Health, Self-improvement, Well-being

What Made Me Drop 17 KG and Has Changed My Personality in One Month

Sometimes circumstances force you to change. But the choice is still yours.

This happens to everyone: something occurs that you weren’t prepared for. Not because it couldn’t happen but because you didn’t think it could happen to you.

And then you face a choice — give up and let yourself go, or grit your teeth and undergo painful changes to your conformist self.

This article is for those who prefer the second choice over the first.

1. Disrupted Equilibrium

To me, this happened during COVID-19. It didn’t directly affect me, but there are still side effects.

WFH changed a lot of things. There were some positive aspects, especially for those who don’t like dragging themselves to the office every morning and crawling back in the evening. But then things got worse. No matter how you spin it, people are social creatures. Being forced to stay home all day is not the kind of lifestyle coded into the DNA of Homo Sapiens.

Undoubtedly, something was broken in many people. The existential equilibrium was disturbed, and nothing could sublimate this loss. I noticed that I started getting fat.

Now I weigh 87.5 kg, and that’s my norm. More than 25 years ago, when I was a student, I weighed about 75–77 kg. For a while, I did bodybuilding and gained about 10 kg of muscle mass. And then I started getting fat.

I noticed that I no longer fit into my old clothes and stopped wearing them. These things lay around in one place or another, like a memory of the youth that remained in the past. They were useless, but my heart ached at the thought of getting rid of them. My heart demanded faith that someday a miracle would happen, and I would be able to fit into these clothes again and go back a quarter of a century.

2. Brain’s blackmail

Anyway, by the time of the events I’m describing, I weighed about 93–94 kg. At the height of 182 cm, it’s not a catastrophe — not ideal, but tolerable.

And then COVID came. Of course, it was stressful for me, just like for everyone else. Besides, my job itself was a constant source of stress. I was an IT developer, and, you know, this is the kind of activity where you constantly have to solve problems that seem unsolvable at first glance.

This makes your brain work in emergency mode. It turns into an insatiable energy consumer. It makes your stomach send hunger signals, and it doesn’t care about anything else. It doesn’t care that you don’t want to see yourself fat, that it’s 3 a.m. right now, or that overeating shortens your life.

You can negotiate with it, staying in a calm state of mind, but IT specialists don’t stay in it as often as others.

Okay, I’m exaggerating — they do, but less often than others. When you have a deadline looming and this damn thing doesn’t want to work, no matter how hard you try, and when it’s absolutely unclear why or how to fix it, well, you know, it’s hard to stay calm.

You can stay stoic, but that doesn’t appease the brain. It continues to consume tons of energy and blackmail you with the fact that if you don’t feed it, it will never fix that damn thing.

So You have to eat, eat, and eat to somehow appease this blackmail. At least eating calms it down for a while.

There are many fat people among IT specialists in general. Sedentary work, chronic mental overexcitement, and, as a result, uncontrolled calorie consumption.

You look in the mirror, desperately trying to convince yourself that the blurry figure there is not you. That it’s some kind of mistake, and soon it will stop, and everything will return to normal…

But why would it stop? Just because you’re “not prone to obesity”?

It sounds unconvincing because the process is one-sided. Its causes could be understood, but how to reverse them is unclear.

1. Downhill

I began to get used to this new image of myself. I bought new jeans with built-in elastic. Now, even if I gained another 10 kilograms, I could still fit into them. It was a mediocre relief but better than nothing.

I began to think, “Well, life doesn’t end here. After all, the most important thing in a person is not their appearance but their spiritual world, their individuality. Isn’t it?”

And I would have probably agreed to fool myself until my dying day, but something happened that interfered with the relationship between the two “Selves” inside me.

At the beginning of the summer, I found myself at the doctor’s office. I don’t remember exactly why I went there, but it wasn’t because of my excess weight.

She looked at me and suggested I step on the scale and then scan my internal organs. The scale showed 110 kg. It was significantly more than I expected. She informed me that my liver was in a “moderately severe” condition and that my excess weight was the leading cause.

This was the moment when reality intruded rudely into your cozy conformist world:

“Could this happen to me?”

Well, you understand me. First of all, the liver itself is a serious thing. If your liver doesn’t work properly, how long you’ll be able to live is unknown. And secondly, if no one in your family has had problems with any vital organs, why in the hell should it happen to you?

If your parents, their parents, sisters, brothers, etc., did not have such problems, then why should you? If someone died of heart failure or cancer, that’s certainly terrible, but at least you know what to expect. But why did you get this?

This event marked an irreversible degeneration of my existential status. And it was also unfair. It was as if someone undeservedly worsened your karma: before, you could have been fixed, but now you can’t. The service is closed, they no longer serve you there.

4. Life that heals the pain.

So, she told me that I needed to urgently change my lifestyle. I had to get rid of the excess weight.

How? By controlling my diet and engaging in physical activity. A simple daily walk of 7–8 kilometers should help restore the liver.

I was overwhelmed, but in a way, I was also angry. In any case, I decided to stop this degradation. Since the liver can regenerate, I had to achieve this no matter what.

That same evening, I took my first step toward recovery.

The landscape of my suburb was conducive to this: there were beautiful coniferous forests, lakes, and the cries of sea birds all around. Everywhere there was life, infinite life. Tall pines grew into the bottomless blue sky. Their scaly bark was like the skin of million-year-old reptiles.

Time here slowed down and intertwined with eternity. And this eternity was not melancholic, it filled the soul with joyous tranquility and strength.

So, from the very first day, I started walking (to jump ahead, I haven’t missed a single walk in three years since then).

At first, I was worried that I would have to spend an extra hour and a half a day, which I usually devoted to reading. But I quickly realized that I hadn’t lost anything because instead of reading books, I could listen to them. All you need is a smartphone and headphones.

But there was something I hadn’t foreseen at first. Instead of going out and immediately buying myself running shoes, I carelessly relied on shoes unsuitable for long walks. After the first trip, blisters formed on my feet, and when I got home, they burst. There were wounds on the soles of my feet, and I realized that I would have to take a break for a week or two until my feet healed and I could walk normally again.

But I didn’t take a break. Strange stubbornness forbade me to do so. Something inside me rebelled and demanded that I follow the plan regardless of the pain. Pain is precisely the ingredient that best guarantees the achievement of the necessary result and confirms its validity. If you feel pain, it means you are still alive.

5. Stick to your line

The pain was really intense, but I found a workaround. I had a piece of thick foam rubber. I cut out insoles from it, attached them to my beach shoes, and managed to walk somehow.

Although the pain still shot up with each step, now it was bearable.

I bought a special healing ointment at the pharmacy, which I remembered from childhood (called “Vishnevsky ointment”), and left it on my battered feet overnight. The next evening, it all started again — walking on foam safety cushions, pain, and determination to continue.

After about a week, my feet partially healed, but only partially. Dense reservoirs of pus formed closer to my toes. I punctured them several times with a needle, which I disinfected with alcohol. The pus came out in thin lively fountains, and the pain decreased. Vishnevsky ointment also did its job diligently. After a few days, I finally bought sneakers. Now I could walk in them.

10 days after declaring war on excess weight, I showed up again at the family doctor’s office.

The scales showed 98 kg. “Excellent result!” said Eugenia (that was her name). It seemed to me that she was surprised. At least I was. I thought it would be more difficult, that I would be able to lose no more than 0.2 kg per day, and that the fight would be long and hard. But it turned out that a positive result can sometimes be achieved faster than you think.

However, I could control it much less than I would like. I bought scales and noticed that the weight loss process had slowed down. Over the next three weeks, I lost 5 kg. Thus, the speed of weight loss decreased by about 5 times — from 1.2 kg to 0.24 kg per day. I suspected why this happened — because I was approaching my normal (i.e., genetically predetermined) weight. But still, I felt that this was not all and that I was not doing something optimally. I remember I made a long attempt to force weight loss by walking about 11 km at once, but when I returned, my weight was slightly higher than when I left!

What the hell? How can that be?

After thinking about it for a bit, I realized that at least one of the reasons was that I drank about 0.5 liters of sweet soda on the way. Undoubtedly, the problem was in fast carbs — I had to get rid of them.

Moreover, I realized something else. I noticed that I had a strange sensation in my muscles during walks. It was similar to what occurs after an intense run or powerlifting session. This prompted me, firstly, to change my diet by reducing the number of slow carbohydrates and increasing the amount of animal protein, and secondly, to drink more fluids before my walks (Eugenia confirmed that my mostly intuitive conclusions were correct).

Although the weight loss remained slow, it did not stop. Starting this journey in mid-June, I had reached my “natural” weight by around November.

That’s essentially how my crusade against obesity ended. What conclusions can be drawn from this story?

6. Conclusions

The reason I achieved the desired result was due to extreme motivation. Everything else was a derivative.

It doesn’t matter what sneakers you wear, what devices monitor your weight, or what you write in your journal. The only things that matter are 1) your genetics and 2) your motivation.

Regarding the first point, every person has natural limitations. These cannot be overcome without changing the DNA of the organism. Unfortunately, this is currently unavailable to humans. In the future, the situation may change, but for now, we can only influence the psychological aspect of the problem. And here we return to motivation.

For me, it was imperative to suppress even the slightest attempt to deviation from the planned path. One could say more — it turned out to be a turning point that changed something in my personality. As I noted earlier, I have not missed a single walk to this day, and I did not need to make any effort to do so.

I simply did not have such an impulse.

I am convinced that it is precisely such changes that determine a person’s fate.

As the great Chekhov said, “One needs to squeeze the slave out of oneself drop by drop.” I do not know of a more difficult task, and I have failed on this path many times.

Because when external coercion is absent, this slave feels fine. He thrives; like any slave, his only concern is a safe and full belly. The only things that can resist him are human reason and will, but they find it difficult to make your body do what evolution did not intend it to do. David Hume famously expressed this as the “human reason is the slave of passions.”

I hate it when people tell you that to change something, you just need to “do it.” You can only do it in a certain state of mind and under certain circumstances. If your rational judgment were enough, you would not have any problems.

Of course, everything is not that simple. It is impossible to maintain high motivation for a long time. It requires enormous mental energy, which needs to come from somewhere. You either need to 1) catch a convenient moment or 2) intentionally put yourself in a situation where not completing the planned task will result in serious unpleasant consequences, which will force you to have motivation.

A convenient moment is fleeting and difficult to predict, but you can often construct a situation of forced motivation yourself. This was my situation, although circumstances, not I, constructed it.

I knew I had to lose weight, and if I didn’t, the quality of my life would continue to deteriorate, and its duration would be shortened. Thus, my choice was predetermined. You would have done the same in my place because that’s what every self-respecting person would do.

The situation of forced motivation opens up new, unexpected prospects for you. Using this approach wisely will give you a powerful tool for boosting your motivation to the highest level.

Think of it as being in a railway tunnel somewhere in the middle. On one side, you see an exit with a light. On the other side, a train is already entering the tunnel. It won’t be able to stop even if it wants to. The only thing you can do is run to the end of the tunnel before it crushes you.

This cannot fail if, of course, you are willing to voluntarily put yourself in such a situation and take responsibility for the consequences.

Of course, you should not act recklessly. You must think everything through. You should have plans A, B, and C. This approach involves raising your psyche, reason, and will to a state of maximum mobilization, not attempting suicide.

But if you do everything right, over time, you will only need the mental construct of external coercion, not its actual embodiment. This will mean that your human reason has turned from a slave of your passions into their master.

This achievement is worth the effort, isn’t it?

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