The story
I didn't get my life back. I built a new one.
Over 300 pounds, a heart failing from alcohol, and no plan. Seven years later: 190 pounds, sober since 2018, and still here. This is the honest version — no shortcuts, no secrets, no product at the end.
I spent years remodeling old houses. That's where the name Remodeled Health came from. When I think about rebuilding my health, I think about those houses. The work starts with the foundation. For me, that meant getting sober. Everything I did after that had something to build on.
01 — The collapse
Nothing dramatic happened. That was the problem.
There was no single night that ruined me. There were years of drinking that I described as normal, and a body that quietly agreed to carry it until it couldn't. The weight came on gradually enough that I always had a reason: work, stress, a bad season, a good season.
What finally stopped me wasn't willpower. It was a diagnosis. Alcohol had damaged my heart to the point where it was struggling to move blood through a body that had grown too heavy for it. I was dying at the age most people start taking their health seriously — and I had spent the whole time avoiding it.
02 — Day one
I stopped negotiating.
Every plan I'd ever made had an exit built into it. "I'll cut back." "Just on weekends." "After this one hard month." Sobriety started the day I stopped leaving myself a door.
That decision did not feel heroic. It felt like admitting I was out of clever ideas. But it was the only foundation strong enough to build anything else on — because no diet, no supplement, and no training program repairs a body that is still being poisoned.
"I didn't need more motivation. I needed fewer decisions I could reopen."
03 — Learning to eat again
Food stopped being a reward or a punishment.
Early on I treated eating like a debt I owed for existing. That lasted about as long as you'd expect. What actually worked was boring: a small set of meals I could repeat without resentment, enough protein to hold onto muscle, and no rule so strict that breaking it meant giving up.
I lost 110 pounds without ever being on a diet I couldn't describe in one sentence. The weight came off because the drinking stopped and the walking started — not because I found the right plan.
04 — The first barbell
A broken heart needed muscle around it.
A failing heart is a weak pump. I couldn't fix the damage I'd already done, but I could make everything around it stronger — so that the life I was living asked less of it. Lifting gave me that. Slowly, badly, and then consistently.
Strength training also gave me something the scale never did: proof, week after week, that effort turns into something real. That mattered more to my sobriety than any meeting or mantra.
05 — Year seven
Now the work is maintenance, not rescue.
Sobriety stopped being a daily battle somewhere around year three. What's left is a life that has to be maintained: training, eating like an adult, sleeping, and staying honest about the things I'd rather avoid.
I write all of it down here — the food, the lifting, the thinking, the bad weeks — because when I was at my worst, what I wanted wasn't a program. It was proof that someone had come back from further down than me. I'm that proof. Use it.