A few years back, my cousin asked me a question at a wedding.
He was standing near the food counter, plate in his hand, and he said,
“Bhai, tell me one thing. I have tried keto, I have tried intermittent fasting, I have even tried that Rujuta Diwekar’s sabzi roti thing.
Nothing works for me long term. What is the actual secret to get rid of this belly fat”?
I looked at his plate. 3 gulab jamuns, noodles, a scoop of pulao, and a Diet Coke next to it. I laughed and told him,
“Bhai, there is no secret. You are just eating more than your body needs. That’s it“. That was the answer.
He looked a bit insulted. People usually do that when the truth is simpler than they hoped.
But that conversation stuck with me, because a few months later I had almost the same conversation, just with a different guy, about a completely different topic.
The Same Question, A Different Room
This time it was a friend who day trades. Same kind of question, different context.
He said he had tried five strategies. Price action, options selling, someone’s YouTube course on candlesticks, a Telegram group that gives daily calls, everything.
Nothing worked long term. Some months green, most months red, but overall in huge losses even after years.
I asked him one simple question. “Bhai, when you lose, how much do you lose? And when you win, how much do you win?”
He got quiet for a second. But then he admitted that his overall losses were bigger than his profits.
And that was it. That was his whole problem.
It wasn’t because he lacked knowledge, had poor analysis, or was using the wrong strategy.
He was losing more than he was making. So even when he got many trades right, the math was still working against him.
Two completely different people. One struggling with his body, and the other struggling with his trading account. But the root cause of the problem was the same.
If you’re wondering why I keep comparing fitness and trading, I wrote about that idea in more detail in The Day I Realized Fitness And Trading Are the Same.
Strip It Down to First Principles
Strip a problem down to its most basic, undeniable truth, and build up from there instead of copying what everyone else does.
It just means you stop looking at all the fancy stuff on top, like diet plans, trading strategies, and influencer advice, and go all the way down to the one truth that cannot be argued with.
Just like you can create as many sentences as you want using A to Z, but the letters always stay the same.
For fat loss, that one rule is simple: a calorie deficit.
You must eat fewer calories than your body burns.
Doesn’t matter whether it’s low-carb, keto, roti sabzi, intermittent fasting, or not eating carbs after sunset.
If you are not in a deficit, none of it works. If you are in a deficit, almost all of it works.
Hormones influence calories in and calories out. Irrespective of hormones, fat loss cannot happen without a calorie deficit.
For trading, that one rule is simple: risk management.
Over time, you must make more than you lose.
Doesn’t matter if you do day trading, swing trading, options, futures, or even long-term investing.
If you’re consistently losing more than you’re making, no “magical strategy” on earth will save you. Risk management comes first. Strategies come later.
Everyone out there is hunting for that secret ingredient. That one supplement, one indicator, and that one course that unlocks everything for them. But both games are built on one first principle.
People think, “If it’s this simple, it can’t be right”. Making it complex makes them feel they’re doing something “advanced”.
The fact is,
Diets and strategies change. Fundamentals don’t.
Strategies are only the vehicle. Principles decide the outcome.
Why We Keep Missing The Obvious
I think the reason we keep ignoring these basics is that it feels too boring to be true. We want it to be complicated, because if it’s complicated, then our failure feels easier to justify.
“It didn’t work because the strategy was flawed” sounds better than “It didn’t work because I kept losing more than I was making”.
Same with food. “It didn’t work because my metabolism is slow” sounds better than “It didn’t work because I was still eating more than I needed, just in a healthier-looking way”.
Nobody wants to admit the problem was this simple all along. The failure feels personal, and it stings the ego.
My cousin, by the way, eventually did lose weight. It wasn’t because of another fancy diet.
He just started quantifying his food and tracked what he actually ate for two weeks. No cheating.
It turned out he was eating almost 800 more calories than he thought. Most of them came from the things he didn’t even count as “big deal”.
Cups of chai with two spoons of sugar. Samosas at the office. That extra roti and extra oil at dinner because it was “just one more” and “only this much”.
My trading friend fixed his account the same way.
It wasn’t another strategy, but respecting a non-negotiable risk-management rule.
He didn’t become a genius trader overnight, but he just stopped breaking the one rule that mattered.
The Point of All This
If you’re struggling to get in shape or become profitable in trading, before you go looking for the next diet plan or the next trading course, ask yourself this boring question first.
“Am I actually in a calorie deficit, or do I just feel like I am?”
“Am I actually making more than I’m losing, or do I just feel disciplined?”
Both games look too complicated from the outside.
Macros, hormones, insulin, RSI, moving averages, options-greeks.
But underneath all of that noise, there is one principle each game cannot escape.
The moment you understand the first principle, you stop chasing better tactics and start mastering the only thing that was ever running the game.
The people who succeed don’t usually know more. They simply refuse to violate the principle that the game itself cannot escape.