I have a problem.
Actually, I have many problems. But this is about one specific one.
I go to extremes.
Let me explain.
In 2016, I injured my neck. I had two options. Surgery, or a complete lifestyle change built around strengthening my neck with isometric exercises, something I had to Google just to understand what it even meant. I chose the latter. The only time I would willingly opt for surgery is if I could perform it myself, and that is not happening!
But that choice came with a cost. I could no longer lift weights in the gym. And this mattered because I had finally built a habit that stuck. Even if it was midnight and it was a workout day, I would be there. No excuses.
I allowed myself a brief moment of self-pity. Brief. Then I did what I always do. I overcorrected.
If I could not control my health through exercise, I would do it through food. Food would become the lever.
That is where the problem really began.
Obsession.
Looking back, I realise I have spent almost a decade running through eighty percent of that cycle.
As with most things in my life, it started with content consumption. I read obsessively. I watched everything I could find. I tried the bad advice and the good advice. More importantly, I tested everything on myself.
The truth about general advice? Even when it is correct, it is incomplete. It does not account for you. Your biology. Your psychology. Your stress. Your constraints. By my own rough math, even the best advice is thirty to fifty percent unlikely to work for you simply because it ignores the individual.
There is another reason too. I will come back to that.
The patterns I remember clearly are these. Eating less. Eating organic whenever possible. Supplementation. And treating myself like a long-running experiment.
I gave up meat. I still believe it can be a perfectly valid lifestyle choice. I quit mainly because I did not trust the quality. I remember one earlier attempt where I stood in a mall food court, completely lost, not knowing what I could eat anymore.
Organic food became an obsession. This was not easy, especially because I travelled constantly for work. I remember staying at a hotel on Marine Drive in Mumbai, stepping out, and walking for over an hour trying to find an organic store or a restaurant with organic food. I failed.
I started scrutinising food. The so-called healthy options. The hidden sugar. The excess salt. The terrible fats disguised by clever marketing. Once you start seeing it, you cannot unsee it.
Then came supplements. Twenty pills a day. In hindsight, this was stupid. You cannot replace clean eating with capsules. It is also dangerous for your liver and kidneys. I have since corrected this, thankfully.
I read labels like contracts. People asked me how I controlled myself around food and snacking. The truth is simple. My life never revolved around food, so there was nothing to control. I also live by a rule that confuses people. If I want to do something, I do it. No judgment. I deal with the consequences.
I walked. I climbed nine floors multiple times a day. I stopped only when my doctor told me that my heart would be great, but my knees would not survive long enough to enjoy it.
This was the obsession.
And then, as always, I swung to the other extreme.
There are no excuses. But context matters.
My body was living in constant stress. Work. Relationships.
If you have been a startup founder, and you had few hundred folks to pay at the end of the month and clients weren’t cleaning your invoices on time, you know what kind of pressure that creates. Everything feeding into everything else. Or eats into everything else. And also when your heart is broken, for reasons that deserve their own piece, positivity and perspective and context can all become bumper stickers that actually irritate you.
I went back to the obvious extreme. Weight gain. Rapid. Visible. The kind that forces you to buy new clothes. Even today, I cringe when I look at my passport photo.
Eventually, I hit another breaking point. Enough.
This time, I found a new tool. Intermittent fasting. Daily twenty-three hour fasts. I did it for a long time. I still do it, though with modified mechanics after a very firm dressing down from a doctor.
Which brings me back to the question I keep asking myself.
Where is the balance?
Because this pattern shows up everywhere in my life. In how I build. In how I drive. In how I eat. Always extremes. Rarely equilibrium.
Now, let me return to the other reason general advice fails.
Variables.
Everything matters. Not one thing. Not food alone. Not exercise alone. It is a system, not a silo.
You can eat perfectly and live in perpetual stress, and most of the benefits evaporate. Stress is a variable. Sleep is a variable. Air quality. Social circles. How you work. How you move. Your genetic predispositions. The specific weaknesses your body demands extra attention for.
It is a system.
And for some reason, we humans are terrible at thinking in systems. We prefer silos. One fix. One hack. One magic answer.
This is strangely connected to how we think about entrepreneurship too. Systems versus silos. Inputs versus outcomes. Long-term feedback loops versus short-term wins.
I did not start writing this thinking about that connection.
It showed up anyway.
Just like my problem. Just like balance. Still a work in progress.