I have always been a very active kid and have been skinny for as long as I can remember. From the time I started my first job, I discovered I was piling on the pounds and by 2009, I was FAT! Since then, I have done too many things and I finally feel like I have a grip on how to solve the problem. This is my story:

2009 – The Aha moment!

This is where it all started. I can still remember it like it was yesterday – we had just finished organising what was arguably the best Barcamp Mumbai had seen and I was at an after-party where someone was clicking pictures.

I remember sitting next to this girl hoping not to get photographed. Heavens! I’d look so fat next to her! I remember being overcome with an immense sense of guilt and disgust – this was me saying I didn’t want to be photographed – everyone knows how much I love to be in front of the camera!

Upon reflection the next day, it hit me that I was incredibly unhealthy and I couldn’t do most of the physical things that I found easy in the past.

I had promised myself I would go the gym that year, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I spent the year moping around and feeling terrible about myself.

2010 – Experimentation!

This was going to be the year I pulled my pants up and got down to fixing myself. I had the will, but I had no idea what to do! I thought if I ate the ‘healthy food’, I would be alright. I couldn’t be more wrong! I tried everything – diets, crash courses, eating everything with ‘healthy’ on it – nothing seemed to be working. This was also when I bought a scale and started tracking my weight on an app.

All of this was doing more harm than good because my weight was still increasing despite me eating all the traditionally ‘healthy’ stuff. By the end of the year, I had the realisation that I had no idea what I was doing and that I needed to understand better what it meant to be healthy.

2011 – The Learning

By 2011, I was tired of being fat and sickly all the time. I came to the realisation that I had to learn about health and fitness to be able to lead a more healthy lifestyle. Thanks to the weight tracking, I could also see that despite my best efforts, the weight was still climbing for the 3rd year in a row!

I have always been a voracious reader, and this time I focused my energies on reading everything even remotely connected to health. I slowly started understanding what food groups were healthy, how most of the ‘healthy food’ today is created artificially. It was in this period that I stumbled into the world of Paleo and started reading the thoughts on fitness and diet from some really amazing people like Timothy Ferriss, Mark’s Daily Apple, Fabulously Broke, Lean Grains, and The Great Fitness Experiment.

2012 – #GyaanKamDhandaZyaada

A year of massive changes. I had a really stressful job and things weren’t too great on the personal front either. The only thing that was holding up was my weight, which stubbornly wouldn’t let go!

While I was reading so much about Paleo and eating/living healthy, I wasn’t practicing any of it. Towards the end of the year, I read a comment from Kris Nair somewhere on the Web, which had the hashtag #GyaanKamDhandaZyaada – which literally translates to ‘talk less, do more’. I was so inspired!

That year, I learnt a crap load of HIT exercises, joined a gym, and went for a grand total of 6 days!! I was however more mindful of what I was eating and I could see that my mood and general outlook of life was improving.

2013 – Kickass

By the time 2013 arrived, I was neck deep in the transhumanism philosophy of life. I was tracking my life on so many parameters – weight, daily steps I took, overall mood, and sleep times – that it could get overwhelming sometimes. That said, because I was tracking these parameters, I had a pretty good indicator of what I should be doing to improve the quality of my health and life.

I started doing all the correct things and I was in the best shape of my life!

2014 – The change

I moved countries in 2014 and am now in London. I can see that I have been rapidly putting on weight in these last few months and that is only because I have been trying out all the new food and ales that London is so famous for! In the 4 months that it took me to find a job, I was the perfect couch potato.

Now that I have a stable job and a steady income, I can focus my efforts on becoming healthy once again. Here is the difference in weight for the same intervening period last year:

I feel like life has finally come full circle. I am once again on my journey to become healthy – only this time, I am better informed and have experience on my side!