Back to Myself
On thyroid, a teacher’s class, and the long way home.
76 Kilograms
I pulled myself up from the floor, where I had been sitting in the hall.
I was sitting with Arjun, a two-year-old boy who was our neighbour.
He was filling in the colours in the colouring book, and I sat beside him helping.
I got up from the floor very uncomfortably.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror attached to my wardrobe in the bedroom before leaving for the mall.
I had always been slim all my life and weighed 50 kgs for as long as I can remember, even throughout my college years.
I was wearing a sleeveless, long satin top and jeans.
But I didn’t think I looked good in it.
When I was at my normal weight, I felt like I looked good in almost everything I wore.
It had been so long since I felt like myself when I looked in the mirror.
I lived every day in a body that did not feel like mine at all.
I had even started to avoid looking in the mirrors when all my life I was too fond of looking at myself.
I now dressed without any anticipation at all.
I felt heavy as I bent to take the comb from the bottom drawer of the wardrobe.
I weighed 76 kg, and it was getting very difficult for me to move from one place to another or change positions.
I had not even got my period for three months.
I had been diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and my body had simply stopped cooperating. I had written about this period before.
I mourned my old self every day.
The Class
I joined the DAMS institute after my internship to prepare for NEET PG.
It was a dermatology session that day.
I sat in the middle rows with my friend Vasudha, whom I met during my internship in Vijayawada. Vijayawada, where I had also learned something else about myself.
She was an FMGE graduate.
I made two more friends at the coaching centre.
Our dermatology teacher, Dr Suresh Mehta, in the middle of the session started talking about intermittent fasting.
It was the first time I had heard of it.
He started to tell us how he had lost all his excess weight and was even maintaining it now because of intermittent fasting.
I had completely given up the idea of losing weight because I did not know that it was possible, as I hated exercise and ate junk food whenever I felt extremely happy or sad.
I had already accepted permanent failure before that class.
But when Sir spoke that day, with the confidence of someone who had changed their life for the better, leaning on the podium, he inspired me so much that I came home and researched intermittent fasting.
I felt like it was the answer to the version of myself I wanted back.
It was free.
I finally felt that coming back to my original weight was possible.
Healthify
I stopped snacking in between meals and started to eat my first meal at 12 pm every day.
I downloaded the Healthify app from the Play Store for calorie counting.
I even avoided outings because then I would not be able to control my food.
I ate pani puri that day because I was craving it.
I went to Healthify and logged in the number of puris I had as soon as I came back home.
It was 7 pm now.
I decided to go to sleep and told myself that this was temporary and once I got back to my original weight, I would not be so restrictive and could eat whatever I wanted.
My body had been changing without asking me.
The weight came on quietly, steadily, regardless of what I did or did not eat.
So when I finally found something that seemed to work, the counting, the logging, the fixed eating window, it felt like I was the one making decisions again.
There was relief in that, and I did not question it.
My body had humiliated me without my permission.
This was permission I was giving myself.
The Wardrobe
Two years later, I was standing on my weighing scale at home, and the scale showed that I weighed 50 kg.
I was elated.
I threw away all my XL-sized clothes from all corners of the house.
I sat on my bed and opened the ONLY website on my phone.
I started looking through their collection of tops and began adding whatever I liked to the cart.
There was a red-coloured floral crop top that I especially loved.
I went through their jeans collection and ordered their smallest size, 25.
I went through their mid-length dress collection and added it to the cart.
It was the first time I had bought from the brand.
By the end, I saw that I had clothes sufficient for a few years to come.
In the past few years, I would look at other people wearing those clothes and be sad that I would never get to wear them again.
Ever since I was a child, I had always loved wearing fine clothes, and here I was, realising my dream.
This was also the first time I was ordering clothes with my own money after getting a job.
I did not even look at the total price of the cart.
I just clicked through to the payment.
I had waited so long for this. I would not let anything come in the way of my happiness that day.
My newly ordered clothes showcased my sense of style as nothing else could.
I tried out every item that I had ordered enthusiastically, touching the fabric and holding it tenderly.
Now
Today I don’t torture myself the way I did all those years ago.
I eat like someone who has stopped making food a project.
I eat things I enjoy occasionally without guilt.
I maintained my weight for a long time until 6 months ago, when I started my writing course and began working on building my writing website from scratch, which had been set in motion by a book that finally made me stop waiting.
I was in a celebratory mood for a long time.
So I gained 7 kgs without my realising.
The strange thing was that I could trace exactly when each kilogram arrived.
The biryani from the dinner when I launched my website.
The ice cream from the night I finished my first essay draft.
The meals I stopped tracking because I was too absorbed in learning something I had wanted to learn for years.
My body expanded in proportion to how good things were getting.
I found it difficult to be angry about that in the way I might have expected to be.
I put on The Chestnut Man on Netflix and put on my blue headphones.
I opened the Zomato app on my phone and placed an order for 500 grams of anjeer ice cream from Naturals.
The delivery person called me after exactly 25 minutes.
I sit in front of the tablet and arrange my cushion against the headboard of the bed and relax as I watch the murder mystery series while enjoying my ice cream.
I no longer calculate what moments like this will cost me tomorrow.
If this resonated, you might enjoy Letters From a Slow Writer, my occasional newsletter on autonomy, solitude and living deliberately.
Aishwarya is a government doctor in Hyderabad and a personal essayist. She writes about solitude, money, books, and the quiet work of building a life on her own terms.