The day I realised I was carrying my son’s weight!

It was an ordinary Sunday morning in Newtown, Kolkata. Divit, my elder son, was five. He climbed onto the bathroom scale the way five-year-olds do — like it was a toy — and the needle settled at 16 kilos.

I stood there for a second too long. Because I knew that number. It was my number. Sixteen kilos was exactly how much I was overweight, according to the doctor who’d diagnosed me with a metabolic disorder.

And then the thought landed, and it didn’t leave for years.

I was carrying my son. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Around my waist, on my joints, into every flight of stairs I avoided.

Imagine being handed your child and told: hold him. All day. Every day. Forever. You’d protest — your back, your knees, you couldn’t possibly. And yet that’s precisely what I was doing to myself, silently, without ever putting him down.

That Sunday morning broke something open. Not guilt, exactly. Clarity.

Garbage in, garbage out

I build software for a living. There’s an old line in our trade: garbage in, garbage out. Feed a system bad inputs and you get bad outputs — no matter how clever the machine.

For years, that was my body. Chennai college days, then startup nights — I stuffed whatever, whenever, from wherever, into my mouth with zero thought about how it would metabolise. High sugar, processed everything, convenience over care. I took the two-wheeler for distances I could have walked in five minutes. I was a sophisticated machine running on garbage, and then acting surprised when the mood, the joint pain, the gout flares showed up.

The thing is — I knew all this. I could have given you a lecture on nutrition. Knowing was never the gap. The gap was doing. As I keep saying in the book, the challenge is rarely identifying what needs to change. It’s implementing it.

Why “eat less, move more” never worked

Here’s the honest part. For years I assumed I just lacked willpower. If I wanted it more, I’d change. More discipline, more 5 a.m. resolve.

But willpower was never the real problem — design was. In any given moment, the bad choice simply had a better user experience. The sugar was right there, delivering comfort in zero seconds at zero effort. The walk asked for shoes, sweat, and a payoff weeks away. The lift was beside me; the stairs were a decision.

That’s the cruel maths of it. In the exact moment of choosing, the junk food was just easier and better than the salad. So of course it kept winning. I wasn’t weak. I was rational. The default was rigged against me, and then I called the result my body.

The unlock wasn’t to want it more. It was to flip the design — to make the healthy thing the lazy thing, and the harmful thing the inconvenient one. To move the effort to the front of the bad habit, and strip it out of the good one.

What actually moved the needle

I won’t pretend I found a hack. I found a handful of boring shifts that compounded. Small changes, big results — the most underrated equation there is.

I went back to my ancestors, not to a foreign diet plan. Every region has its own seasons, crops and climate. The diet that suits California may quietly wreck someone in Kolkata. Rather than importing the latest influencer protocol, I adapted what my grandparents ate — local, seasonal, time-tested — and layered modern technique on top. It worked far better than anything I’d bought off the internet.

I changed the rule from “never empty” to “80% full.” I was raised to eat every three or four hours and never let my stomach go empty. Much later I discovered the quiet power of mindful eating and fasting — daily, weekly, yearly. Eating until I was 80% full, and letting the gaps exist, gave me back a sense of control I’d lost somewhere in my twenties.

I redesigned my defaults so the right thing got easier. Took the stairs by removing the choice to take the lift. Walked the short distances instead of reaching for keys. None of this was heroic. It was just removing friction from the good behaviour and adding a little to the bad — one default at a time, until the better choice stopped asking for a decision at all.

I treated my body like the Ferrari it is. We wouldn’t pour cheap fuel into a high-end machine and then complain when it sputters. Yet we do it to ourselves daily, then blame the body for the bloating, the fatigue, the pain. The reframe was simple and it stuck: become mindful of what goes in, because we genuinely do become what we consume.

There’s a deeper idea under all of this, borrowed from James Clear’s Atomic Habits — that the most durable habits aren’t built on goals but on identity. I stopped trying to “lose weight” and started becoming a person who takes care of his body. The behaviours followed the identity, not the other way around. And once they did, they stopped costing willpower. What had felt like effort early on slowly turned into the effortless default — which, as I keep reminding myself, is the whole point of building a habit in the first place.

What the scale gave me back

I shed more than ten kilos. But the number on the scale was never really the point.

The point was this: I reached a stage where I no longer needed medication for a condition I’d been told would shadow me for the rest of my life. I got my energy back — enough to actually chase my kids, not just watch them. My mood steadied; the extreme highs and lows of a sugar-and-stress diet flattened out. I stopped looking for outside validation of how I looked, which, it turns out, frees up a startling amount of mental space.

And the weight I’d been carrying around my son’s exact size? I finally set it down.

I don’t write this as someone who arrived. I’m still on the journey — co-learning, co-hustling, still figuring out the next 80%. Some weeks are better than others. But I know now that taking care of yourself isn’t a selfish act stolen from the people who need you. It’s the opposite. A healthier, present version of me is the most useful thing I can offer my family.

If you want the actual tools I used — the trackers, the frameworks, the free alternatives — they’re over at the resources page, and the full chapter on the physical sphere lives in the book. You can read a bit more about why I started writing all this down if you’re curious.

But you don’t need any of that to start. You just need to do what I did one Sunday morning: notice the weight you’ve been carrying without ever agreeing to. Then ask whether you’d hand it to someone you love — and tell them to hold it forever.

You wouldn’t. So why are you?