A View of Wellness: Bearing witness to discipline, self-trust and consistency

I HAVE HAD A front-row seat to Anandita De’s wellness journey—Ana to family and friends. Not the performative kind, with before-and-after Reels and breathless declarations, but the quiet, grinding, unglamorous seat that comes from proximity. From watching someone day after day choose discipline over drama, structure over sympathy, staying over spiralling.

Friendship gives you intimacy. Experience gives you restraint. I’ve had both. For over two decades, my life has been shaped by health and nutrition conversations—at Harvard School of Public Health, the Culinary Institute of America, New York University’s School of Nutrition and Food Studies. What those rooms teach you, if you’re listening, is humility: every body is different, every journey is singular, and outcomes are shaped by a messy constellation of biology, psychology, access, timing, trauma and will.

So when Ana began her journey, I watched closely—and cautiously. Not with suspicion, but with responsibility. I knew the seduction of shortcuts, the false promises, the collateral damage that often trails “success stories.” And yes, there were moments when she didn’t love hearing the hard truths I shared—the side effects, the failures we see, the costs people don’t Instagram.

But friendship isn’t flattery. It’s permission. I gave her the information I had, without agenda. What she did with it was hers alone.

And what she did was remarkable. Ana did this on her own. No trainers scripting her days. No miracle medical aid. No spectacle. Just work—consistency, repetition, restraint—the quiet, unglamorous discipline of showing up daily, long after motivation fades.

Sixty kilos down is not a statistic; it’s a fact of survival. It’s reclamation. It deserves celebration—not because thinness is virtue, but because collapse was arrested. Because discipline replaced despair. Because staying became a skill.

What has always struck me is Ana’s relationship with effort. She doesn’t romanticise it, but she doesn’t run from it either. Even when tired, even when travelling, even when the old comforts beckoned, she stayed the course. Not as punishment, but as commitment. That distinction matters. One corrodes. The other builds. There is a steadiness to her now that didn’t exist before. Less defensive. Less frantic. Less hungry for approval. Watching her, I see someone who has stopped bargaining with herself. Someone who has learned that freedom often looks like structure.

Despite the noise—bullying, vulgar mockery and misinformed teasing from frustrated onlookers—Ana moves on undistracted, refusing to let cruelty, misinformation or ridicule derail a journey rooted in wellness, clarity and self-respect. She understands this noise comes neither from knowledge nor care, but from people entertaining themselves by tearing down someone doing something radical, mindful, and life-altering.

The timing of her upcoming book could not be more urgent: in an age of fake news, 24x7 news cycles, and WhatsApp University dispensing harmful half-truths, Ana’s story arrives grounded in lived experience, restraint, and earned learning.

This book matters because it refuses the usual lies. It doesn’t sell solutions. It doesn’t pretend universality. It doesn’t turn discipline into aesthetic content. It simply documents what it took for one woman to stop abandoning herself. And that’s the part that stays with me.

I’ve known Ana through phases—visibility, vulnerability, giving too much, trusting the wrong people. I’ve seen her brilliance diluted by exhaustion, her generosity weaponised against her. What this journey has done is return authorship to her. Of her body. Of her time. Of her choices.

There will be more magic ahead, I’m certain of it. Not the loud kind. The durable kind. The kind that compounds quietly over years.

Sixty kilos is a number. What Anandita De has really built is something rarer: self-trust, earned the hard way. And that—far more than weight lost—is worth documenting, saluting, and learning from.