I Have Never Been Very Good at Being Bad at Things

How a lifetime of easy grades and linear rewards completely broke my relationship with my body.

(The cover, of course, is from Anti-Hero!)

I’m thirty-one. For most of my life, I’ve had a transactional and almost boringly predictable relationship with effort. I want something, I figure out what it takes to get it, I do the work, and eventually I get it.

In my first draft of this essay, I immediately followed that up with a very polite caveat. I wrote that this isn’t to say things have always come easily to me, or that I haven’t worked hard. Quite the opposite! I’ve worked very hard for plenty of things. Which is true if you look at my late twenties or my thirties. Ask anyone who works with me and they will tell you I have a slightly unhealthy capacity for work.

Except when I read that caveat back, I hated it, because it was a lie I put in so I wouldn’t sound insufferable on the internet.

The actual truth is that when you grow up as a “high achiever,” you’ve kind of always been smart. Exams came easy to me. School came easy to me. I could coast at a lot of work because I spoke well and thought on my feet. Reading what a room wanted and handing it back took almost zero effort. For the first twenty-odd years of my life, I never had to put in effort just to do basic things or stay afloat, because things just came easy to me. Coasting got me eighty percent of the way through most doors, and forty-eight hours of panic-studying handled the rest. You only put in real effort when you wanted to, usually because there was a shiny, tangible prize at the end, and when you did bother trying, the return showed up on schedule.

Even in my late twenties, when work got exponentially harder and I was pulling stupid hours building a career, the core transaction held. A straightforward relationship existed between what I put into something and what I got out of it. When that relationship broke down, I could figure out why, change my approach, and try again. I have spent most of my life believing that effort, applied intelligently and consistently enough, will eventually produce the result I want.

That kind of linear math spoils your brain. It teaches you that effort is a lever you only pull when you want a trophy, and the trophy better arrive on time. The one place this understanding of the world has consistently failed me is my relationship with my weight.

I have spent years approaching my body with the exact same forensic logic I apply to everything else in my life: identify the problem, understand the variables, find the right people to help, make a plan, execute it. What is the bottleneck? What is the protocol? Who is the best domain expert I can hire? And yet, weight has remained the one territory where knowing what to do, being willing to do it, and actually doing it haven’t reliably translated into the outcome I wanted.

It is infuriating to be able to solve complicated problems in other parts of your life and then feel completely defeated by your own body, especially when you’ve spent so long believing that anything can be figured out if you’re willing to work hard enough. When you’re a person wired like this and you struggle with weight, it fucking sucks, because your own body is walking, living proof of the fact that you have no control over this one facet of your life.

And you cannot hide it. If a deal falls through at work or a draft dies in a Google Doc, nobody at dinner knows about it. You don’t have to wear a failed pitch deck on your face. Your body walks into every room five seconds before you do, broadcasting that here is one basic thing you haven’t managed to sort out.

I think what makes this particularly difficult is that I have never really learned to separate failure from a failure of effort.

In most areas of my life, if something doesn’t work, I can usually trace it back to a decision I made, a step I skipped, something I overlooked, or an approach I could improve. My understanding of failure has never included something being outside my control. In my head, the equation is: I failed once, okay, I’ll put in more effort, and I’ll do it again.

With a human body, reward is not linear at all.

Because I’ve aced exams all my life, I treat everything in my life like an exam. Every time I step on the scale in the morning, it feels like sitting for an examination I was certain I’d prepared for, only to discover that I’ve failed. Every time I get on that glass square and look down, it’s a big fat F, and my ego can’t take it. And the worst part isn’t even the number itself. It’s the immediate, almost involuntary conclusion that I must have done something wrong. And because I’m so accustomed to being able to correct my failures through effort, I find it almost impossible to accept a disappointing result without turning it into an indictment of myself.

I went looking into the psychology of why people like me lose their minds over this, because it is a pattern I’ve started seeing in almost every ambitious person I know (and because researching my own neuroses is apparently how I relax).

There is a whole body of clinical literature on what happens when high performers run into systems they can’t control. Psychologist Nick Wignall writes extensively about what he calls “anxious high-achievers”- people who are smart, hard-working, did well in school, moved fast in their careers, and yet constantly “run hot” with background stress and anxiety. Almost universally, they walk into his office asking for the same impossible deal: “I want to keep my ambition and drive, but with less stress and anxiety” (good luck!).

In the academic research on perfectionism, psychologists split people into two very different camps. Adaptive perfectionists set high standards and genuinely enjoy the grind of a challenge. Maladaptive perfectionists are terrified of flaws, equate any error with personal defectiveness, and are hypersensitive to criticism (even when the critic is a digital bathroom scale). If you’re in that second group, you don’t even celebrate when you win. If you succeed, it is just a normal part of your life, the baseline you expected of yourself anyway, so you barely register it and move on.

When you lose, though, you come undone.

Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph Boden published a landmark review in 1996 on threatened egotism, which I cited in an essay about marriage and men a while ago. Turns out, the exact same mechanism explains my 8 AM standoff with my bathroom scale (humbling). Baumeister and his colleagues showed that extreme, defensive, destructive reactions to failure don’t come from people with low self-esteem. They come from people whose self-image is high, favourable, and precarious. When your entire identity rests on being the person who gets an A without breaking a sweat, trying hard at something and still getting an F doesn’t just feel annoying. It registers as an existential threat to who you think you are. You simply do not have a file folder in your brain for studying hard and failing anyway.

So what happens when a person who isn’t equipped to handle failure gets handed an F by their own body?

They burn the classroom down.

I have developed an (almost) impressive ability to turn one small failure into three unrelated ones. Every time I decide to get serious about my health, I approach it with the enthusiasm of someone launching a new startup. You don’t just fix your breakfast or go for an evening walk, because incremental habits are for people who are fine with a B-. You start all three things at the exact same time: you start strength training, you start nutrition, and you start cardio.

For a while, everything goes according to plan. Then, a flu happens. I miss a workout. Perhaps work gets in the way, perhaps I’m travelling. Maybe I’m just tired!

Rationally, missing a workout at 6 PM should have absolutely no bearing on what I eat for dinner at 9 PM or whether I go for a walk the next morning. Those are independent decisions! Except somewhere in my head, the entire project has already been declared a failure. You fail at one, and you immediately want to throw everything else away and fail at all three because you are just not equipped to handle a partial grade. If I cannot be excellent at taking care of myself, I would rather not do it at all.

Psychologist Guy Winch has a single line in his research on self-sabotage that explains this entire meltdown: people unconsciously sabotage themselves the exact moment their motivation to avoid failure exceeds their motivation to succeed.

Read that again and think about how a high achiever’s pride works. If I follow the nutrition plan to the gram, show up for every lift, do all my cardio for a month, and the scale still barely moves, the shame is unbearable because it means my actual best effort wasn’t good enough. I tried and I lost.

But if I miss one workout and immediately decide to blow up my diet for the next five days by ordering whatever I want? I’m off the hook! When the scale is up on Monday morning, I don’t have to feel stupid or defective or out of control. I can just tell myself, Well, obviously I didn’t lose weight, I ate like an idiot all week. Self-sabotage is pre-emptive ego protection. You wreck the exam on purpose so the exam can’t tell you that you weren’t smart enough to pass it.

The alternative, of course, is that I do everything right and still don’t get the result I want, which is somehow even more infuriating.

I eat well, get my protein in, show up for strength training, do my cardio, and spend an entire week feeling very pleased with my newfound (old) commitment to being a functional adult. Then I step on the scale and discover that nothing has changed! Sometimes the number has even gone up. I know enough about weight fluctuations to understand that this doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Water retention exists. Hormonal fluctuations exist. Flights bloat you, salt bloats you, luteal phases bloat you, bodies are complicated. Unfortunately, knowing something intellectually and being able to emotionally accept it are two very different things. When you are conditioned to expect a direct reward for effort, and your body refuses to hand one over on schedule, you feel cheated. And when the reward doesn’t arrive on the scale, the temptation to go out and find one elsewhere becomes enormous. Food, particularly, offers something that long-term health rarely does: immediate, predictable gratification.

And then there are the times when the scale does move, which doesn’t always make things better.

I lose a little weight, feel the enormous relief of finally having something to show for my effort, and immediately begin negotiating how much I can afford to relax. I’ve been good all week. I’ve earned this. I lose a bit of weight, and then I go straight into a full binge cycle because my brain is looking for its trophy. One indulgent meal becomes a weekend of eating, which occasionally becomes a full-blown binge, followed by the familiar cocktail of guilt, regret, self-soothing, and frantic promises to compensate for it the following week.

What fascinates me is how quickly food can move between being something I must control and something I believe I deserve as compensation for exercising that control. I’ve turned eating into both the examination and the prize for passing it. And somewhere in this exhausting arrangement, I’ve managed to make the ordinary pleasure of enjoying a meal feel like a statement about my morality.

For the longest time, I assumed that whole restrict-binge-regret pendulum was some weird pocket of zero willpower in a person who otherwise knows how to be disciplined.

It isn’t. In 2023, neuroscientists at Stanford Medicine published a study using high-resolution brain imaging to map what actually happens inside the heads of people stuck in binge-eating loops. They looked specifically at the sensorimotor striatum, the deep region of the brain that runs automatic, reflexive habits, and how it talks to the prefrontal regions responsible for self-control. What they found was stark: after repeated cycles of restriction and bingeing, connectivity inside the automatic habit circuit becomes hyper-strong, while connections to the self-control regions physically weaken. Once you have run the loop of stress or scale disappointment → restriction → binge enough times, overeating stops being a conscious decision and becomes an automated neural reflex, firing on the exact same pathways as substance addiction.

Every time you flood your brain with massive dopamine surges from hyper-palatable binge foods after starving yourself of reward all week, you desensitize your own dopamine receptors, a state neuroscientists call reward deficiency. As the lead author on the Stanford paper pointed out, the more dopamine exposure patients have in the context of binge eating, the more altered their habit circuit connectivity becomes. Normal meals and ordinary daily wins stop registering as pleasurable, which compels your brain to go hunt for a bigger hit just to feel normal.

The Stanford team made a point of stating something every self-flagellating overachiever should probably tattoo on their forearm: disordered eating cycles are not a fault of personality. They are physical changes in the brain. When you spend years treating diets like a board exam and using food binges as the consolation prize when your body doesn’t applaud you fast enough, you physically wire your striatum to hijack you the second you feel unrewarded. Willpower doesn’t stand a chance against a habit circuit that thinks it’s saving you from starvation and misery.

We love pretending that bodies are simple math problems because if a body is a math problem, smart people get to win at it. Meanwhile, the clinical data from the NIH and CDC says they are anything but. Genetics dictate a massive share of where your weight wants to sit; obesity runs in families across dozens of polygenic variations that govern appetite hormones and fat storage before you even take a bite of food. Age changes the equation too, as muscle mass naturally drops and fat increases over time, slowing down baseline metabolic burn. Hormonal realities like PCOS, hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, or even routine prescription medications tilt the board further.

And look at how ambitious people in their thirties actually live! We sleep five or six hours a night, we sit in front of glowing laptops for twelve hours straight, we catch flights, we run on cortisol and cold brew, and we live inside urban ecosystems engineered to deliver two thousand calories to our front door in ten minutes. Sleep deprivation alone wrecks your endocrine system, spiking ghrelin so you’re ravenous and tanking leptin so you never feel full. We live lives that biologically instruct our bodies to hold onto weight at all costs, and then we stand on the bathroom scale in the morning and scream at ourselves for lacking character. You cannot argue with your own endocrine system, no matter how good your grades were in twelfth standard.

Over the years, I have spent upwards of ₹5 lakh trying to solve this problem.

Five lakhs. I have spent 5 lakhs on nutritionists, on peptides, on supplements, consultations, programmes, blood panels, blah blah blah blah blah. Enough expert advice to qualify me for some sort of honorary degree in the management of my own metabolism. Looking back, what strikes me isn’t necessarily the amount of money I’ve spent. It’s the extraordinary optimism with which I’ve spent it.

Perhaps the previous nutritionist hadn’t accounted for something. Perhaps I needed a different training programme, a more precise calorie target, a better supplement, a new peptide, a different approach altogether. There is something reassuring to a person like me about believing that the answer exists out there and that I simply haven’t bought it yet. Because if the problem is a lack of information, expertise, or the right intervention, then it is still a problem I know how to solve! I can research it. I can pay for it. I can optimise my way out of it.

Spending ₹5 lakh was my way of trying to turn my body back into a problem that responds to capital and intelligence. What I have found considerably harder to accept is that even the best, most expensive plan in the world cannot eliminate uncertainty from a living body.

Especially because what actually works for long-term health doesn’t cost ₹5 lakh at all. In fact, when you look at the medical consensus across decades, it is almost stupid how boring the real answer is. There is no secret biohack. The evidence-based prescription for long-term weight and metabolic health is maddeningly simple: eat a balanced, nutrient-dense diet with enough protein, vitamins, and fibre in a moderate calorie deficit, rather than doing violent crash diets that trigger binge loops. Get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise a week so your cardiovascular system works properly. Do strength training at least twice a week so you build muscle and protect your resting metabolism from tanking as you get older. Sleep enough. Even in the era of GLP-1 medications transforming obesity treatment, doctors repeat the exact same caveat: the prescription does not replace having to eat protein, lift weights, and maintain boring daily habits for the rest of your life.

The reason I couldn’t stick to those basics for thirty-one years wasn’t that I needed another ₹50,000 consultation to explain what a vegetable or a dumbbell is. Any idiot can understand the plan. The problem was psychological: doing moderate, unglamorous things forever without getting an A+ at the end of every week broke my brain.

When clinicians actually treat high-achieving people trapped in all-or-nothing diet cycles, they don’t hand them a stricter macro spreadsheet; they use behavioural frameworks like Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Motivational Interviewing. Which, when you strip away the clinical terminology, are essentially bootcamps for teaching a rigid, grade-obsessed brain how to stop throwing tantrums when life isn’t perfect.

CBT forces you to catch the absurd all-or-nothing distortion the second it fires. The voice that says “I missed my Thursday workout, so the week is dead and I might as well order dessert” has to be manually replaced with boring reality: “I missed a workout. Dinner is still just dinner.” ACT targets what psychologists call psychological flexibility: building the tolerance to sit inside uncomfortable feelings like hunger, stress, boredom, or a scale that hasn’t budged in three weeks without immediately blowing up your habits just to soothe your bruised ego. And Motivational Interviewing forces you to drop the harsh, disappointed-parent lecture in your head and figure out why you actually want to take care of yourself when nobody is grading you.

All of that clinical research points to the exact same conclusion: you have to rewire your own brain.

It is only now, at thirty-one, after spending ₹5 lakh and decades fighting myself, that I have finally started to see the process itself as the reward. Not the number on the scale at the end of a twelve-week sprint, and not the ego rush of passing a test, but the process as a lifelong commitment to my own health and wellness.

Nobody is coming here to give me a medal for taking care of my body.

Nobody is standing outside the gym with a trophy because I lifted weights thrice this week, or hit my protein target, or slept eight hours, or didn’t spiral into a three-day binge when the scale ticked up after a flight. There is no graduation day where you hit a magic weight, frame your certificate on the wall, and get to go back to only putting in effort when you feel like it.

To love your body is to be in a long-term marriage with it. You don’t necessarily always like it, but you have to love it, and you have to put in the work every single day to make it work. It is not something that continues to thrive despite you, but because of you, and it requires a level of consistent commitment to the absolute basics. And if I want to survive that without making myself miserable for the next forty years, showing up for the daily work has to be the reward by itself.

I’m still thirty-one, and if I’m being honest, I’m still figuring out how to do this without my ego getting in the way every morning. I still step on the scale sometimes and feel that hot flash of annoyance when the number doesn’t applaud my effort. Thirty-one years of expecting a gold star takes a while to unlearn. Better to finally walk out of the exam hall, though, than to keep failing a test nobody asked me to take.