The Strange Ease of Changing My Life

Back in March, when I last wrote about the changes unfolding in my life, I thought I was already well into the process. Looking back now, that confidence feels almost adorable, because I had apparently only dealt with the most visible layer while everything else was still shifting quietly underneath, rearranging itself before I even realized how much was changing.

The visible part is easy to summarize: since the unexpected hospital stay in October 2025 gave me the wake-up call I apparently needed to finally take my health seriously, I’ve lost 30 kilos. 

I go to the gym regularly, I walk a lot, I have a routine, I plan what I eat, I weigh my food, I track my calories.

Yes. I have somehow become one of those people. And nobody is more surprised by this development than I am.

A year ago, all of this would have sounded like a second job: an app monitoring my peanut butter consumption, a food scale acting as middle management, and a bathroom scale handling performance reviews.

Now it is just… my life. And perhaps the strangest part is how ordinary it all feels — not easy exactly, but nowhere near as hard as I once imagined changing this much would be. That, more than anything, still surprises me.

The entire process has been long, but not brutally hard. There were uncomfortable moments, obviously, and there were days when I had to push myself, but I never felt like I was engaged in some heroic daily battle against my own nature. 

What took real work was changing the assumptions underneath my behavior — what I believed about food, movement, relationships, responsibility, rejection, boundaries, uncertainty, and especially how much effort I was supposed to invest in holding on to things that were not making much of an effort to stay. 

Once those assumptions began to shift, changing the behavior itself became surprisingly easier.

It started with a podcast

There was no dramatic moment when I decided to transform my life. No Monday morning proclamation, no vision board, no “this time will be different” speech.

It started much less ceremoniously: I listened to a podcast with Dr. Gheorghe Cerin, a cardiologist who had developed a diet to help some of his patients lose weight before heart surgery. Something in the way he spoke about food, metabolism, health and personal responsibility clicked with me, so I bought his book, read it, and started experimenting with some of the ideas.

Not perfectly, not all at once, and definitely not with the energy of someone who had suddenly discovered their calling. I just started making better decisions more often.

I read more about insulin resistance, increased the amount of fiber I was eating, cut back on carbohydrates and learned to combine food in a way that made more sense for me. Eventually, my days settled into a rhythm: nuts and yoghurt in the morning, whatever I wanted for lunch as long as I kept the quantities reasonable, and a large salad in the evening with lots of olive oil, a heroic amount of apple cider vinegar, yoghurt again, and some additional protein.

It was surprisingly simple, which probably helped.

Then came the movement part. And with it, one completely ridiculous problem: I genuinely had no idea where I was supposed to walk.

Yes, I am fully aware of how absurd this sounds. You open the door, go outside, and move your legs. Humanity has been managing this for thousands of years without requiring strategic alignment, a roadmap, or even a clearly defined objective.

My brain, however, was unconvinced by the concept of walking purely for the sake of walking. Where exactly was I going? Why was I going there? What happened when I arrived? I apparently needed a destination before I could justify the activity.

So I gave myself one: coffee.

I picked a café and started walking there. Technically, I was not “going for a walk”; I was going to get coffee, which for reasons I still do not fully understand was perfectly acceptable to my internal bureaucracy.

Then spring settled in, flowers started appearing everywhere, and I began photographing them on my walks mostly because I needed something to keep my brain occupied. Somewhere along the way, that little distraction turned into a ritual: I would notice whatever was blooming, take a picture, post it on Instagram, and slowly build a visual record of all those ordinary walks that were quietly becoming part of something much bigger.

So yes, if you need proof, it is all there on Instagram — mostly flowers, occasionally interrupted by the usual amount of shameless self-promotion.

Without really intending to, I was documenting my way back into the world and building a small map of a life that had started expanding again.

One of my regular walking routes exists entirely because a Bolt driver mentioned, almost in passing, that there was a beautiful street just a few hundred metres from my home. I had lived nearby for years and had never even thought of going there; now I know the entire neighborhood so well I could probably navigate it half asleep.

Around the same time, a friend introduced me to a café that very quickly became my favorite place, which gave me something else I apparently needed in order to walk voluntarily: another destination, another small reason to leave the house.

Then, during a conversation with another friend, I casually mentioned how much weight I had already lost. He immediately asked what I was doing to preserve muscle and minimize loose skin.

The answer was: basically nothing.

He suggested I should probably start going to the gym, or at least add some form of exercise beyond walking.

The next morning, because apparently this is what I do now when someone makes a disturbingly sensible suggestion, I signed up for a membership at the gym closest to my home.

Looking back, a surprising amount of this transformation seems to have depended on people casually dropping one useful sentence into my life at exactly the right moment. No grand speeches, no dramatic interventions, no carefully designed master plan — just small pieces of information that shifted my direction by a few degrees and quietly sent me somewhere new.

Sometimes a few degrees is all it takes.

The gym was another accident that worked out extremely well

I chose Valeriu, my coach, after browsing the personal trainer profiles on the gym’s website, without much strategy beyond “this person seems fine”.

That turned out to be one of the best decisions I made.

From the beginning, he managed to give me confidence without turning progress into pressure. He encouraged me without rushing me, corrected me without making me feel incompetent, and never created the sense that a workout only counted if I crawled out of the gym questioning every decision that had brought me there. There was nothing performative about it. I did not need to prove that I was tough enough, fast enough, strong enough or sufficiently miserable to deserve progress.

I just had to show up, listen, and keep going.

And, somewhat inconveniently for someone who likes complicated explanations, that worked.

Following his advice consistently and allowing my body to progress at a pace that actually made sense produced results I had not expected, and somewhere along the way the gym stopped feeling like another thing I was forcing myself to do and became part of the structure of my week.

Valeriu is much younger than I am, but he has a remarkably mature way of looking at things, and I ended up learning more from him than the correct way to lift something heavy without injuring myself.

Probably the most important lesson was one he never really had to explain: progress does not need to be dramatic, painful or heroic in order to be real. Sometimes nothing spectacular happens at all. You simply do the work, come back, do it again, and allow repetition to quietly do what repetition does.

Then one day you notice that the thing that once felt impossibly hard has somehow become normal.

There was something particularly satisfying about that because, until then, weight loss had mostly felt like an exercise in subtraction: kilos disappearing, portions becoming smaller, numbers moving down.

The gym gave me the opposite experience.

A few more reps. Better balance. More strength. More control. A little more confidence that my body would actually do what I asked of it.

For years, I had thought about my body mostly as something to look at and evaluate — something to criticize, hide, fix, compare, shrink or wish looked different. The gym slowly introduced a completely different question: what can it do?

And discovering that my body could become stronger, learn new things and surprise me in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with how it looked has probably mattered more than any number the scale has ever shown me.

Yes, I considered Mounjaro and Ozempic

I did. Seriously.

If the changes I was making had not worked, I probably would have tried medication eventually, and I do not attach any moral value to that choice. Medication helps people. That is what it is there for. I have no interest in ranking weight-loss methods according to how virtuous, disciplined or difficult they look from the outside.

In my case, I was simply fortunate enough to discover that I could get there without it.

What changed was not just the number on the scale. Over time, the way I ate changed, the amount I moved changed, my hunger changed, my routines changed, and eventually even my idea of what a normal day was supposed to look like changed with them.

The funniest part is still the food scale.

I used to look at people who weighed their food as if they belonged to some highly evolved species of disciplined human being, the kind who had everything under control and probably also meal-prepped on Sundays in matching glass containers.

Now I weigh mine without thinking twice.

Apparently, discipline becomes considerably less impressive once you realize that a large part of it is just repetition with progressively less negotiation. You do something often enough, and eventually it stops feeling like discipline at all.

It just becomes what you do.

The 30 kilograms are not actually the main story

They are simply the easiest part to measure. The other changes are harder to quantify, and if I am being fair, therapy is probably where the real story begins.

I went back through my WhatsApp history because I wanted to remember exactly when Mihaela entered my life: September 30, 2021.

One of my closest friends had suggested therapy and recommended Mihaela, and after a sleepless night I finally wrote to her.

By then, I had already been through my divorce and losing my father, and I remember laying both things out for Mihaela almost as if I were handing over a problem statement: here is the situation, here are the major incidents, this is the current impact, now please tell me what we do next.

In other words, I showed up to therapy exactly like an engineer walking into a debugging session.

Problem A exists. Problem A is causing significant disruption. Let us identify the root cause, fix it efficiently, verify the result and ideally close the ticket as soon as possible.

Mihaela’s answer was that we would take things slowly.

This was, frankly, deeply unsatisfactory.

I did not want to go slowly. I wanted a plan, a timeline, preferably some measurable indicators of progress, and if we could somehow have the whole thing resolved before the next sprint, that would have been ideal.

But slowly was what she offered me. So slowly was what we did.

I only vaguely remember the person I was back then, partly because that whole period now exists in my memory as a kind of fog. I was exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed, permanently bracing for whatever life was going to throw at me next, with very little sense of direction and an even weaker sense of who I was underneath all the surviving.

From the outside, I was still functioning well enough that it probably did not look like I was drowning.

From the inside, that is exactly what it felt like.

I did not know who I was, what I wanted or where I was going. I only knew I could not keep living like that.

Naturally, once therapy started, I approached it the same way I approached everything else: as a system I could understand if I gathered enough information.

I tried to remember everything Mihaela said. I took notes. I searched for patterns. I reverse-engineered concepts, built mental models, looked for the hidden logic underneath my reactions and assumed there had to be some architecture behind all of it.

Surely, if I understood the system well enough, I could fix it.

Mihaela kept telling me to put the pencil down. Get out of my head. Stop documenting the experience and actually have it.

I found this deeply inconvenient.

But, little by little, the pencil stayed on the table more often.

What followed is almost impossible to describe chronologically, because therapy never unfolded as a neat sequence of breakthroughs. There was no staircase where every step came with a label explaining exactly what had changed.

It was much messier than that.

A realization that arrived unexpectedly.

A reaction I caught a few seconds earlier than I would have before.

A sentence that suddenly made sense months after I first heard it.

I remember how much anger I carried and how long it took first to recognize it, then to stop being afraid of it, and eventually to let it exist without immediately trying to shut it down.

Emotions, in general, had always been something I stored rather than expressed. I swallowed them, compartmentalized them, stacked them somewhere out of sight, and then wondered why everything inside me felt so unbearably heavy.

Mihaela taught me to tolerate uncertainty, to stay in the fog without demanding that it clear immediately, and to keep moving even when I could not see the whole road ahead.

There was also the imaginary box full of flames and snakes, which sounds completely unhinged outside the context of those sessions, but apparently this is what emotional regulation looks like when therapy gets creative.

For years, I understood my patterns intellectually long before I was able to behave differently. I could identify them, explain them, probably draw you an excellent diagram, and then go right back to doing exactly the same thing.

That gap between understanding and actually living differently was enormous.

Only recently have I started to feel it closing.

The things I spent years analyzing are slowly becoming instinctive. I notice much earlier. I react differently. Sometimes I even choose differently before the old pattern has time to fully assemble itself.

That is the part that feels truly new.

The people close to me have probably noticed before I did

The people closest to me have probably noticed the change before I fully did, mostly because boundaries now show up much earlier in the process.

If something bothers me, I say it.

I no longer spend months quietly translating someone else’s behavior into the kindest possible interpretation while resentment accumulates somewhere in the background. I am also no longer permanently available, which by itself is a fairly major shift.

If someone says or does something that goes against my values, I am much more likely to say so. If I feel disrespected, I am much more likely to step away than to start building a case for why I should keep tolerating it.

And yes, that means accepting that some friendships may end.

The old version of me would have found that deeply frightening.

For a very long time, I carried far too much responsibility for keeping connections alive, whether they were friendships, romantic relationships or something harder to define. The moment something felt strained, my instinct was to look inward and ask what else I could do to repair it.

More understanding. More empathy. More patience. More explaining. More accommodation.

Eventually, I had to admit something that now feels painfully obvious: there is a difference between caring for a relationship and carrying one.

I am still loyal. Still empathetic. Still perfectly capable of giving people the benefit of the doubt and trying to understand where they are coming from.

What changed is that I no longer believe those qualities require me to disappear from the equation in order to prove them.

Dave spotted the problem much faster than I did

I started working with Dave, my career coach, as part of a leadership program at work, expecting the conversations to stay comfortably within the usual professional territory.

That lasted about five minutes.

He read me almost immediately, which was both illuminating and mildly irritating, and pointed straight at the area where he thought I had the most work to do: the intersection between empathy and boundaries.

I remember hearing that and thinking, essentially, Oh, for Pete’s sake. Of course.

Because once he said it, it was painfully obvious.

A lot of our conversations revolved around courageous communication, not in the polished corporate sense of the phrase, but in the much less comfortable version where you actually have to say what is true before you have buried it under six layers of context, reassurance, justification and careful wording.

What do you need? What do you not want? What is bothering you?

Can you say it clearly, while it is still a relatively simple sentence, instead of waiting until it has evolved into a full legal argument with supporting documentation?

At some point, I told him about dating, which was definitely more personal than I had originally intended to get in a leadership coaching session.

His response surprised me.

He did not tell me to become softer, more patient, more accommodating or more understanding.

He told me to keep going. And to be blunt.

If something does not work for me, say it. If I do not like something, say it. If I want something, say that too. If I do not want something, stop trying to make it sound more acceptable before saying it.

That advice turned out to be useful far beyond dating. Learning to articulate what I want, what I do not want, what I am willing to accept and where I draw the line has changed the way I communicate in almost every area of my life.

And dating apps — horrifying as they can be — turned out to be an unexpectedly efficient place to practice.

Dating apps: an unnecessarily hostile learning environment

I stayed on dating apps partly because I still wanted a partner and partly because, at some point, I realized I was actually learning something there.

This does not mean I enjoyed the experience.

There were conversations so strange that I am still not entirely convinced everyone involved belonged to the same species, but the apps did give me repeated opportunities to practice things I had historically been very bad at: saying no without over-explaining, noticing discomfort early instead of rationalizing it away, ending conversations that were going nowhere, allowing people to dislike me, allowing them to misunderstand me, letting silence remain silence, not converting obvious incompatibility into “potential”, not making myself easier to choose, and not chasing clarity from people who seemed perfectly comfortable providing none.

And then there was rejection. Rejection from someone you actually like stings as fuck.

I would love to report some kind of spiritual breakthrough where I now smile serenely, thank the universe for the lesson, and float away in a cloud of emotional maturity every time a man does not want me. But no.

What changed is the meaning I assign to it.

My old instinct was to trace rejection directly back to myself. What did I say? What did I do? Was I too much? Too direct? Too available? Not available enough? Too weird? Too interested? Not interested enough?

There was always an internal audit running in the background, as if rejection could only be explained by locating the exact point where I had somehow failed.

Now, at least most of the time, rejection is allowed to be much less elaborate.

Someone did not choose me.

That can disappoint me deeply. It can hurt my feelings, ruin my mood for a while and make me wish things had gone differently.

What it does not have to do is become evidence about my value, my character, my desirability, or whether I behaved correctly.

Disappointment and self-condemnation are no longer the same event.

That distinction is still relatively new for me, and probably one of the most important ones I have learned.

Silence may be the biggest breakthrough of all

The funny thing about anxious attachment is that, from inside your own head, it can look a lot like being extremely reasonable. You are not panicking, obviously. You are analyzing, reviewing the conversation, noticing changes in tone, considering possible misunderstandings and generally conducting a very thorough investigation while your nervous system quietly asks, Has something changed, and was it me?

Silence used to hit that exact nerve. If someone I cared about suddenly went quiet, I immediately felt responsible for figuring out why, fixing whatever might be wrong and restoring contact as quickly as possible. Uncertainty felt less like uncertainty and more like an emergency.

That is one of the places where I can see the change most clearly now.

Silence still affects me, especially when I care about someone. I notice it. I can still feel anxious, curious, disappointed or confused. What changed is that I no longer feel compelled to act on every uncomfortable feeling the moment it appears.

An unanswered message can remain unanswered for a while. A gap can simply be a gap. I can be curious about what happened without immediately needing to resolve it, and give the other person enough space to come forward in their own time.

Sometimes people go quiet because they are overwhelmed, uncertain, distracted, scared, confused, or simply dealing with something that has very little to do with me. Sometimes I may never know the reason.

That used to feel unbearable. Now it is mostly just uncomfortable — and learning that discomfort does not have to become an emergency has changed everything for me.

Building resilience around silence has meant learning that uncertainty does not automatically require action. For someone with anxious attachment, that feels less like learning a new communication skill and more like quietly rewriting gravity.

Jean started as a career coach and then things escalated

When I first started talking to Jean, through the ten coaching sessions package I get every year as a work benefit, I wanted to focus on my career.

The goal was simple: I had just moved into a new work environment and wanted to shorten the period in which people tend to overlook me before eventually realizing what I can actually do.

My default mode in a new place is to stay quiet, observe, gather information, analyze everything and only then start making myself visible. This is useful if your priority is understanding the system before acting. It is considerably less useful if your priority is being noticed quickly.

Being chubby and having low self-esteem at the time did not exactly improve the situation either.

Somewhere along the way, however, what had started as career coaching expanded into nutrition, creating healthy behaviors, manifestation and how to spot scammers on dating apps faster than your friends can say, he seems nice though.

A perfectly natural progression, really.

I get ten sessions a year and have already used them all, so I am now basically waiting for January because I want Jean back.

Our last conversation was about manifestation, and I told her something that still feels slightly strange to say out loud: I already have almost everything I could realistically want.

I am good. My life is good. There is just one thing I would still really like.

Jean suggested that instead of focusing only on who that person should be, I should think about the qualities I would like them to have and, more importantly, about how I would want to feel inside that potential relationship.

Naturally, I made the list funny and posted it online.

Actually feeling those emotions in advance, rather than just turning the whole exercise into Instagram content, is proving slightly more difficult.

So we shall see how well I eventually get the hang of this whole manifestation thing.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to win everything

Effort has always been one of my default solutions. If something is not working, try harder. If there is a misunderstanding, explain it. If a door does not open, perhaps I am simply pushing at the wrong angle.

That mindset has served me very well professionally. It is less useful everywhere else.

Sometimes a closed door is not a technical problem. Sometimes the door is simply closed.

These days, I pay more attention to reciprocity and evidence. Is the effort mutual? Does this actually fit my life? Am I pursuing something because I genuinely want it, or because I want the satisfaction of making it work?

Potential interests me much less than it used to. What is actually happening interests me more.

I can care deeply about something and still choose not to pursue it. I can want something and decide the price is too high. I can be disappointed and still recognize that the outcome may ultimately be better for me.

That no longer feels like giving up.

It feels like discernment.

It took a village, apparently

There is a very popular version of personal transformation in which one heroic person decides to fix her life and then proceeds to do it alone through discipline, determination and, presumably, an alarm clock set to 5 a.m.

My version involved considerably more people.

A therapist.

A personal coach.

A career coach.

An actual coach.

Close friends.

Trusted advisors.

Colleagues.

And a few random people who happened to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment.

Some challenged me. Some reassured me. Some noticed progress before I was ready to trust it myself. Some told me things I did not particularly enjoy hearing and were, annoyingly, completely right.

There were also a few people who simply stayed present in quieter ways, checking in, noticing changes, encouraging me, and making the progress feel a little more real by reflecting it back to me when I was still too close to see it clearly.

No grand motivational speeches.

Nothing dramatic.

Just steady support, the kind that says, in a hundred small ways:

I see what you are doing. Keep going.

That kind of support is very easy to underestimate.

My team at work also became a surprisingly important part of the process. My colleagues shared ideas, practical advice, food suggestions, exercise tips and small solutions to problems I had not yet figured out, and generally treated what I was doing as something worth encouraging rather than interrogating.

Nobody did the work for me. Nobody weighed the food, took the walks, set the boundaries, sat with the uncertainty or resisted sending the unnecessary message on my behalf.

I did those things.

But a lot of people helped me become the version of myself who could.

What balance looks like from here

For a long time, I assumed transformation would feel dramatic — a clear before and after, some invisible threshold I would cross before emerging as the upgraded version of myself, ideally with excellent posture, perfect emotional regulation and zero remaining attraction to complicated situations.

That is not what happened.

The new version of my life feels almost disappointingly normal. I work, go to the gym, walk, drink coffee in places I like, plan my food, count calories, take pictures, go to therapy, talk to friends and occasionally return to dating apps to gather fresh evidence that human beings remain endlessly creative.

The difference shows up in smaller moments.

The old impulses still appear sometimes: explain, fix, chase the answer, make the other person understand, keep something alive long after reciprocity has disappeared. But they no longer feel like instructions.

There is more space now between feeling something and acting on it, enough to ask whether the response I am about to choose actually belongs to the life I want.

Sometimes I still overthink. Rejection can still ruin my mood for a while. Silence can still activate every ancient alarm system in my body before the more evolved part of my brain catches up.

Nothing here is perfect.

I am not “healed” in the ridiculous sense where one apparently reaches a state of permanent serenity and begins communicating exclusively through wisdom. I still get angry, still get hurt, still get attached, still want things I probably should not want, and I can still be spectacularly messy.

The difference is that the mess no longer scares me as much. I trust myself inside it.

I trust myself to notice when something is wrong, to say it, to survive disappointment, to walk away if staying means becoming smaller, and to let uncertainty exist without immediately treating it like a problem that needs solving.

Somewhere along the way, I also stopped treating my life like a waiting room.

For years, happiness always seemed to come with another condition attached: after I lose weight, after work becomes easier, after I get that promotion, after I understand myself better, after I heal, after I find a relationship, after some future version of me finally gets everything right.

That logic has faded.

My life is happening now, and rather unexpectedly, I like it.

I like my routines. I like having favorite places. I like getting stronger. I like knowing that my body can do more than I thought it could. I like saying no without attaching a legal brief. I like being less available, because the time I keep for myself no longer feels like time I am taking away from somebody else.

I like that rejection can hurt without becoming identity, and that silence can sting without becoming catastrophe.

I still want a partner. Very much, actually. It simply feels different now. It is just a desire, not a rescue plan.

The woman I see now is not some radically new creation. She was probably always there underneath the anxiety, exhaustion, grief, over-responsibility, people-pleasing, extra weight, constant explaining and the impressive collection of emotional contingency plans.

All I seem to have done is remove enough noise to hear her properly.

And I like her. A lot.

I like the woman who can sit in uncertainty without immediately constructing a bridge out of text messages, who can say this hurts without automatically adding therefore something is wrong with me, who still gets emotional, still gets angry, still occasionally spirals, but comes back to herself faster.

Maybe that is what balance actually looks like.

Not the absence of difficult feelings, bad days or uncertainty.

Just having a place inside yourself that feels familiar enough to return to.

The journey here was long, and it is still ongoing. There will absolutely be more things to learn, more patterns to discover, and more moments when I realize I have apparently understood nothing.

But I am no longer desperately trying to arrive somewhere else.

For the first time in a very long time, I am not looking at my current life as a temporary version of the real one.

I think this is the real one.

And I am very happy to be here.