Confessions of a Linux Engineer Trying to Lose 60+ kg

Pic Courtesy: Me, I took this pic. You will read about this below.

I once spent hours debugging an issue without properly getting up from my chair.

At the end of the day, the servers were healthy.

I wasn’t.

It took me far too long to notice the irony.

I’ve spent the last 12 years working as a Linux and Cloud Engineer. Most of those years have been remote.

I understand monitoring.

I understand alerts.

I understand what happens when a system runs out of resources.

I understand why ignoring warnings eventually leads to an incident.

Apparently, I understood all of this only when the system wasn’t my own body.

Twelve Years Behind a Screen

My work usually happens in one of two shifts — morning or afternoon.

Being a lead engineer also means working hours are sometimes more of a suggestion than a rule.

And on-call?

That’s simply part of life.

Servers don’t care that it’s dinner time.

Production incidents don’t check whether you’re about to sleep.

Nobody has ever received an alert at 2 AM and thought,

“What wonderful timing.”

No matter which shift I’m working, I usually wake up around 6:30 in the morning.

The day begins with black tea or coffee.

Then work.

I never really skipped food. In fact, skipping food was rarely my problem.

Eating late was.

Breakfast became late.

Lunch became later.

Dinner occasionally arrived at a time when sensible people were thinking about sleep.

And somewhere between tickets, calls, logs, troubleshooting, escalations, and meetings, food became convenient rather than intentional.

“I’ll Eat After I Fix This”

If you work in IT, you’ve probably said this sentence.

“I’ll eat after I fix this issue.”

The problem is that the issue doesn’t know you made that promise.

One log leads to another.

One server leads to another.

You find something strange in a configuration.

Then you find something even stranger.

Three hours later, the original problem is fixed, you’ve discovered two completely unrelated problems, and your lunch is sitting somewhere wondering what it did wrong.

I’ve done this more times than I can count.

Sometimes I’d go to make tea and return with tea, biscuits, and snacks.

Other times, cooking or finding something sensible to eat felt like too much effort.

So I’d order.

Food Delivery Was Always There

Three or four times a week wasn’t unusual.

Porotta and beef.

Biriyani.

Burgers.

Pizza.

And whatever else looked good while scrolling through a food delivery app when I was already hungry.

Late-night hot pizza was a particular weakness.

There’s something dangerously comforting about opening a pizza box after a long day of troubleshooting.

The laptop is still open.

The terminal is still there.

You’re mentally exhausted.

And there’s hot pizza.

At that moment, nobody is thinking about blood pressure.

You’re thinking,

“I deserve this.”

That sentence probably added more kilograms to my life than I care to calculate.

Sugar Was My Fuel

Sugary drinks were practically a lifeline.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

Add three cups of tea or coffee a day.

Add snacks while working.

Add stress eating after a difficult incident.

Add late nights.

Then add almost no physical movement.

Repeat for years.

That’s the important part.

I didn’t wake up one morning at 165 kg.

There wasn’t one spectacularly unhealthy meal that changed everything.

It was repetition.

Small habits.

Normal days.

Thousands of them.

My Daily Step Count Was Almost Impressive

Impressive for all the wrong reasons.

Working remotely meant my commute was extremely efficient.

Bed.

Bathroom.

Desk.

Kitchen.

Desk.

Maybe the front door.

Desk again.

On some days, I’m fairly certain my office chair travelled more than I did.

Ten to twelve hours of sitting became completely normal.

Weekends weren’t active either.

They became recovery days.

After spending the week mentally exhausted, the last thing I wanted to do was exercise.

So I rested.

Then Monday came.

And the cycle restarted.

The Alerts Were Already There

Looking back, my body wasn’t exactly silent.

My weight kept increasing.

My blood pressure became a problem.

My blood sugar moved in the wrong direction.

Clothes became harder to find.

Stairs became less friendly.

Photos made me uncomfortable.

There wasn’t one warning.

There were many.

I ignored them in the same way we sometimes ignore a warning in a monitoring dashboard.

“I’ll check it later.”

“It’s probably temporary.”

“I’ll fix it next week.”

Then my blood pressure suddenly spiked.

I ended up in the hospital.

That’s the thing about alerts.

Ignore enough warnings and eventually you get an incident.

I Optimised Servers Better Than I Optimised Myself

This is probably the most uncomfortable confession in this article.

For years, I was better at maintaining infrastructure than maintaining my own health.

If a server was running at dangerous resource levels, I’d investigate.

If a service behaved abnormally, I’d look at the metrics.

If monitoring showed a worrying trend, I’d want to know why.

But my own weight kept climbing and I somehow accepted it as normal.

High blood pressure?

I’ll deal with it.

Prediabetes?

I should probably eat better.

Constant tiredness?

Work is stressful.

There was always an explanation.

And explanations are very convenient when you don’t want to make changes.

Five Days Since My Last Post

It’s been five days since I last wrote here.

Today, I stepped outside and noticed this flower.

Yes, the photograph above is one I took today.

A beautiful pink flower, fully open, quietly doing its thing.

I stopped and took a picture.

Maybe I’m becoming unnecessarily philosophical because I started a blog.

That’s entirely possible.

But I realised something.

For years, I spent so much time looking at screens that I rarely paid attention to the small things around me.

Logs.

Dashboards.

Terminals.

Emails.

Tickets.

Phone.

Laptop.

Repeat.

Today, I noticed a flower.

I’m not claiming weight loss has suddenly turned me into a nature photographer.

The flower was probably just in the right place at the right time.

But I stopped.

I looked.

I took the photograph.

For me, right now, even noticing life outside a screen feels like a small win.

Things Are Changing

Since starting this health journey, my appetite has reduced significantly.

I eat smaller portions now.

I still eat four or five times a day, but the quantity is nowhere near what I used to eat.

I’m drinking around two to three litres of water.

I’m sleeping seven to eight hours more consistently.

The constant thoughts about food have become quieter.

And perhaps the biggest surprise?

My sugar cravings have almost completely disappeared.

Sugary drinks used to feel essential.

Now I don’t really think about them.

Bakery food?

Strangely, I’m not tempted by it these days either.

I’m also making a conscious effort to stand more often and walk around instead of remaining glued to my chair for hours.

Small changes.

Nothing dramatic.

But after years of doing almost nothing for my health, small changes feel significant.

Have I Started Exercising?

No.

There.

I confessed.

The morning walks I keep talking about?

Still pending deployment.

Exercise?

Currently somewhere in the backlog.

My endocrinologist would probably assign this a critical priority.

I’m still learning.

Work still runs late because sometimes the job genuinely demands it.

Consistency is proving harder than motivation.

I can decide tonight that I’m going for a walk tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning, however, has its own management team and frequently rejects my proposal.

But this time, I’m not using imperfection as a reason to stop everything else.

That’s something I did for years.

If I couldn’t follow the perfect diet, I’d eat whatever I wanted.

If I couldn’t exercise for an hour, I wouldn’t walk for ten minutes.

If Monday didn’t go well, I’d wait for the next Monday.

I’m trying to stop thinking like that.

The Hardest System I’ve Ever Had to Fix

Being a Linux Engineer didn’t make me obese.

Remote work didn’t make me obese.

On-call didn’t make me obese.

Food delivery didn’t make me obese.

But years of sitting too long, sleeping late, stress eating, drinking sugar, ordering convenience food, and telling myself I’d deal with my health later certainly helped me get here.

The hardest bug I’ve ever had to fix wasn’t in production.

It was the collection of habits I’d quietly built over more than a decade.

And unlike a server problem, there’s no command I can run to fix everything.

No sudo make_me_healthy.

Trust me.

I would’ve tried it by now.

This is going to take time.

Better food choices.

Smaller portions.

More sleep.

More water.

And yes…

Eventually…

That morning walk.

For now, I’m learning to monitor a system I ignored for far too long.

Myself.

And maybe, every once in a while, I’ll close the laptop and notice a flower.

If you work in IT — or any job that keeps you sitting for hours — I’m curious:

What’s one unhealthy habit that quietly became “normal” because of your work?

Mine was telling myself I’d get up after fixing the next issue.

There was always another issue.