Ronan Diego narrates a personal journey from a violent neighborhood in Brazil through bullying and a desire to become physically strong, to a life-changing car accident that caused retrograde amnesia (lost memory of the prior ~4–5 years). He describes how returning to heavy lifting and prioritizing fitness became a way to feel alive and regain purpose. Later, he recounts helping his father recover from a severe health decline—diagnosed as "pseudo dementia"—by changing nutrition and exercise; over three months (August–November) his father lost 14 kilos and regained mobility and outlook. The talk links physical health, inflammation, and mental well-being and concludes with advice to persist through struggles because they can lead to deeper purpose beyond aesthetics.
Questions this video answers
2007
About four to five years (retrograde amnesia).
Three months (August to November).
"Pseudo dementia" (described as dementia-like symptoms without physiological protein/clotting causes).
Chapters
I woke up in the hospital. And this is. I remember. And that memory that I lost meant that I couldn't remember anything that had happened in the past four to five years. I grew up in a place that. In the neighborhood in Brazil where kids needed to be taken care of because there was a lot of violence and drugs and things like that. And I was getting to fights, but I was a very skinny and small and weak kid, so it was not to my advantage. I remember this one episode that I was at school and we were at physical education classes. That to me was my worst, my nightmare. And that was one day that we were having a flexibility assessment. And that thing I was really good because I was practicing karate. I was super flexible, put my legs here and there. And I remember that one assessment is that we sit on the floor with our legs straight and you try to reach your toes, toes. And the cool kids, they were good at football. They couldn't barely reach their knees. They're like that. So when I was there, super flexible, touching my toes. There was a school kid that came besides me. He said, ah, teacher, he can do this because he's short and his legs are short. And then I was there and I look at him and said, yeah, but my arms are also short. They are proportional, right? And then he slapped me at the back of the head and he said, you shut up, you piece of shit. And I kept my head down, I shut up, and I stayed that way. The teacher didn't do anything. And that memory disappeared from my mind because it was something too hard to remember or to deal with. It disappeared from the top of the mind. But it was in the back there was this need. I am not a weak piece of shit. I want to show that I am strong. And the only way that I knew how to do that was to grow a strong body. When I was 18, when I started university, I joined mechanical engineering because that was my dad's dream. He's a mechanic, He's a car mechanic. In university, I started also going to the gym. And I think the main reason that that happened, my parents didn't allow me to go to the gym before I was 18 because they thought that I would remain short. I was a short kid and I was counting the freaking days to start going because that was a very strong drive towards it. So I was in the beginning of university, starting to work on improving my body and nutrition and training. And at some point, university just became too overwhelming. Mechanical engineering is hard. And so at that time, there was something that I was Missing. In my second year of university, I had a car accident and I lost memory. The last thing that I remember on that day was entering the car and sitting at the back seat on the right side and just shaking hands with everyone. That's the last thing that I remember. Everything else that I will tell you are things that people told me or things that I saw in the CCTV of the traffic light. But we were going to the bar and we were passing in a crossroad. There was a traffic light that was yellow for us. And so the driver just went through. And the car that was coming on the other street, there was a car coming, but he was coming super fast. And then he crashed his car exactly where I was sitting. I hit my head against the window. And this affected the prefrontal cortex. That amongst many things, it holds your short term memory. I woke up in the hospital and this is I remember. And that memory that I lost meant that I couldn't remember anything that had happened in the past four to five years. Nothing, zero, nada. I remember being in the hospital, there was a friend of mine with me and he said, man, I know you're confused, you're going to be okay. But we were in a car accident, you are fine, but you lost memory, you're going to recover that. So I was okay, trying to see what was happening. I was asking him, what year is this year? He said, It's 2007. And I was asking him what do I do in my life? And he said, man, you play the guitar, you go to the gym and all these kind of things. And he was telling me these things and I was getting these goosebumps because there were things that I didn't remember. I did, but I liked it. And he said, yeah, but that changed once you started university because then you got too busy, the band doesn't exist anymore. You're also not exercising as much anymore because you're just studying this past semester after this, my dad entered the hospital and he said, ronan, I just hope, hope that you recover your memory as soon as possible because you're doing amazing. You are studying mechanical engineering and you work and you study in the morning, you study in the afternoon, studying in the evening. You wake up at 6:30 on Saturday and Sunday to study and like when you are on vacation with your books. And then I heard that and I felt pity for that story. Is this my life? I felt pity for the guy that my dad was describing because I was feeling nothing. Is this guy putting all his time into something that clearly he does not care about. It's very interesting when someone tells what you've been doing with your life and you are watching this an expectator. After that time, it was hard for me to digest this. It took months. But what I decided was that I wanted to feel more alive. I said, this is not my life, this is my time, but there's no life to it. I want to feel more alive. I don't know exactly what it is, but I will see seek things. And then that idea of lifting heavy weights, that is something in my everyday that up to this day make me feel in the moment, make me feel like a creative expression. And that needed to come back. I needed to find time to study a little bit less, to dedicate less time for things that I didn't care about, the things that made me feel alive. And this is when I found, okay, I need to pivot things in a significant and organic way, because my life's completely going to the direction that is the opposite of what I wanted to go. I would love to tell everyone that my fitness journey started from this beautiful place that wanted to improve my body, improve my life. It was from a lack. It was from trying to fix something, something. It was up until many, many years later that when I was, you know, very, sometimes very angry with my body. You know, I was trying to transform it. And even when I started training other people, all my clients, they got better results than I did. I applied the same things. So, okay, this is what I do. This is what you're going to do. They get two times the results and sometimes even simpler things. You know, I have these friends that I trained and they got super strong and they looked amazing and they drink beer and they go for pizza and they skip their training. And I like. I eat one sweet potato and my belly gets this big. Sometimes I was just angry. It's like, why do. Why body? Why do you do this to me? I'm here, you know, from everyone that I know, I'm probably the one that works the hardest. And there was a time that I realized that this was a blessing, that I was born not with the body of the athlete, but I was born with the body of the teacher that is the one who faces all the possible challenges so that you need to learn about them, so that you need to master them. And because you did, I could help so many people. You know, last year my. My dad almost. Almost died. He had almost a seizure that developed into a depression. He was working and one day he was fixing a car that's what he does. And he was found unconscious and he was taken home, and he didn't remember who he was. He didn't remember where he lived, and his mind was blank. And for three months, it was like that. No one knew what was going on. We thought it was Alzheimer or dementia. And we did a lot of scans and different neurologists look into his brain, and things were fine up until he was diagnosed with something called pseudo dimensia. That is when you have the symptoms of dementia, but it's not the physiological aspect of it. It's not the proteins that are clogging your brain. Your brain is shrinking, but it's more a psychological state that manifests that. And that comes usually from a huge amount of inflammation in the body. And that amount of inflammation is a result of years and years of not caring about it. You know, he always had ulcerative colitis, the type of inflammation that you have in your gut. And the doctor said, you cannot eat cheese or cannot drink dairy or alcohol. And he was like, yeah, pizza and beer. You know, his body could take it. And at some point, the body collapses after a couple of years, and that's what happened to him. And I went. I live in Malaysia, and I went back to Brazil to visit my family last year around August. And my dad, by that time, he was recovering from the psychological state, and then he was back to his personality, but his body was still in that very deteriorated space, and he was super overweight, and pain here and pain there. He can barely walk and this kind of things. And I was there with my dad, and he said, ronan, I want to change that. It's done for me. And I said, dad, I know how to do that. I worked with my dad for three months in August to November. November was his birthday. He lost 14 kilos. We changed his nutrition. We started going to the house and, okay, these are the things that we include in the nutrition. These are things that we leave out. And then, you know, we did some intermittent fasting, we did some carbohydrate manipulation, some exercises. All the things that I always developed that works with so many people. After three months, he lost 14 kilos. But not only that, he looked completely different, but his outlook of life changed because before I talked to him about coming visiting me in Malaysia, and he was always saying, I don't think I'm ever going to make it because I feel I'm at the end of my life and stuff like that. In November last year, he was saying, let's buy tickets. And now he has tickets. He just didn't come because of the lockdown of COVID And now he rides his bicycle, you know, every day he goes buy bread with his bicycle. He could barely walk before. If I went back in time to the time that I was starting my health and fitness journey and I could give myself an advice, I know what he would do be. I know that I wouldn't ask my young self to change anything or to avoid any mistake. I know that all the mistakes that I, that I made, the struggles that I went through, they built who I am right now. But I know that I had very hard times by trying to reach results, that my body was not responding and by comparing myself to others. And it had a lot of these different things that I always almost giving up on that thing. I think I would just tell my younger self that you are on the right path. Don't give up, because one day you will find a bigger purpose to this. Now keep going, do your things, you know, struggle. Just. Just don't change that. Because in a couple of years from now, you will see that this journey took you to a place that is a lot deeper, a lot more than you could have wished. You go a lot beyond a body that looks good into something that gives value to other people's lives. And all of this was only possible to figure out that I was not working on the surface, but I was working on something that went beyond the body. Sa Sam.
