It was 11:30 PM on a Tuesday, and I was sitting on our kitchen floor in Noida, eating a bowl of cold khichdi and staring at my phone. My co-founder had just sent three frantic Slack messages about our database lagging, the monsoon heat outside was unbearable even with the AC on, and my fitness band had just buzzed to tell me my stress levels were high. Like I needed a sensor to tell me that.
The real problem started the next morning. I stepped on the scale, expecting some kind of reward for surviving the week. Instead, the number jumped up by almost two full kilograms. Two kilograms in twenty-four hours.
As a tech person, my entire life is built on data. If our server response time spikes, we fix a bug. If our active user count drops, we run a campaign. So when my weight spiked, my brain immediately treated it like a system outage. I started debugging my own body. Did I put too much ghee in the dal? Was it the extra roti my spouse convinced me to eat on Monday? I felt like an absolute failure before I even brushed my teeth.
For the next three weeks, I became obsessed. I weighed myself every single morning. If the number went down by a fraction, I was having a great day. I was nice to my team, I felt light, and I walked around with this smug sense of accomplishment. If the number went up, even by a tiny bit, I spent the afternoon in a terrible mood, convinced that my evening gym sessions were completely pointless.
It was exhausting. I was letting a cheap piece of glass and some sensors dictate my self-worth.
The turning point came on a Friday when I had to skip my usual morning run because of a sudden server migration. I spent twelve hours glued to my desk, drinking black coffee and barely moving. By the time I closed my laptop, I was sore, tired, and deeply annoyed. I stepped on the scale just to see the damage. It showed I had somehow lost a kilo.
That made absolutely no sense. I had done zero exercise and eaten a massive bowl of curd and aloo jeera for lunch.
That was when I realized how stupid I was being. My body is not a simple database where inputs and outputs balance out perfectly every single hour. Water weight, salt, stress, sleep, and even the weather can make that little number bounce around like crazy. A single day's reading is just a random snapshot. It does not actually tell me if I am getting healthier or stronger.
I ended up reading a really interesting breakdown of the actual research behind this, which you can find at https://url.shrynshjn.com/x22cDzm, and it helped me understand why tracking trends over weeks is so much better than agonizing over daily fluctuations. It turns out that focusing on the long-term slope instead of the daily spikes is what actually keeps you sane.
Now, I still weigh myself, but I do not look at the daily number as a grade. I put it in an app, let the app smooth out the curve over a month, and barely look at the individual days. Some days the graph spikes, and some days it dips, but as long as the general line is heading where I want it to go, I am happy. It turns out that my body, much like our startup's user growth, has a lot of daily noise, and the only way to stay sane is to zoom out.
