Why I Even Started This Page

Why did I even start posting this stuff on Instagram?

The honest answer is simple: in the hope that I could inspire even a few people to get started and stay disciplined. My own journey has been eye-opening — if I can do it, anyone can. That's the whole pitch.

But then the voices in my head started.

The five voices

Voice one: nobody I know actually does anything about it. I've had close friends and relatives tell me they're impressed, that seeing my posts motivates them — but I can count on one hand the people who've actually tried. One friend put it more honestly than most: "I see your posts everyday and get so motivated, but then I just shut my phone and get back to my life." I've had the same conversations with family and friends, busting the same myths about strength training, over and over, seemingly to no effect. And I thought — if I can't even influence the people closest to me, what kind of influence could I possibly have on strangers on the internet?

Voice two: getting in front of a camera and talking to it like it's a person. People who know me well know I find it hard enough to talk to actual human beings, let alone an inanimate object ;-). Some of the Gen Z crowd have a natural gift for this. That's about as far from my personality as it gets. And with all of 30 followers at the time, who would I even be talking to? Just my phone.

Voice three: I'm not qualified. I'm neither a certified trainer nor a nutritionist. I study the subject a lot, I even signed up for an ACE certification and went halfway through before life happened — real time constraints, not excuses. Can't skip my own workouts, can't skip the day job that pays for everything, so something had to give. I came away with solid foundational knowledge, and maybe I'll finish it one day if that's where the path takes me. But there are well-known, genuinely qualified health influencers already doing this — in India and globally. Someone like Luke Coutinho, for instance. With that much credible information already out there, what impact could a nobody like me possibly make?

Voice four: the fear of another failed cycle. What's the point of putting myself out there if this turns into one more version of what I'd done before — lose weight, lose focus, back to square one?

Voice five: I don't have a dramatic before-and-after. I've never been massively overweight. The highest I've ever weighed is about 74 kgs. No jaw-dropping transformation photo to make eyes pop on the internet. Which, looking back, might be exactly the point — but I didn't see that yet.

What finally cut through all five voices wasn't a plan. It was strangers.

The people who see you every day rarely tell you you're making progress — maybe because the change happens too slowly for them to notice. But a few moments of validation from complete strangers have stayed with me. There was the driver — a friend's — who came to pick me up at the airport after not seeing me for a while and said, "Sir, acha body banaya aapne." There was the security guard at airport screening who, mid-frisk, suddenly asked, "Sir, kabse kar rahe ho." For a second I froze — I genuinely thought he'd caught something on me I wasn't supposed to have ;-) — so I did a double take, and he repeated it: "Sir, gym kabse kar rahe ho?" I answered, with a smile I couldn't hide, "Sir, paanch saal se." He nodded: "Paanch saal continuous? Badhiya hain." I couldn't wipe that smile off my face for the rest of the flight.

Or the time I was walking Storm in the community and a couple of 12-year-olds asked if they could pet the dog. One boy crouched down with Storm; the other kept glancing at me and telling his friend, "Look at uncle. He's so jacked!" I was almost more shocked that a 12-year-old had "jacked" in his vocabulary than by the compliment itself — but it landed anyway. These small, random moments with strangers are what told me I was on the right path, long before any algorithm did.

So I finally decided to stop procrastinating and give it a shot. Health and fitness is something I'm genuinely passionate about, and once I saw the changes in my own body, I started noticing something everywhere I went: I began "checking people out" — and I'm straight, but more with men than women ;-). See a fit, middle-aged guy and there's an instant respect, because I know exactly what that discipline costs. See a potbelly and my first instinct is: can I just talk to you for ten minutes?

The uncomfortable part

In India, you'll see far more potbellied middle-aged men than fit ones. There's an internet term people throw around for this build — "skinny fat." Thin limbs, not much fat on the arms, but a heavy gut. It turns out that's not just an internet joke. An Indian doctor, C.S. Yajnik, gave it an actual medical name twenty years ago — the "thin-fat Indian" phenotype — after a photograph comparing an Indian and a European researcher at the exact same BMI showed the Indian carrying more than double the body fat. That belly fat isn't cosmetic. It's mostly visceral fat, the type sitting around your organs, and it's the most dangerous kind there is — which is why the waist-circumference cutoff for "at risk" in an Indian man is just 90 cm, lower than almost anywhere else in the world. You can be "normal weight" on a scale and still be carrying it. India already has roughly 101 million people living with diabetes and another 136 million heading that way — second only to China. That's not a scare number I picked to sound dramatic. That's just where we are. And a good chunk of that damage gets done sitting at a desk, not standing at a buffet — the years of back-to-back meetings, skipped walks, and decks due by 6pm add up quietly. That's a story for another post, but the short version is: the job never once asked how your body was doing.

I think it's high time we changed that dynamic — men who won't take their shirt off at a pool because they're ashamed of a body they never learned to take care of. And here's the part that should have talked me out of every one of those five voices from the start: it is never too late to start. Men well past 40 who pick up strength training for the first time cut their risk of dying from any cause by 10 to 20 percent, according to research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Not "some day." Now.

So why did I even start posting this stuff on Instagram? Because I lived it too — years of grind and politics, working yourself up to become the "provider" you were supposed to be — and it came at a cost the day I stopped paying attention to my body. I paid that cost more than once before I finally woke up. This page exists so you can see what it looks like for an ordinary guy who went through everything you're going through right now, and still found a way to take care of his body without shrugging off his responsibilities.

Find the balance — because none of the money in the world is worth much from a hospital bed in your retirement years.

Will it make a difference? Maybe someone like Luke Coutinho, with three-quarters of a million followers, moves the dial by 5%. If people like me — and you — start posting and reach a smaller, more real audience, maybe we move it by 0.1% each. Either way, each of us does our part in nudging the country toward a healthier version of itself. Will it work? Only time will tell. But I promise you this — if it fails, it won't be because of lack of effort.

Follow the journey: @that_midlife_hustle