out about myself in two years.

The first three months, nine kilos went down. Over the next eleven months, three.

This is the part that nobody tells in stories like this. That a person makes a decision, buys a machine for a thousand euros, walks on it for a whole year — and almost nothing happens.

The question I couldn't shake off

The turning point came in autumn 2020 and behind it was no book and no good advice. Behind it was a question. In three years I had gone from a hundred kilograms to a hundred and fifty-five. Where would I be in another three?

In the end it was a flight to my mother and her embrace that got me off drugs. No conditions and no questions. Then came a morning when I set myself a boundary that still holds today.

I was never in a treatment facility. I have been sober since 2021. Every week I go to the abstinence club AK ZMENA in Tvrdošín — we sit down, say what happened during the week, and go home. That's all it is. And it's enough.

What I do today

Since March 2023 I have been exercising four times a week. I have run fifteen half-marathons and one ultramarathon. I do cold-water exposure. I climb via ferratas.

On 10. July 2025 I stood on the summit of Elbrus. 5,642 metres, the highest mountain in Europe. I chose it because it was the biggest possible challenge for me — for a man who once couldn't tie his shoelaces over his belly.

Today I weigh 105 kilograms.

Why I'm writing about it

It took seven years to get from there to here. It didn't happen through diets or training plans. It happened through having to stop at the grief I had been carrying from childhood, and learning to care for myself. Written down it sounds simple. Lived, it was not simple.

I am writing a book about it. It is called 7 rokov k životu. An autobiography, six chapters, self-published.

It is not a self-help guide and it does not end in victory. The last chapter turns everything that came before on its head — and that is what finally moves it in the right direction. What happened in it I'll save for the book.

I also add notes here from time to time — shorter texts about what is being created while the book is being created.