Let me set the context first.
Background
Ever since I can remember, I have been a healthy child – I remember clocking 50 Kgs as a 10-year-old, jumping 10 Kgs every year – 90 Kgs by class 9th. This was not because of some condition or disease, rather pure laziness. I never took my body seriously. I remember gobbling an entire pack of Parle-G every morning with around half a litre milk. And this just breakfast. My portion sizes were too high and I didn’t go out to play as a child, so there was no way for the calories to burn.
I did have a stint of weight-loss, taking it up seriously in class 9th – we purchased a treadmill, I found this miracle crash diet – GM Diet. Story goes that in 1900s; GM factory workers were becoming very obese. Therefore, the company researched and came up with this diet – a 1-week weight loss diet for its workers. And it worked immediately for them. Now, as I came to know of it – decided to give it a shot, other than limiting my diet by removing all packaged foods, daily 500 calories burn on treadmill, supplemented by following GM diet once every month, it started to show the results. Within a few months, I dropped to 70 Kgs, started looking better and feeling better.
During JEE days though, I couldn’t sustain this; regressed heavily – stopped the dietary restrictions, gave up on the treadmill runs. Eventually I reached back to my peak and this time, in engineering, crossed the 120 Kgs mark. In my mind, I was always telling myself, that I am physically strong, weight is not the only criteria of a healthy body and things like this is my time to focus on learning, getting a good job, weight can be managed later.
I was a proper obese person by then. Food became an addiction. I was giving in to the temptation every single time and weight kept going up slowly but steadily.
The Start of Change
Fast-forward to 2023, I now have a great job, I have enough time in the evenings to spend on myself. Weight count now was at 127 Kgs. Decided to start going to the gym. I had heard of miraculous results of people after joining the gym. Sadly, I wasn’t a part of that elite group even after 2 months of joining. The root-cause, I had no idea what I was doing there. As a manager of mine once taught me, “What you cannot measure, you cannot improve”. I used to play around with some equipment and mostly running on the treadmill.
I was at my sisters place for Raksha Bandhan and there we took some pictures. When I saw them, I realized that I don’t look like a brother, more like a middle-aged father. Same was the case with the group photo of all joinees that year at my company. I was looking disproportionate to the crowd. I had a sad realization that I HAVE to take it seriously and commit to this.
As I was researching weight-loss methods, I came across a video by OkayMohit. He shared his journey of losing a significant amount of weight by eating only once a day – an OMAD diet as I later came to find out the name. The logic was simple – you eat limited calories if you restrict your food-intake to only once per day. This idea stuck with me. If I can just eat all that I want to in the morning and make sure that am burning those calories through the day, I can lose a lot of weight. There is a certain math here as well – 1 Kg is approximately 7,000 calories. Meaning that if you are able to create a deficit of 7,000 calories, you are going to lose 1 Kg. Now this is extremely oversimplified, but for a man looking at impossible task, it seems like simplification acts a motivation to start. Coming back, there is also the concept of BMR – Basal Metabolic Rate. BMR basically is the number of calories your body burns each day to keep all of its functions running – also called resting metabolism. The more active your lifestyle, higher the muscles, larger is your BMR. I decided to set targets on my fitness watch – 500 calories, 10,000 steps and 90 minutes of active time. A target I still follow today.
A friend of mine, also suggested me to start taking liquid L-Carnitine as a supplement. Essentially, consuming it daily ensures that fat is burnt and not muscles. Although my experience with it has been inconclusive. So, I was all set with the system!
A typical day for me went like this: gym in the morning – primarily cardio (big mistake) so that I can track the number of calories am burning. Breakfast (combined with lunch and dinner of course), walking in the office break-time, typically while reading a book, and walk a little in the evenings. The hunger cravings were suppressed drinking water. Yes, it’s a brutal way to lose weight, I believe that when the number to lose is so large, I wanted to make it quick – so as to not lose motivation in the middle. And I was able to see the results much faster than I had expected. Clocking 107 Kgs by Diwali (October 2023).
Tragedy Strikes
The night of Diwali, our kitchen caught fire. The whole space was burnt, with the smoke catching up the whole house. Thankfully, no major injuries to anyone. Now, we were living in a much smaller house, till our home was repaired and renovated. We got an induction stove to make basic food. Now my daily schedule also involved supervising the workers, getting the materials, etc. In this process and maybe just the smell of burnt charcoal in every corner, I became nauseous to food. I only hate a handful of chorafalli or papad daily – that’s it. Wasn’t able to hit the gym, so that guilt was also taking up to not eat anything. My mother tried cooking delicious meals or going to restaurants, but I wasn’t able to eat anymore than a few morsels, it was like, body had started rejecting food.
I also noticed a very weird behavior with my body – I started to get painful headaches after climbing up a floor, quickly getting up and even increasing my speed slightly. My mother initially believed it must be something to do with the heat in body and I ignored it too. Until one day, I went out to buy some food for home, and on the way, on the signal, I had a blackout – loss of strength to even reach home. Gathered strength somehow, covered myself from the sun and made it back. I realized that this is something I cannot ignore. Our family doctor recommended a doctor – who asked me to get some blood tests done. As I came back to her with those – she gasped with surprise and told me that I have to be admitted the same day. The results were quite literally off the charts.
I was admitted for 3 days – where I was given IV drip for Iron and B12 and some medicines. Doctor explained me, not eating is not an option for the body. When liver is not able to derive nutrition from food, it starts getting it from the blood – and since I wasn’t replenishing it, the quality of blood had messed up. She said it was urgent situation – Hemoglobin below 2 is extremely critical and would’ve been a matter of life and death. She then asked me to relax this diet, forcibly eat everything – specifically I was asked to eat Mutton and Peanuts. Since Hemoglobin was a priority. I took that advice to the heart. I love eating peanut butter, chikki, shengdana laadu. A healthy source of essential fats and protein. The weight at this point had already reached 82 Kgs. Albeit, I was completely out of shape and nutrition.
I had lost significant amount of muscle till here. Yes, the inches were off me, I could finally shop from the mall and not one of those ‘Plus-Sized’ stores. Life was better, but I still had to fix the mess I had made while scaling to this journey.
The Correction Arc
From a team outing at office, I really found an inkling to learn swimming – it felt like I was missing out on an essential skill. So, I joined the local government swimming pool and made it a point to be regular there. Swimming every morning post-gym. I was still going with one meal a day, but now the meal was balanced. Sometimes it was an avocado and peanut-butter sandwich others it was paneer sabzi or mutton rassa bhaakri. The goal was to eat healthy, but not lose out on the progress made in weight-loss. Every free-time, I engaged in some physical activity. I found this therapeutic and enjoyable. It’s crazy how disciplined we can be if we are able to set sights on the results and can see daily progress.
Eventually, I reached weight of 72 Kgs, even for a while going as low as 69 Kgs (nice :p. It was a big deal for me, to come all this way. It took over a year, but it did happen. A set-goal and small strides towards indeed go a long long way.
Oh, and I have to share this picture of me in the next year’s Raksha Bandhan :p
As it Stands
Coming to present, my weight now hovers around 80 Kg, I have relaxed myself a little, focusing on strength-training and overall agility now. It is one journey to get the weight down, and whole another to keep it down. Someday, I’ll write about that journey as well.
I won’t say that you follow what I did, if anything, I would suggest you to not be so greedy, instead follow a slower but more permanent way – reducing food portions, exercising and building muscle daily. I went through this simply because it would’ve taken too long to see the results and also the fact that, I’d rather eat what I want in less quantity, than eat a dietician's meal as much as I’d like. Moral is – don’t be like me :)
Final Words
The core of weight-loss is just maintaining a calorie deficit, while giving body all the essential nutrients. Everything else, is a fad. It is as much a mental challenge as it is physical – controlling the urge to break, to cheat the diet slightly is real, but it is tougher to come back. If anyone is motivated to start this journey, I wish you all the best! As someone who has been in those shoes, I can promise you, the results are worth it!
Thanks for reading this super-long blog. I hope you learnt something here.
