I am forty-one. Five foot ten. Around ninety kilos. My blood pressure is borderline high. My resting heart rate is higher than it should be. A nosebleed and a sustained pulse over 100 were enough to tell me something was off.
Ordinarily, I do my health checks in India each January. Apart from high cholesterol, things usually come back fine. During the pandemic I was very fit. Even as recently as October, I was training regularly and moving well. This is not a story of collapse. It is a story of drift.
My baseline habits are solid. I do not drink. I do not smoke. I eat cleanly and avoid excess sugar and carbohydrates. I carry weight well, but weight is still weight. At forty-one, the body compensates more slowly. Margins narrow.
Borderline Is a Signal
There was a moment of unintended comedy. I mentioned the blood pressure to my friend in Chennai. He listened carefully, nodded, and then said, βDonβt stress about it.β This was, of course, excellent advice delivered at exactly the wrong level of abstraction.
The problem is not ignorance. It is sequencing. When work intensifies, movement slips. Steps fall without notice. Exercise becomes irregular. Food becomes functional rather than intentional. The body absorbs this quietly, until it does not. Borderline blood pressure and an elevated resting heart rate are how it speaks up.
High blood pressure rarely announces itself. It accumulates. A higher resting heart rate reflects sustained stress, poor recovery, or insufficient aerobic conditioning. A nosebleed alone means little. Combined with a pacing heart, it earns attention.
At this stage of life, health cannot sit behind work or projects indefinitely. It has to become a standing priority, not something deferred until there is time. Maintenance now matters more than bursts of optimisation.
This is not about obsession or restriction. It is about realism. The body is no longer infinitely elastic. Sensitivity increases with age. Consistency matters more than intensity.
For 2026, the adjustment is simple. Movement becomes non-negotiable. Baseline cardio returns. Daily steps matter again. Weight needs to trend down, even modestly. Stress requires deliberate outlets rather than assumed dissipation. Borderline is not failure. It is feedback. And it is the moment to act.
I’m approximately the same age and height as you. I’m about 71 kgs. This is probably the lowest my weight has been since I was a teen. I go the gym five days a week.
Just about two years ago, my weight was over 80 kgs. This was when I was living in New York and largely getting food delivered.
More than exercise, the deciding factor is diet. My mother has recently completed a fellowship in Integrative Medicine from the Andrew Weil Center at the University of Arizona. Since the pandemic, our household has been doing intermittent fasting. We eat our first meal around noon and our second meal at around 5 PM. After that, there is no eating until the next day.
My mother has changed her entire medical practice to focus on patients with metabolic problems. She argues that the entire medical system operates on the wrong model. Doctors only see patients after the patient is already ill and then they only provide symptomatic treatment (for example: insulin). Instead, doctors should be aiming to change people’s behavior such that diabetes etc don’t develop. Her patients regularly get their blood tests done and she calculates their insulin resistance. It’s a topic of regular discussion in our family.