“I failed at trading and fitness”.
That thought kept coming back. It felt strange because I was never someone who doubted myself.
Even if my own parents tell me, “You can’t do this”, I would never believe it.
Not because I’m stubborn, but because I can never stop believing in myself.
So when that thought kept coming back, I knew something was seriously off.
That’s when I realised something deeper:
Fat loss and trading are psychological battles that look like physical ones.
Calories, workouts, charts, trendlines, and strategies don’t fail.
People do. Mentally. The part nobody wants to address.
The wake-up call
There was a time I’d wake up, grab coffee, open my charts, and stare at my P&L, refreshing it again and again.
If the market was green, I felt like a genius. If it was red, I felt like trash.
Those feelings didn’t stay on my trading desk. They followed me everywhere.
To deal with red days and boredom, I started numbing myself.
- Ate junk aggressively
- Did emotional eating
- I drank cans of beer to switch my brain off
- Even started smoking (let me confess). I knew what I was doing. But I still did it.
I relapsed.
I kept telling myself for weeks that I’d fix everything from Monday onwards.
But Monday never came. Months passed by, until one day it hit me.
I wasn’t losing money and health because my strategy was bad. I was losing because I was not in control.
That’s what losing control looks like. It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens slowly.
I hated what I was becoming.
The mental shift
That’s when I went back to treating my health like my trading portfolio.
I had lost the gym after an injury. But I found myself again on long walks.
Walking became my therapy when life stopped making sense. No phone, no music, and no distractions. Just me and my thoughts.
- I went back to quantifying my nutrition
- Structured my diet and exercise plan
- Tracked everything
- Lost kilos of weight
- Managed risk and took quality trades only
- Repeated consistently
No emotional trades. No emotional eating.
And believe it or not, the fitter I got physically and mentally, the wealthier I became. Not just in money, but in all areas of my life.
The “secret” strategy
Most traders and people trying to lose weight think they need a better strategy.
They don’t.
They need to fix themselves with a structure built on non-negotiables:
- Kicking off alcohol and smoking (Yeah, it’s been over a year since I quit)
- Hydration
- Well-structured nutrition
- Exercise
- 7-8 hours of sleep
- Not trading when you don’t find a setup
People think they need fat burners, special diets, setups, or hacks.
What they actually lack is control when things don’t go their way.
The body and the market expose the same thing. Your behaviour.
Your behaviour is the culprit
You can’t trade calmly when your body’s multitasking on loads of caffeine and three hours of sleep.
And you can’t lose fat if you’re drinking beer almost every night out of boredom, or stress-eating after every bad day.
The mind you bring to your charts is the same mind you bring to your plate. Fix one, and the other follows.
What changed everything
Once I saw this connection, my approach changed. I stopped chasing quick profits, shortcuts, and dopamine hits.
Instead, I built systems.
Daily actions that didn’t look impressive, but compounded quietly:
- No beer or alcohol
- Tracking my food
- Taking long walks
- Limiting day trading and switching to swing trading
- Creating instead of consuming
- Using the same screen time for writing on Medium
(And yes, let me confess this too. Deleting Instagram did wonders.)
Things started falling back in place. And slowly, I realized I wasn’t chasing anything anymore. I was in absolute control.
Final thoughts
Most quit thinking they need a better plan, a better diet, a better setup, or a better mentor. So they keep hopping from one to another.
That’s rarely the problem.
When fat loss and trading fail, the problem isn’t knowledge. You already know a lot. You’ve already been through thousands of videos.
Something else breaks first.
- Sleep gets messed up
- You’re tired and demotivated
- You can’t control impulses when things go wrong
- Your habits fall apart
- Boredom pushes you into bad decisions
- Stress runs your behaviour
Eventually, discipline and consistency break.
The plan doesn’t fail. Your mind does. And fixing that fixes everything.
Your body and the stock market work the same way.
Both punish impatience and impulsiveness.
So before switching methods and strategies, pause for a second and ask:
Did my plan fail? Or did I slowly start tweaking things on my own? And instead of taking accountability, did I start justifying those mistakes?
Because most failures don’t happen suddenly. They happen subtly.
They look like:
“It’s just one biscuit”
“Just a handful of chips”
“Aarggh! I’m stressed. Something sweet won’t hurt tonight”
“Just one more trade”
“Let me buy more”
“I’ll start fresh tomorrow.”
And by the time people realize this, it’s already too late.
Diets and trading don’t fail. People do.
Once the mind breaks, even simple things feel impossible. And when the mind is right, even difficult things feel simple.
A work-from-home boredom relapse just forced my mindset to reset.
This time, with a stronger comeback.
