Garbage in, garbage out: food, energy, and output

In Chennai, at sixteen and finally free, I ate like a machine that didn’t read its own manual. Whatever was nearby, whenever I felt like it, from wherever — into the mouth it went. I never once asked what would happen to it after. I was too busy living.

There’s a line we used in software, back when I was hunched over a CRT monitor twelve hours a day: garbage in, garbage out. Feed a program junk data and it doesn’t matter how elegant your code is — the output is junk. I’d say it to my team without blinking. It took me embarrassingly long to notice I was running the exact same bug in my own body.

The garbage was going in. The garbage was coming out — as weight, as mood swings, as a tiredness I’d started to mistake for my personality.

The day my son weighed my problem

For years I told myself I was just “busy,” “stressed,” “built this way.” Then one ordinary Sunday I weighed my son Divit. He was five. The scale said 16 kilos.

Sixteen kilos was exactly how much I was overweight.

It landed like a punch. I was carrying a whole second child on my frame — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — and I’d somehow narrated that into normal. My mind wanted to do great things. My body had quietly filed a complaint. That’s the cruellest part of garbage-in: you don’t get a crash screen. You get a slow, invisible degradation you learn to call “just how I am now.”

Your body is always sending messages. The problem isn’t that it goes quiet — it’s that we get very good at not reading the logs.

Your body is a Ferrari you’re feeding from a bin

Here’s a thing I’ve come to believe, fully: your body is closer to a high-end Ferrari than to a dustbin. It is the single most sophisticated machine you will ever be handed, shaped over millions of years of evolution, and you get exactly one, with no resale.

And yet we’d never pour street-side fuel into a Ferrari and then act surprised when it knocks, sputters, and stalls. With our bodies we do it daily — the sugar (which, studies suggest, lights up the brain harder than cocaine), the processed convenience, the second helping that isn’t hunger but a way to numb a hard feeling for ninety seconds. Then we complain about the bloating, the joint pain, the 3 p.m. fog, as if the body had betrayed us.

It didn’t. It just ran the input we gave it. Garbage in, garbage out — no exceptions, no appeals.

Why “eat less, move more” never stuck

The advice is correct and almost useless, because it’s a willpower instruction wearing a science coat. I knew what to eat. I had a metabolic disorder, gout flares that once left me bedridden and dependent on my wife, a doctor telling me I’d be on medication for life. Information was never my gap. Execution was. Knowing has never once equalled doing.

So I stopped trying to want it more and started changing the inputs and the defaults — which is the same effort-to-effortless spine I write about in everything. Make the good thing the lazy thing; make the garbage take work.

Three shifts actually moved the needle for me:

1. What worked for my ancestors works for me. I quietly retired the imported, Instagram-shiny diet plans built for other climates, other crops, other bodies. I ate closer to what people in my region had eaten for generations — then layered modern technique on top. My grandmother’s kitchen, debugged. It worked astonishingly well, because it was never fighting my biology in the first place.
2. Eat to 80%, then stop. I was raised to never let the stomach go empty — eat every three to four hours, fill it up. Later I found the opposite was the unlock: stop at roughly 80% full, and bring back fasting — daily, weekly, the occasional yearly reset. Less garbage in, by design, not by daily heroics.
3. Make convenience the enemy, not the friend. I’d been taking the two-wheeler for distances I could walk in five minutes. Convenience had crept into every corner of life and quietly made me sedentary. So I added friction back: parked the easy option further away, made the lazy default slightly more annoying than the healthy one.

None of this was a sprint of discipline. It was redesigning what was easy. The willpower was a bridge across the first hard stretch — used, then put down.

What came out the other side

I lost the sixteen kilos. The bigger thing: I passed my blood tests with flying colours and came off the medication I’d been told I’d need forever. I’d genuinely believed that was impossible.

But the kilos weren’t even the real output. When the inputs got cleaner, everything downstream got cleaner. My energy stopped crashing. My mood stopped swinging between extremes through the day. I stopped chasing outside validation for how I looked. My best breakthroughs on the hardest product problems started arriving on the far side of good food and real sleep — because, it turns out, you cannot out-think bad fuel.

That’s the whole point of garbage-in, garbage-out as a life rule, not just a coding one: your food isn’t a separate department from your work, your patience with your kids, your ambition. It’s the upstream data feeding all of it. Clean the input and the output cleans itself — across mood, energy, focus, presence.

We are, in the end, an accumulation of what we consume: the food, the water, the air, the scrolling, the company. We become what we put in. I spent years editing the output and wondering why nothing held. The leverage was never there. It was always one step upstream — at the input.

If you want the trackers and templates I actually use for this, they’re in the free resources. The longer version — the full physical sphere, the stories I couldn’t fit here — lives in the book, and a bit more about my road from that Chennai mess is on the about page.

Stop debugging the output. Go clean the input. The body, like the code, was only ever doing what it was told.