Last Pizza Ever (Until Thursday)
When I moved to Berlin in 2007 I weighed exactly 70 kilograms. I remember this precisely because I wrote it down somewhere, probably in a fit of optimism I’ve since completely abandoned. That was before roughly a thousand cheeseburgers and three thousand pizzas got their hands on me. I now weigh something north of 100 kilograms. A 40 percent volume increase. You do the math.
I understood the full extent of the situation today in a bathroom I’d rather not name. I looked down. My belly—enormous, inflated, magnificent in the worst possible way—had fully eclipsed what is, I want to be clear, an otherwise impressive and generously proportioned penis. Just gone. Horizon blocked. This is where my life choices have led me.
This epiphany arrived immediately after I’d eaten a double-loaded cheese pizza at a pace that would make competitive eaters nervous. Afterward I felt so genuinely sick that I briefly entertained the idea of using the pizza cutter to open myself up and retrieve the thing through what I can only describe as a DIY surgical extraction. I lacked the courage. I also lacked the anesthesia.
So I went home and, in a burst of spontaneous clarity, filled two enormous blue garbage bags with every piece of shit food in and around my fridge and dragged them to a dumpster on the other side of town. Yes, I threw away food. No, I don’t feel bad about it. I even said goodbye to the pizzas I’d just bought, which honestly hurt more than I expected.
I know how these posts end. I’ve written enough of them in my head. The resolution lasts two weeks and then you’re face-down in a cream cake inhaling deeply. Every declaration about changing your life ends the same way. But knowing that doesn’t make it less true that if I don’t lose 30 kilograms within a reasonable timeframe, they will eventually have to remove me from this apartment with specialized equipment.
My plan is ingenious in its simplicity: eat only cucumbers and walk 10,000 steps a day. That’s it. I acknowledge the plan has structural weaknesses. I’m still workshopping the details. But directionally, you know where I’m going with this.
The weight is also why I’ve stopped showing up to press events. Partly because sweating next to perfect, cellophane-thin Instagram models is its own specific kind of humiliation, and partly because the doors at these places appear to be getting narrower every year. I mean that without any irony whatsoever.
I could go the body positivity route. Eat twelve packs of cookies a day and post "fat is beautiful" while suing toy companies for making unrealistically buff action figures. And sure, there’s an argument there. But the honest truth is I feel absolutely terrible. I no longer know what hunger feels like. Eating became habit long before it became a problem. Vegetables are a garnish. These are the clichés, and I am living them.
I know from somewhere—psychology, probably, or a podcast—that saying "this will change" works better than "this must change." So: this will change. I’m holding myself to that.
A friend of mine has been tracking everything with Lifesum and walking 10,000 steps daily, and has lost 12 kilograms. I am a shameless copycat and I will now be doing this exact thing. In a year, when you see a lean, well-defined guy winking at you in a way that suggests he knows exactly how good he looks—that’s me. Obviously.