Hello World,

As strange as it may seem to you, looking at all the pictures on this site, I have never been fit, lean, muscled or jacked my entire life. Until I turned 48 years old/young. That was the time when I realized that my 70^s will depend on my 50^s and I need to do something with myself. And it better be systematic, sustainable, reasonable and please let it be fun.

Until that moment, I was always the fat kid, the chubby teenager and the well-rounded adult. There were periods in my life when I was also skinny fat, fragile, weak. I have pictures to prove that at my high school graduation I was solid 100 kg (221 lb) and that album is now buried at the bottom of the closet. 

My life has never been easy. I moved to the capital of Bulgaria when I was 20 years old with just two bags of clothes and four years later I graduated as Master of Public Relations and started my professional career. I loved my job, it brought me many friends, travels, challenges, victories. Until the day when I realised that year after year I was doing the same thing, just the locations and the audiences changed. It took me good 20 years to understand that despite how good I am at my job, the joy was missing.

I also come from a family that worships food, my granddad was a kind of a chef. We never had much, but we always had food and we also cared for two vegetable gardens, a fruit orchard and raised cattle (goats, pigs, chicken, the stuff). My grandpa gave me the basics how to cook, my grandma taught me how to knead dough and how to make bread. So I started experimenting with food, even had my own cooking blog. Brave and foolish enough, never professionally trained in cooking, I had no boundaries or fears what ingredients to mix, how to properly stir a sauce or in what order I should build a cake batter.

And couple of years after the blog, came my ‘first child’, Daro Bistro. In 2016 I took over a dilapidated street-food-shop and turned it into one of the highest rated brunch spots in Sofia, a preferred place to have your weekend meetings with friends. And once again I was living my dream, surrounded by food, smells, lots of butter and welcoming new people daily.

Cooking there every day gave me not only joy, but a lot of knowledge about food, ingredients, and nutrients. My natural curiosity lead me to books and sources to learn more about nutrition and it changed my view on how a diet of a man should look like. In the past, I have hired professional trainers to help me get in shape and I always ended up with people that force upon me a ready-made workout routine plus ready-made meal plans, mainly chicken-and-broccoli-seven-times-a-day. I knew that there has to be a way to still both enjoy my food and have the most of its nutrients without having to sacrifice one over the other.

There was another aspect of my journey to become fit and that was the gym. Being disappointed by a number of trainers before, I was cautious in choosing the science based approach of the right person. Because, let’s face it, there has to be chemistry with your trainer, the workouts should be fun and we all need a bit of a motivation now and then.

Truth be told, it was fun. I happened to have a mentor who understood me and my life constrains, took into account my lifestyle, preferences and habits. We spent a year together, to your surprise we never met in person, it was all online process and communications. Just do not get me wrong, I did not move my bed to the gym and I do not live there. I started and continued to go to the gym twice per week for a maximum of 90 min (change-train-shower-change). And to this day, I usually go to the gym three times per week and spend there 1 hour max. That is like 2.5% of my time and I still enjoy seeing friends, going out, chill, movies.

Somewhere along that road, I found out that I have what it takes to help other people become fit.I know that I have the approach and the empathy. Might sound like bragging to you, but I developed the ability to put myself into your shoes and walk a mile in them. And already armed with all the knowledge about nutrients and food, all I needed was a deeper understanding of the human body, the mechanics, the muscles and how I can make them grow. And still enjoy the process, having fun while working out makes things so so much more easy.

I did acquire that knowledge and I am still educating myself, that area is huge and full of noise, sometimes cutting through the crap online is a difficult task. I know that this will also be a never-ending game, just like self-care.

That was my biggest revelation, the change of perception and how I approached all my previous attempts to get in shape. Before, I was always like ”OK, six months of pain and I will be a brand new person” or ”90 days diet and I will be in shape”. I always strived for the end result, never paid attention to the process. Because a workout routine is nice only and if it is designed to last a lifetime. Because a diet should be sustained for 90 years, not 90 days. Because there is no end result, I am not a sculpture to chisel myself and that is it. I am what I am and I could be a bit bloated after Christmas, I could become even more lean for the summer vacation, I could even go on stage and compete if I want to.

And all of that is because I have the knowledge how to change lives. How to create habits that are sustainable. How to design nutrition plan and still enjoy my foods and even go out with friends and have huge dinners and wine. How to create and structure a workout routine, tailored to a body composition and taking into account all the other aspects of life like job, family, kids, relatives, all of it. And may be the most important of all, I am willing to share.

To share all my knowledge, experience and all the small things that in time pay back in big results. It is brave of me to say, but when I become your trainer and mentor, I will be the last one you will ever need.