Dear fat,
We need to talk.
First of all, I want you to know that I have nothing against you personally.
You have an important job.
You keep humans alive when food disappears. You protect organs. You store energy. You help with hormones. You probably did excellent work in 14th-century Europe when somebody had to survive February with half a potato and a suspicious-looking turnip.
I respect the history.
But this is 2026.
I have a refrigerator.
And now it’s your time to go.
Not all of you, obviously. I’m not trying to become one of those anatomical drawings from a biology textbook where you can see every tendon in the man’s face.
I just think we’ve reached the point where our relationship has become slightly too comfortable.
Especially around the waist.
And the face.
The face thing is frankly unnecessary.
The 290-day plan
Because I am apparently incapable of doing anything normally, I decided that getting lean should become a 290-day project.
Normal people probably notice their trousers getting tight and eat slightly less for a while.
I create a project.
There is a timeline.
There are phases.
There are spreadsheets somewhere.
There will almost certainly be emotional instability caused by a completely meaningless 600-gram increase on a bathroom scale.
This is what happens when a web developer starts applying project management principles to abdominal fat.
The basic plan is incredibly boring:
- Eat a little less.
- Train.
- Move.
- Sleep.
- Repeat for approximately the length of a human pregnancy.
There is no detox.
No superfood.
No metabolic reset.
No Himalayan berry harvested by monks during a full moon.
Just months and months of occasionally wanting a sandwich.
The first few weeks
I started around 90 kilos.
A few weeks later the scale was already moving quickly enough that I had the opposite problem: I had to make sure I wasn’t eating too little.
Which sounds wonderful until you’re actually doing it.
People imagine fat loss as some heroic Rocky montage.
It isn’t.
Most of the time it’s just standing in your kitchen at 20:37 looking at bread and thinking:
Technically I have already eaten dinner.
That’s the sport.
There are good days when you look in the mirror and think:
Holy shit, it’s working.
Then there are mornings when you wake up holding three litres of water for absolutely no reason and suddenly look like you have been inflated overnight by a bored Finnish municipal worker.
Nothing meaningful has happened.
Your brain does not care.
Your brain has already cancelled the project.
Dear body fat, please leave in an orderly fashion
This time I’m trying not to declare war on you.
That never works.
I’ve done the aggressive version before.
Train harder.
Eat less.
Get impatient.
Reduce food again.
Add cardio.
Start thinking that feeling terrible means the plan must be working exceptionally well.
Eventually your body files an official complaint.
So this project is different.
I’m still lifting.
I’m still eating real food.
I’m trying to sleep.
Some days I eat more.
Some days I train less.
Because apparently the human body responds better when you don’t treat it like a captured enemy combatant.
Who knew.
The strange middle part
There is also a phase of dieting that nobody puts on Instagram.
You are lighter.
But you’re not lean yet.
Your muscles are flatter because you’re eating less.
There is still enough fat covering everything to hide the evidence.
Congratulations.
You are now smaller and somehow equally disappointing.
This is the fat-and-flat phase.
It’s beautiful.
You spend months lifting weights so you can eventually look like a slightly more athletic version of a man who has been stranded at an airport.
But you keep going.
Because eventually the fat moves.
Slowly.
Annoyingly.
Sometimes apparently from everywhere except the exact place you would like it to disappear from.
The human body has its own roadmap.
Mine seems to say:
- Arms.
- Shoulders.
- Legs.
- Random part of back nobody has ever looked at.
- Possibly face.
- Stomach sometime during the next presidential administration.
Why 290 days?
Because I’m tired of the usual six-week nonsense.
I don’t want to lose weight quickly.
I want to arrive somewhere I can actually stay.
The real goal isn’t seeing some magical number on the scale.
It’s reaching a body-fat level where I feel comfortable, then making that normal life.
No dramatic bulk afterward.
No celebratory six-month pizza festival.
Just maintenance.
Train.
Eat reasonably.
Live.
It sounds suspiciously adult.
I don’t like it either.
I will think about you on the treadmill.
I will think about you every time I feel like I deserve a treat for successfully surviving an ordinary Tuesday.
Every time I walk past the bakery.
Every time someone opens a bag of chips within a fifty-metre radius.
Every time my brain says, you’ve trained today, surely this doesn’t count.
I will think about the good times we had.
But I will also remember that this is exactly how you got here.
One harmless little reward at a time.
You know, in retrospect, how easy would all of this have been if we had just laid down some basic rules when we first met?
A little boundary-setting.
A reasonable agreement.
You stay here, I stay there, we both respect the arrangement.
But no.
You had to get comfortable.
Then more comfortable.
Then apparently start acquiring property.
And before I knew it, you had taken roughly 25 percent of my entire body and were acting like this was a perfectly normal living arrangement.
Look at us now.
Me counting calories.
You being slowly evicted.
This could have been so much easier.
So, fat…
We’ve had some good times.
Pizza.
Christmas.
Stress eating.
Those mysterious evenings where 800 calories somehow disappeared while standing next to the kitchen counter.
I don’t regret everything.
You were stored honestly.
Every gram has paperwork.
But we’re downsizing now.
I’m keeping enough of you around for normal biological operations, emergencies and possibly one extremely cold Finnish afternoon.
The rest of you can start packing.
There is no rush.
Actually, there is a little rush.
But I know how this works.
I’ll keep lifting.
I’ll keep biking.
I’ll keep eating enough protein.
I’ll try to sleep like a functioning mammal.
And every week, hopefully, a tiny bit less of you will be here.
No hatred.
No punishment.
Just mathematics and an unreasonable amount of patience.
Dear fat,
I know you have a place in my world.
But now it’s your time to go.
Please leave the muscle.
Thanks.