Gauri Shankar Sharma was forty-one when he noticed that a full night of sleep no longer made any difference. He would wake up tired. His lower back hurt through the day, his legs ached, and a desk job in government service meant sitting with that pain from morning until evening.
The blood tests came back mostly normal. Cholesterol had begun creeping up. What worried him more was a feeling he could not test for, a sense that the efficiency of his own body was quietly draining away and that his years of illness had begun.
The cupboard full of medicine
For two years he had worked on a medicine distribution posting, which left him with a working knowledge of what different tablets were meant to do. So he began prescribing for himself. If a medicine sounded useful, he bought it and kept it at home. Over time, the cupboard filled with medicines, including several he did not need for at all.
His weight reached 96 kg. He had tried cycling. He had tried the gym. He had tried running, and fasting through Navratri. Each attempt gave him two or three kilos back, and then four returned.
At home his wife had slipped into her own low period watching this. Her work schedule was demanding enough that she could not accompany him anywhere, and that became the reason nothing changed.
What actually shifted
The change was not dramatic. It was a daily eight-to-nine morning session that he stopped missing, and a group that noticed him.
He describes it with a joke that has become well known inside the community. Whatever mistake he made on a given day would somehow come up in the next morning's session. He asked whether a CCTV camera had been installed on him. Nobody was watching him, of course. The sessions simply address the mistakes people are actually making that week.
Once the same mistakes stopped repeating, the weight began to move on its own.
26 kg and 41 inches
Over fourteen months he lost 26 kg and 41 inches. The back pain and leg pain went. The exhaustion went with them.
Near his home is Goverdhan, where the parikrama runs twenty-one kilometres. He had gone before, but carrying that weight, he had never found the courage to complete it properly. That changed.
What he says now is about food rather than exercise. His attention has moved to whether what is being cooked at home is healthy, and whether anything arriving from outside is hygienic. His daughter-in-law, Nirmala, has since taken her own ideal body weight trophy.
His single piece of advice has not changed since the day he received it. Do not miss the eight-to-nine prime-time session.