The first person who called me “Aye Motu” is probably dead.
I cannot remember his face. I cannot remember where I was standing. I cannot remember whether he meant it as a joke, an observation, or an insult. Yet, nearly three decades later, I remember the word itself with remarkable clarity.
That is the strange thing about childhood. We forget entire years but remember individual wounds.
Somewhere, buried beneath layers of memory, there is a version of me who was not overweight. A skinny Malayalee boy growing up in Gujarat. A child who climbed stairs without thinking about his knees, ran without calculating the distance, and never wondered whether a chair would comfortably accommodate him.
Then life intervened.
Bell’s palsy entered the story. Recovery followed. Steroids became part of the treatment. The doctors were trying to save one thing without realising they were quietly changing another.
Nobody tells a child that medicine can alter how the world sees him.
The paralysis eventually faded. The weight did not.
Children are surprisingly adaptable. They accept reality long before adults do. I accepted the body I had been given. What I struggled to accept was the reaction it produced.
Every family gathering seemed to include a commentary panel.
“He has become healthy.”
“Too much rice.”
“Look at his cheeks.”
“He should exercise.”
“Must be eating all day.”
The remarkable thing about Indian families is that they can discuss your body as if you are not present, even while you are sitting directly in front of them.
Nobody was trying to be cruel.
That is what made it worse.
Cruelty can be resisted.
Concern often slips past our defences.
The observations accumulated slowly. One remark from an uncle. A joke from a cousin. A comment from a neighbour. A nickname from a classmate.
Eventually, they fused into an identity.
I became the fat kid.
Not the boy who loved reading.
Not the boy fascinated by human behaviour.
Not the future psychotherapist.
Not the future author.
Not the future father.
The fat kid.
Years later, while studying psychology, I would learn that human beings often internalise labels long before they develop the intellectual capacity to challenge them. Children do not possess sophisticated frameworks for understanding social bias. They simply assume that repeated messages must contain truth.
If enough people tell a child that his body is a problem, he eventually stops questioning them and starts questioning himself.
The tragedy is that obesity is one of the few conditions where society routinely confuses observation with understanding.
People see weight.
They assume they understand the person carrying it.
Nobody looks at the medication history.
Nobody looks at genetics.
Nobody looks at emotional regulation.
Nobody looks at trauma.
Nobody looks at culture.
Nobody looks at the thousands of invisible negotiations happening between appetite, stress, sleep, hormones, habit, and self-worth.
They see the outcome and mistake it for the explanation.
As I grew older, I discovered that weight occupies a peculiar place in modern society. We claim to be compassionate, yet obesity remains one of the last socially acceptable targets for ridicule. We would never mock someone’s depression at a wedding. We would never joke about someone’s anxiety during a family gathering. Yet making comments about another person’s body continues to pass as normal conversation.
Perhaps it is because weight feels visible.
Perhaps it is because visibility creates the illusion of simplicity.
Or perhaps it is because many people secretly believe that suffering is easier to justify when it appears self-inflicted.
Whatever the reason, being overweight teaches you something fascinating about human nature.
You begin noticing how differently people treat bodies.
You notice who receives attention.
Who receives patience.
Who receives admiration.
Who receives forgiveness.
Who is considered disciplined.
Who is considered desirable.
Who is considered successful.
The body becomes a passport, and not everyone receives the same visa.
For many years, I assumed that losing weight would solve all of this.
I was hardly alone.
Entire industries are built on that assumption.
Buy this programme.
Follow this diet.
Try this supplement.
Track these calories.
Count these steps.
Transform your body and transform your life.
The promise is seductive because it contains a grain of truth.
Bodies matter.
Health matters.
Longevity matters.
The problem is that transformation stories rarely mention the hidden clause in the contract.
Changing your body does not automatically change your relationship with yourself.
That discovery took me decades.
India, meanwhile, was changing around me.
The country of my childhood was disappearing. The India of scarcity was becoming the India of abundance. Cable television brought global beauty standards into living rooms. The internet amplified them. Social media industrialised them.
The body was no longer merely a body.
It became a project.
A brand.
A statement.
A metric.
Somewhere along the way, fitness stopped being about health and became increasingly entangled with identity.
The six-pack became a personality.
The gym became a religion.
Protein powder became a sacrament.
The weighing scale became a daily referendum on self-worth.
The irony, of course, is that while society became more obsessed with thinness, it also became more conducive to obesity.
We moved less.
Worked longer.
Slept worse.
Experienced more stress.
Consumed more processed food.
Spent more time sitting than any generation before us.
The same civilisation that sold us ideal bodies also quietly engineered lifestyles that made them harder to achieve.
As a psychotherapist, I have often wondered whether modern life has become a machine that manufactures appetites faster than it manufactures meaning.
We are encouraged to want constantly.
A better phone.
A better salary.
A better body.
A better relationship.
A better version of ourselves.
The economy depends upon dissatisfaction.
Contentment is terrible for business.
Perhaps that is why hunger fascinates me.
Not merely hunger for food.
Hunger itself.
The desire for more.
The restless force that keeps human beings moving.
The need to improve.
To achieve.
To become.
To matter.
By the time I met Aathira, I had already spent years negotiating with my body. Some days we had a ceasefire. Other days we resumed hostilities.
What I did not expect was to meet someone who seemed largely uninterested in the war.
Aathira never treated my weight as a referendum on my worth. Looking back, that may have been one of the most radical acts of love I have ever experienced.
People often assume that love changes us because it motivates transformation.
I suspect the opposite is closer to the truth.
The healthiest love often emerges when somebody sees who you are before the transformation occurs.
Long before photographs.
Long before applause.
Long before validation arrives.
They see the person.
Not the project.
And perhaps that is why her presence altered something fundamental inside me.
Not immediately.
Not dramatically.
But permanently.
For years, I had been trying to earn acceptance.
Aathira quietly demonstrated acceptance.
There is a difference.
One exhausts you.
The other heals you.
Years later, when our son Siddhansh was born, another shift occurred.
Fatherhood rearranges your relationship with time.
Before becoming a father, I measured life largely through ambition. After becoming a father, I began measuring life through presence.
The question was no longer, “What do I want to achieve?”
The question became, “How long do I get to stay?”
That distinction changed everything.
Because for the first time, my weight stopped being about appearance.
It stopped being about attractiveness.
It stopped being about social acceptance.
It became about something far more frightening.
Mortality.
I remember looking at my son one evening and experiencing a thought so simple that it felt devastating.
I want to be around.
Not successful.
Not admired.
Not influential.
Around.
To watch.
To listen.
To witness.
To remain present for chapters of his life that had not yet been written.
It was perhaps the first genuinely mature reason I had ever found to care for my body.
And it would eventually change the course of my life.
The first time.
And then, much later, all over again.
For most of my life, I believed that weight loss would feel like liberation.
The advertisements promised it. The magazine covers suggested it. The transformation stories practically guaranteed it. Lose the weight, and life would finally begin. Doors would open. Confidence would appear. Happiness would arrive carrying flowers.
What nobody tells you is that transformation has an awkward aftermath.
The first time I seriously committed to changing my body, I weighed approximately 141 kilograms. Even today, that number feels like it belongs to someone else. I remember seeing it and experiencing the peculiar combination of denial and recognition that accompanies uncomfortable truths. Part of me wanted to argue with the scale. Another part knew it had stopped lying long ago.
The journey that followed was neither glamorous nor inspirational while it was happening. Most meaningful change rarely is. It consisted of thousands of decisions that nobody applauds. Meals chosen differently. Walks taken when excuses seemed more appealing. Small victories that looked insignificant on any given day but became extraordinary when accumulated over months and years.
Eventually, I reached approximately 80 kilograms.
More than sixty kilograms disappeared.
The world noticed.
The world always notices.
People who had ignored my existence suddenly became enthusiastic observers. Strangers offered compliments. Friends expressed admiration. Relatives who had spent years discussing my body now congratulated me for changing it.
I wish I could say that I found the experience entirely satisfying.
I didn’t.
Because alongside the compliments arrived a question I could not shake.
If people treat you differently after you lose weight, what exactly are they rewarding?
Your discipline?
Your health?
Or your conformity?
The question haunted me because I realised that while my body had changed dramatically, a large part of my internal world had not. The boy who had been called mota still existed. He had simply become harder to see.
That is one of the least discussed aspects of significant weight loss.
The body often transforms faster than identity.
The mirror updates before the mind does.
You can lose sixty kilograms and still carry every insult.
You can fit into smaller clothes and still inhabit old insecurities.
You can become healthier without becoming kinder to yourself.
“Nobody warns you that losing sixty kilograms is easier than losing the identity attached to them.”
For a while, however, life felt lighter.
Not merely physically.
Professionally.
Personally.
Emotionally.
My career expanded. The work I loved began reaching larger audiences. Clients increased. Speaking engagements multiplied. Books were written. Opportunities emerged. Recognition arrived in forms I had once imagined but never fully expected.
From the outside, it appeared as though life was unfolding exactly as planned.
From the inside, something more complicated was happening.
Success creates its own metabolism.
The more responsibilities you accumulate, the more energy they consume. The more visible you become, the less private your struggles feel. The more people depend upon you, the easier it becomes to neglect yourself in service of everyone else.
Travel increased.
Schedules became unpredictable.
Stress became normal.
Recovery became optional.
Sleep became negotiable.
And slowly, almost politely, the weight returned.
Not dramatically.
Not overnight.
A few kilograms.
Then a few more.
Then enough that old clothes stopped fitting comfortably.
Then enough that old fears started introducing themselves again.
The experience was humbling in a way that only genuine setbacks can be.
When you lose weight once, people call you disciplined.
When you regain it, you begin questioning whether you ever were.
That is the lie shame tells.
Shame rarely attacks your actions.
It attacks your identity.
It whispers that temporary failure reveals permanent truth.
As both a therapist and a human being, I have learned to distrust those whispers.
Yet even with all my training, all my experience, all my understanding of human psychology, I was not immune to them.
Knowledge does not eliminate struggle.
It merely helps you understand it.
Around this time, I began noticing something fascinating in conversations around obesity. For decades, society had largely framed excess weight as a moral issue. People were praised for discipline and criticised for perceived lack of it. Obesity was often discussed as though it were primarily a character flaw wearing a larger shirt.
Then science complicated the narrative.
Researchers began uncovering deeper connections between appetite, hormones, metabolism, genetics, sleep, stress, inflammation, gut health, and behaviour. The more we learned, the harder it became to maintain simplistic explanations.
Human beings, it turned out, were considerably more complicated than calorie calculators.
Then a new generation of medications entered public consciousness.
Suddenly, dinner-table conversations sounded different.
People were talking about Ozempic.
Mounjaro.
GLP-1 agonists.
Words that had once belonged exclusively to endocrinologists started appearing on social media, in newspapers, and in everyday conversation.
Like most cultural phenomena, the reactions were immediate and predictable.
Some people viewed these medications as miracles.
Others viewed them as shortcuts.
Some saw liberation.
Others saw cheating.
Very few seemed interested in complexity.
And complexity, in my experience, is usually where the truth lives.
The discussion fascinated me, partly because I had spent a lifetime thinking about appetite.
Not merely appetite for food.
Appetite itself.
The strange engine that drives so much human behaviour.
As therapists, we are trained to look beneath actions and search for underlying needs. A person may think they are seeking food when they are actually seeking comfort. They may think they are pursuing success when they are really seeking validation. They may think they are chasing wealth when they are actually chasing security.
The object changes.
The hunger remains.
Perhaps that is why I found myself less interested in the medications themselves and more interested in the questions they seemed to provoke.
What exactly is appetite?
Where does it begin?
Where does it end?
How much of human behaviour is shaped by desire?
And if science becomes increasingly effective at regulating desire, how might that change us?
I don’t ask these questions because I fear progress.
Quite the opposite.
The history of medicine is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Countless lives have been improved, extended, and saved because someone somewhere asked a difficult scientific question.
But every meaningful advancement eventually forces us to ask philosophical questions as well.
The internet changed communication.
Artificial intelligence is changing cognition.
Modern medicine is increasingly changing behaviour.
And behaviour sits remarkably close to identity.
The older I get, the less interested I become in extremes. Life has shown me that most meaningful truths live somewhere between certainty and confusion. Obesity is neither entirely biological nor entirely behavioural. Discipline matters. Biology matters. Environment matters. Psychology matters.
Human beings are ecosystems, not equations.
Perhaps that is why the current chapter of my life feels different from previous ones.
This time, the journey back toward health has been less emotional and more scientific. Less punishment and more curiosity. Less war and more partnership.
For years, I approached my body as though it were an enemy that needed defeating.
Today, I see it differently.
My body survived Bell’s palsy.
My body survived steroids.
My body survived obesity.
My body carried me through fatherhood.
Through entrepreneurship.
Through professional success.
Through failures.
Through reinventions.
Through every version of myself.
And for the first time in many years, I am beginning to understand that health may have less to do with control than I once believed.
It may have more to do with stewardship.
That shift sounds subtle.
It is not.
Because once you stop trying to conquer your body, you can finally start listening to it.
And sometimes, if you listen carefully enough, you begin hearing questions that have very little to do with food.
Questions have a peculiar habit of changing as we age.
At twenty, I thought the important questions were about achievement. What career would I build? How much money would I earn? Would I become successful? Would I matter?
At thirty, the questions shifted. Marriage, fatherhood, responsibility, stability, legacy.
Nearing forty, I find myself asking something entirely different.
What is it, exactly, that keeps human beings moving?
Not physically.
Existentially.
What is the force beneath ambition?
What sits beneath attraction?
What powers curiosity?
What drives someone to build a company, write a book, raise a child, climb a mountain, start a revolution, fall in love, pursue God, or spend years chasing a dream that offers no guarantee of fulfilment?
The answer, I suspect, is desire.
Not desire in the narrow sense that popular culture uses the word.
Not merely sexual desire.
Not merely appetite.
But desire itself.
The ancient, restless force that persuades human beings to reach beyond their current circumstances.
For most of history, philosophers, religious leaders, psychologists, economists, and poets have wrestled with the same paradox.
Desire creates suffering.
Desire also creates civilisation.
Without desire, there would be no heartbreak.
Without desire, there would also be no love.
Without desire, there would be no greed.
Without desire, there would also be no ambition.
Without desire, there would be no addiction.
Without desire, there would also be no art.
The same fire that burns us often illuminates our path.
That paradox becomes increasingly interesting when viewed through the lens of modern medicine.
For centuries, humanity fought disease by targeting infections, injuries, and physiological dysfunction. Today, we are entering an era where medicine is becoming increasingly capable of influencing behaviour itself.
That distinction matters.
A treatment that lowers blood pressure affects the body.
A treatment that changes appetite touches something much closer to identity.
Because appetite is not merely biological.
It is autobiographical.
Every appetite tells a story.
The appetite for food.
The appetite for recognition.
The appetite for certainty.
The appetite for intimacy.
The appetite for achievement.
The appetite for belonging.
The older I become, the more convinced I am that most human struggles involve some version of wanting.
We are creatures of longing.
We spend our lives moving between desires fulfilled and desires deferred.
The child wants independence.
The teenager wants acceptance.
The young adult wants success.
The parent wants security.
The ageing adult wants time.
The object changes.
The longing remains.
As a therapist, I have spent thousands of hours listening to people describe their problems. Yet beneath the surface details, I often encounter remarkably similar themes.
People want to feel seen.
People want to feel safe.
People want to feel loved.
People want to feel significant.
People want to believe their lives matter.
Everything else is often a variation of those themes.
Which is why I find it fascinating that modern conversations about weight frequently become conversations about morality.
One group frames obesity as a failure of discipline.
Another frames it entirely as biology.
One side worships willpower.
The other side dismisses it.
Neither perspective fully captures reality.
Human beings are rarely explained by single causes.
A man can be overweight because of genetics, medication, stress, trauma, environment, sleep deprivation, emotional regulation challenges, and lifestyle habits simultaneously.
Reality rarely respects ideological boundaries.
The same applies to health itself.
Health is not merely the absence of disease.
Health is the presence of capacity.
The capacity to play with your child.
The capacity to walk without pain.
The capacity to pursue meaningful work.
The capacity to remain present for the people who depend upon you.
The capacity to participate fully in your own life.
That understanding transformed my relationship with weight more profoundly than any diet ever could.
For years, I had approached health from a place of criticism.
I wanted my body to become smaller.
Today, I want my life to become larger.
The distinction is subtle.
The consequences are enormous.
One is driven by shame.
The other is driven by possibility.
“The opposite of hunger is not fullness. The opposite of hunger is peace.”
Perhaps that is the insight I wish someone had offered me when I was younger.
Not advice.
Not instructions.
Not another comment about my appearance.
Simply the reminder that bodies are companions, not projects.
We spend so much of our lives evaluating them that we forget to appreciate them.
My body carried me through Bell’s palsy.
My body carried me through steroid treatments.
My body carried me through obesity.
My body carried me through love.
Through fatherhood.
Through entrepreneurship.
Through failures.
Through reinventions.
Through every chapter that eventually became my story.
And yet, for years, I treated it as though it were the enemy.
How many of us do the same?
How many people spend decades trying to earn peace from a body that has been trying to protect them all along?
Perhaps that is why ageing has felt unexpectedly liberating.
Youth often asks, “How do I become impressive?”
Age increasingly asks, “What deserves my attention?”
The questions are different.
The answers are different too.
At twenty, I wanted admiration.
At forty, I want energy.
At twenty, I wanted achievement.
At forty, I want presence.
At twenty, I wanted recognition.
At forty, I want enough health to watch my son become whoever he chooses to become.
There is wisdom hidden inside that transition.
Not because ambition disappears.
It doesn’t.
But because ambition eventually encounters mortality.
And mortality is a remarkably effective teacher.
One day you realise that the most important thing in your calendar is not the next meeting.
It is the next decade.
You stop asking how to optimise your day and start asking how to extend your life.
You stop worrying about looking young and start worrying about staying well.
You stop treating health as a cosmetic pursuit and begin recognising it as a relationship.
Perhaps that is where all of this ultimately leads.
Not to a debate about obesity.
Not to a debate about medication.
Not even to a debate about desire.
But to a deeper question.
How do we live well inside the bodies we have been given?
Not perfectly.
Not endlessly.
Not immortally.
Simply well.
Well enough to love.
Well enough to work.
Well enough to laugh.
Well enough to forgive.
Well enough to remain present for the moments that matter.
Because despite all our technological progress, despite our algorithms, our medications, our diagnostics, and our increasingly sophisticated understanding of human physiology, the fundamental challenge remains surprisingly unchanged.
We are still trying to learn how to be human.
We are still trying to understand what is worth wanting.
We are still trying to distinguish between appetites that nourish us and appetites that consume us.
And we are still trying to make peace with the fact that every meaningful life will contain both hunger and fulfilment.
Today, I am lighter than I have been in years.
My blood markers are better.
My energy is better.
My relationship with my body is healthier.
Yet the most significant change has nothing to do with kilograms.
The most significant change is that I no longer believe my worth is hiding beneath a number.
Not 141.
Not 100.
Not 80.
Not any number at all.
The boy who was called “Jadiyo” or “Aye Motu” spent years believing that happiness existed on the other side of weight loss.
The man writing this has learned something different.
Happiness was never waiting at a destination.
It was waiting inside a relationship.
A relationship with health.
A relationship with identity.
A relationship with self-respect.
A relationship with the body that carried me through every version of myself.
And perhaps that is the real question.
Not whether we can become thinner.
Not whether we can regulate appetite.
Not whether science will continue changing the way we think about health.
Those things will happen regardless.
The more important question is whether we can learn to pursue health without declaring war on ourselves.
Because somewhere between discipline and self-compassion, between desire and acceptance, between hunger and peace, lies the entire story of being human.
And that story, unlike any number on a weighing scale, is always worth carrying.
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About the Author
Dr. Sheetal Nair (DSN) is a Psychotherapist, Executive Coach, TEDx Speaker, author, and columnist. He writes about psychology, identity, relationships, leadership, and the often-unspoken questions that shape modern life. A husband, father, entrepreneur, and lifelong student of human behaviour, he believes that the most important conversations are rarely about what people do – they are about what people long for. His work explores the intersection of mental well-being, meaning, ambition, and the pursuit of a life lived consciously.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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