How I start my journey to become a better version of myself
By: Giacomo Lanzi
Tags: Life Change, Diet, Body Positive, Health, Weight

Since I was a teenage boy I was overweight, I smoked and drunk regularly a discreet amount of alcohol. I was happy more or less, but when I became 20 and left my high school to start my university experience, I started feeling inadequate. To be clear, that was that kind of devastating struggle to comply with fellow students or the effort to fit in some kind of stereotypes. I was aware of what I was, what were my limits and what I should have improved in order to reach a better lifestyle. I simply didn’t want to.

I was happy (or at least I remember I felt that way), I had my close friends, I started playing saxophone after years trying other instruments with very poor results. I was, and I still am, one of those guys who follow his curiosity wherever it takes them. I read a lot, I wrote and took pictures. Some of these activities made me also earn also some money later.

I studied psychology just out of curiosity, but I discover it only the third year when I realize that I didn’t want to be a therapist. Those studies still are one of my best skill and I earn my last raise over this. Pretty neat indeed. After psychology I studied literature and that I just decided to open my little business making one of my hobbies my work. I founded (and later also closed) my own photo studio. In was 4 years ago when I started to realize I wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be. Again it wasn’t a sudden revelation about life, the universe and everything else, but I felt like around me there wasn’t anything interesting anymore. It was like I was stuck in my own decisions with very few options to grow my future. Also, at the time in Italy, the word “future” itself was a big question mark.

I quit my life as it was and I moved to Berlin. My journey to became a better version of me started.

In November 2014 my new life began. I shut down my own photo studio, I moved myself to a huge city and I put myself in an unpleasant situation where I had to learn a new language in order to get back on track. For six months I attended German lessons. I had the intent to do all that it takes to become part of the city and the country. I’m now halfway to the time I need to ask the citizenship.

During the first year, the deadline I gave myself, I reached what I before decided was the bare minimum to consider my new life experiment a success: I was able to speak the language in order to obtain an unlimited job in a German company. I felt powerful and realized.

At that point, I was just taking what came around with a positive attitude. That job wasn’t intended to be my lifetime one but it was enough to get back strongly on my own legs. Feeling happy in that situation made me realize I wasn’t really happy before. In Italy, I was my own boss I remember I ended up the last months working almost every night to collect enough money to call it a salary. It was so stressful that I started to have mixed feeling about it. My friends told more than once to stop looking at the email at the pub. For me, it was just about normal to do it.

In Germany, I felt alive again. Everything was new and exciting, all the city was there to be explored, totally new subcultures and architectures were there to be admired and studied. In that first year here I weighted circa 105–110 kg and I was fitter that now since that first job was at the Deutsche Post and I was a delivery guy.