Rock Bottom is Where You Stop Digging
Jun 08, 2026
Laney Demeza was on top of the pyramid at Nationals when she was a kid. Literally, she was flying through the air, competing against teams from across the country with the Pop Warner Rockets in 1991. She was a go-getter from day one.
And then high school happened. She wanted to fit in, she found alcohol, and, as she put it, she applied that same overachiever energy to the partying.
Sound familiar?
When I met Laney, I immediately thought, this is a Sober Fit Life story. She's strong, she's confident, she's glowing. But the road to get there? That took some work.
By the time COVID hit, Laney was deep in the detox-to-retox cycle — making rules about her drinking, stepping over every single one, waking up to that empty bottle in the kitchen, feeling the shame on repeat. She was working out hard, trying to compensate. She was doing all the things on paper. But nothing was changing because she wasn't looking at the thing that was undercutting all of it.
So she started digging herself out instead of digging deeper.
One of the first things she did was something I think is genuinely brilliant: she shaped her own algorithm. She started listening to sobriety podcasts on her dog walks. She chose audiobooks where the main characters were getting sober. She stopped following the accounts that glamorized drinking and started following people who were talking openly about alcohol freedom. She literally rewired what was going into her brain every single day, and it worked.
She also leaned hard into the gym. Not as punishment, but as community. As identity. As a place where she could build something real without alcohol involved. She found her people at Royal Fitness in Barrington, and she never looked back. Once she stopped drinking, the gains she'd been chasing for years finally started showing up. Her consistency got real. Her brain fog lifted. And eventually — because she suddenly had the time and mental space to do it — she got certified as a personal trainer.
She saved over $15,000 in 620 days. She went to bed at 8:30 not because she'd passed out, but because she actually wanted to sleep. She stopped having mood swings she'd been blaming on perimenopause. Turns out a lot of those were the alcohol.
Her mantra through all of it — written on her phone wallpaper where she'd see it every single day: The woman I'm going to be in a few years is counting on me.
You don't have to hit the bottom of the hole to decide to stop digging.
Catch the full episode of Sober Fit Life here 🎧
Find Laney:
- Personal training at SmartBodies in Marlton, NJ
- Community at Royal Fitness in Barrington, NJ
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Ready to explore what alcohol freedom could look like for you? Email me at [email protected] or visit my website. No obligation. No labels. Just support that actually works.
