Why this isn't another self-help book?
This is not another self-help book full of empty phrases about miraculous weight loss. It is a raw and sometimes painful confession about how far a person can fall when they start running from themselves.
It begins in childhood, with shouting behind closed doors and nights huddled under the covers. At its heart is a dark room where, weighing 155 kilograms and addicted to methamphetamine, I was waiting for my own end — schizophrenic delusions, isolation, bottomless loneliness. I told myself my problem was my weight. In reality it was a missing self-love and a sorrow I had carried since childhood.
But the book is not just about the fall. It is a detailed map of the way back — including all the places where I went off course. About how I stopped making excuses, how I learned to say "YES" to life, and how a man who couldn't tie his shoelaces over his belly became someone who runs half-marathons and stood on the highest mountain in Europe.
You won't find any diets here. You will find my own notes and lessons that this journey cost me years to learn. I wrote it for everyone who is lying to themselves today the way I once lied to myself.
Excerpt — I betrayed the light
Slowly I was getting back to normal. The job I found after all of that suited me. I quickly settled in, as if I had finally landed where I belonged. Everything pointed to things only getting better. Maybe they did for a while.
But something in me stayed quiet and alive at the same time. Something that didn't disappear with the new apartment, the paycheck, or everyday success. Loneliness. Not the ordinary kind you feel when you have no one to go for coffee with. The deeper kind — rooted in silence, in childhood, in nights that seem endless even when you're an adult and have your whole day under control.
That loneliness never faded. It just went quiet. And in that quiet it lurked. Waiting for the moment when it could speak up again. I didn't want to hear it — who would? But the more I pretended everything was fine, the louder it crept into my thoughts.
And so one day I believed the old lie. That a little relief would help, a small escape, one evening. Maybe it did help. For a moment. But I knew the price of that moment. I had paid it once before — and I did it again anyway.
I used meth again.
It occurred to me it would be just once. Just to remind myself of the feeling. One evening, one act of forgetting.
A few phone calls were enough. Within two hours I had ten doses at home. I told myself I'd take one. Just one. I'd keep the rest for later. But that "later" came the very next day. And then again. And again.
They say that when you break sobriety, you don't start from zero. You pick up where you left off. That's exactly what happened. It was the fourth day and I no longer knew myself. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I was so high I didn't go to work in the morning. I didn't answer my phone. I didn't care. About anything. About anyone.
I was falling again. But differently than before. Quieter. More stupidly. More consciously.
I betrayed the light that had been pulling me out. And yet I had lit it myself. I put it out myself too.
I stopped only when I had run out of everything I had. All the doses. All the energy. All the pride.
Only when my mind cleared a little did it sink in. Fragments of memories — someone knocking on my door, someone standing behind the wall calling my name. I don't know who. I don't know why. I only know I didn't move. I pretended I didn't exist. Just so they wouldn't find me lying high on the bathroom floor. Just so no one would see the shame.
And now? Now I was just sitting staring at the wall. How do I go back to work? How do I explain it? What will I say when they ask?
That's when it hit me. What I had done. What I had put at risk. The job I loved. The security I had worked hard to build. The apartment where after years I finally felt at home. But above all my health. The last thing I still had.
At work I faced an interrogation. I made up a stupid lie that certainly nobody believed. I got an unexcused absence and a warning. Nobody said anything out loud, but I felt that everyone knew.
That evening I sat in my room with a knotted stomach. I stared at the floor, silent as never before. I thought about what I had done and everything I had put at stake. And although deep inside I perhaps still felt it wouldn't be the last time, that evening I told myself it was over.
Not because I knew how to go on. Not because I had the strength. But because there was nowhere left to go. I was empty. Exhausted. Tired of myself.
And so I decided that meth was over. It had to be. And even if I didn't quite believe it yet, at least I had started going in the right direction.
Because even the illusion of hope is more than nothing.
What you won't find in the book
- Diets or meal plans.
- Training schedules.
- A guide to losing weight.
- Expert advice on addiction.
- A promise that it will work for everyone.
- A motivational conclusion to every chapter.
There is only what actually happened — including the places where I went off track.
Who I write for
I'm not writing this for people looking for inspiration. I'm writing it for people who lie to themselves — the way I lied to myself for years. For those who know what they should be doing, but do something else. Not because they're weak, but because something is missing and they haven't even named it yet. I spent seven years looking for that thing.