The stupid “just eat less” advice is, sadly, the only way to lose weight. Yes, exercise helps, too, but you cannot outrun your calories. However, I knew that eating less wouldn’t really work if I didn’t sort out my mind first.

I went to therapy, which only partially helped. Then I discovered psylocibin, which helped me reevaluate many core assumptions about myself and the relationships with the people around me. Friends who weren’t passive-aggressive relatives that “meant it well” and the eternally unfulfilled promise of being loved back by someone who just kept feeding the flame to keep their own self-esteem high. Relationships trimmed.

My career was making me miserable, and I took care of it too. I stumbled here and there, disappointed from academia I went to get even more disappointed by tech boys and corporate drones. Goodbye, LinkedIn “friends”. I’ll pass on your thought leadership and valuable insights. Enough of doing busywork and ass time to impress execs in corporate. Enough of the greediness and hypocrisy of startups.

Now, the diet: I needed some help to curb my appetite. At this stage, my body was completely messed up and stubbornly insisted on crawling back to 120kg, regardless of my efforts. I was lucky enough to find a doctor who himself lost a lot of weight and understood the challenges of it. He prescribed me liraglutide.

I had to rethink my relationship with food. The word “diet” always brought back the smell of steamed broccoli. Conventional approach to dieting is punitive: eat this disgusting food and then you can gorge yourself on “cheat day”. I couldn’t stick to a diet for more than a couple weeks, until I really understood and convinced myself of how my body benefited from not eating this and instead eating that.

My wish to be a better boxer kept me going. I would still “cheat” and have the occasional bite of something disgustingly tasty, but it wouldn’t be a constant bug in the back of my mind, telling me how much I was “missing out” on life. Miss out on the chips now, so that you don’t miss out on being a healthy, lean, sexy boxer.

I counted calories, often eating under 1800. Sure, calorie counting is as exact as horoscope reading, but still correlated enough to actual food intake to be a useful KPI. With liraglutide keeping the hunger in check, I could train 3 times per week. I kept my macros in check, at around 30/35/35 (protein/carb/fat).

All good, right? No, fuck no. The inertia and the loneliness crept back in. I failed in less than 60 days and had a huge binge with pizza, chips and hard booze. Only this time, the meds kicked my butt. By slowing down the digestion, I got a lovely 3-day hangover, and I would still feel the taste of alcohol crawling up from my throat one week after. Carbs withheld so much water that I gained 3 kilograms of water, which took me two boxing classes to sweat off.