Why Indians Always Feels Tired, Fat & Stressed Today | Health Crisis Explained | ft. Dilip Kumar

What an endurance athlete, VC, and serial entrepreneur taught me about India’s health epidemic, the protein myth, and why you should check your blood before you check your phone

A conversation with Dilip Kumar, Partner at Rainmatter Investments, endurance athlete, and entrepreneur behind IM Strong.

There is a moment in many founders’ lives where the body finally sends a bill for everything the mind has been spending.

For Dilip Kumar, that moment was a staircase.

He was in his early thirties. He was running a startup. He was sleeping three to four hours a night. He was eating whatever was available, whenever he had a moment, because stress has a way of making the body crave comfort food. He had not been on a weighing scale in years. He had no idea what he weighed.

One day he missed a step coming down from his home. His leg twisted. It was a ligament tear. The doctor told him he would need surgery.

He was thirty-something. He was not going to put a rod in his leg. He asked if there was another way.

There was. Rehab. Physical therapy. Walking. Running.

He had not run since school PT class. He started at 400 meters. Then 600. Then a kilometer. Then ten. Then a half marathon. Then a full marathon at 42 kilometers.

He has not stopped since.

This is the conversation we had about what India gets wrong about health, and what it would take to fix it.

Part 1: The Epidemic Nobody Is Talking About Clearly Enough

Ten crore Indians are diabetic. Another 13.6 crore are pre-diabetic, sitting at HbA1c levels between 5.5 and 5.8, which means they are on the border and moving toward it.

Fifty to sixty percent of Indians have at least one lifestyle disorder at any given point, whether that is diabetes, obesity, PCOD, or something else. This is not a fringe concern. This is the majority of the country.

Dilip’s take on why: India is carb heavy in a way that goes deeper than just food choices.

“Look at breakfast across any region. North India: paratha, chapati, bread. South India: idli, dosa. Carbs dominate every meal. Protein is almost an afterthought.”

He pointed to a second problem hiding inside the carb problem. The grains people ate decades ago had more nutrients than the industrially processed versions of the same grains available today. Wheat and rice grown at scale have less nutritional density than their predecessors. So people are eating more carbs and getting fewer nutrients from them.

Then add sedentary lifestyle on top.

“Before, you went to the shop. Now the shop comes to you. Before, you went to the mall. Now the mall comes to you. Before, you cooked in the kitchen. Now someone else does it. The last bits of natural movement in daily life have been systematically removed.”

The result: a health epidemic that is not an accident but the predictable output of how modern Indian life has been designed.

Part 2: Stress Is a Ghost

Dilip described stress in a way I found more useful than anything I have read in a self-help book.

“Stress is like a ghost. You cannot see it. You do not know its color or its shape. But it will find you. If you do not build a system around yourself, it will hold on to you.”

He knows this from lived experience. As a founder, stress was what he called his second sleeping partner. When you have a real partner next to you at night, stress is on the other side of the bed. Always.

The problem with stress is also that it drives eating behavior in ways most people do not consciously recognize. People who are overweight often report that they eat not because they are hungry but because sugary or oily or fried food soothes them. Their bodies have learned to seek comfort in food as a response to cortisol. Telling them to eat less is the wrong intervention.

His approach to managing stress now runs on two principles.

First, he says no more than yes. He has become deliberate about what he does not want to do and who he does not want to spend time with. Knowing what you do not want is, in his view, more clarifying than knowing what you want.

Second, he has cut synchronous communication. WhatsApp is checked once a day. Email gets faster responses than messages. The expectation that a message deserves an immediate reply is, he argued, one of the most insidious drains on cognitive and emotional bandwidth in modern professional life.

“If you respond to a thousand messages a day, where is your family time? Where is your actual work time? You go home to finish the work you could not do because you were responding to messages. Then your family gets nothing.”

Part 3: Healthy Is Not a Gym Membership

Here is the reframe that I think most people need to hear.

Healthy does not mean more protein and more gym time. Healthy is a combination of physical activity, nutrition, sleep quality, mental state, and stress management. If even one element is missing, the system breaks.

Dilip made this concrete.

You can run ten kilometers every day and spend three hours in the gym. If you sleep four hours a night, you are still unhealthy. Your body is not recovering. Your hormones are dysregulated. Your cortisol is chronically elevated.

You can eat a perfect diet and maintain an ideal body weight. If you are mentally exhausted or emotionally trapped in a toxic environment, you are still unwell. Stress raises blood sugar. Anxiety disrupts sleep. Burnout suppresses immunity.

His core message on stress and toxic environments was unambiguous.

“If a situation is toxic and it is damaging your mental health, you need to leave. You cannot fix other people. You can only fix yourself. Leaving is not weakness. It is strength. It means you know what you need.”

Part 4: The Running Journey Nobody Talks About

When Dilip started running as rehab, his only goal was to not stop.

Day one: 400 meters. Day two: 600. One week later: a kilometer. He did not set out to be a runner. He did not think about marathons. He just tried to do slightly more than he did the day before, and then be consistent enough to do it again.

The fear around running in India is real and understandable. When you start, you are gasping. Your heart rate spikes. Everything inside you says this is wrong and you should stop. Most people stop.

Dilip also noted a structural problem. India does not have enough running infrastructure. There are almost no proper pedestrian paths in most cities. Roads are shared with bikes and cars. And culturally, running as a fitness discipline simply does not exist for most people after they leave school.

“Cricket takes over in college. Once college ends, all movement ends.”

What got him through the early discomfort was one thing: he kept doing it. Consistency is the only real variable that matters. Not talent. Not the right shoes. Not the perfect training plan. Whether you do it again tomorrow.

He eventually completed a full marathon. He is still running.

Part 5: What You Eat Matters More Than What You Do

Dilip made a point that contradicts how most Indians think about fitness.

When he was running at peak volume, he was eating carelessly. His reasoning was that he was burning so many calories that it did not matter what went in. It mattered enormously.

Eventually he hired a nutritionist. What he learned reoriented everything.

For someone training for endurance events, his daily calorie intake ranged from 2,500 to 3,200 calories depending on the training block. Those calories were broken into macros: carbohydrates for glycogen replenishment, protein for muscle repair, fats for hormonal function. His protein target was between one and one and a half grams per kilogram of body weight. At 65 kg, that meant roughly 100 to 110 grams of protein per day.

“I would recommend that anyone serious about their fitness hire a nutritionist before doing almost anything else. What you eat is more important than what you do with your body.”

On protein supplements, he pushed back against a common Indian perception.

“People treat protein powder like it is a steroid. Even my own family looks at it skeptically. This is an education problem. Protein is not just for bodybuilders. Every person needs adequate protein, whether they are male, female, young, or elderly. The supplement exists because most people cannot hit their protein requirements through whole food alone.”

He also noted that the Indian protein supplement market is real and growing, currently worth around Rs 2,500 to 3,000 crore, with products ranging from plant protein to whey to protein-infused versions of traditional snacks. His advice: educate yourself before buying anything. Do not rely on influencer recommendations, trainer endorsements, or celebrity ads.

Part 6: The Blood Test Nobody Is Getting

One of the most practical recommendations Dilip made, and one I think gets vastly underemphasized, was this:

Get a blood test every six to eight months. Male or female. Young or old.

A basic CBC test costs around Rs 400 to 500. From it, you learn your HbA1c levels, your Vitamin D levels, your B12 levels, your iron, your lipid profile. You learn where you actually are, not where you assume you are.

“Know your body before you try to fix it. You cannot navigate without data.”

He also pointed to AI as a useful tool for medical triaging. Take your blood test results, enter them into an AI system with your age, gender, lifestyle, and training routine, and ask it to interpret them. For routine monitoring, AI can flag anomalies and help you decide whether something warrants a doctor’s visit.

“You do not need to see a doctor for everything. But if something in your results looks wrong, get a proper medical opinion.”

Part 7: Why Indian Healthcare Access Is Broken in a Specific Way

India’s doctor-to-patient ratio is actually better than most developing countries, and even better than some developed ones. That surprised me.

What is broken is the distribution.

In metro cities, you will find hospitals on every street. Go 100 to 200 kilometers outside any major city and hospitals become sparse. Good hospitals become nearly impossible to find. People travel 100 kilometers to see a specialist.

The economic logic is straightforward: hospitals are businesses. They go where paying customers are densest. Rural areas have lower insurance penetration and lower paying capacity. Private capital follows density and income. Government hospitals fill some of the gap in rural areas, but not enough of it, and often not at the quality level people need.

Dilip is investing in this problem at both the preventive and treatment layers. On the treatment side, he mentioned a portfolio company building a system that lets individual doctors create their own clinic networks, increasing access without requiring hospital-scale capital. He also mentioned an investment in an AI drug discovery company, where AI is compressing the standard five to ten year, billion-dollar drug development timeline into two to four years at a fraction of the cost.

Part 8: The Elder Care Problem Everyone Is Ignoring

Most urban millennials and Gen Z Indians do not live with their parents. Their parents are in hometowns or villages, often alone, often aging without nearby support.

Dilip is investing in this space because it is personal, as it is for most of us.

The specific risk he focused on is falls. After the age of sixty, a single fall can be catastrophic. Sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass that comes with aging, means the body has less resilience and recovery capacity. A fall that a thirty-year-old walks away from can be fatal or permanently disabling for a seventy-year-old.

He recently met a company building a fall detection system that can identify when an elderly person has fallen and immediately trigger an SOS response. This kind of technology does not require the elder to remember to press a button or call someone.

Rainmatter’s portfolio also includes companies focusing on elder nutrition, elder strength training, and elder community building. The goal is systems that let elderly people remain active, connected, and independent longer.

Part 9: His Cold Email to Nitin Kamath

Before Rainmatter Investments, Dilip built IM Strong, an online fitness platform for busy professionals who could not make it to the gym.

He launched it six months before COVID. The pandemic gave the platform tailwind. Then COVID ended and people wanted offline experiences again. Online fitness fatigue had set in. Twenty percent of users were driving ninety percent of usage, which is a red flag for consumer adoption. The team decided to move on.

But during that time he had gotten Nitin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha, as his first investor.

The story: a friend gave him Nitin’s email address. Dilip wrote a cold email explaining what he was building and asking for a pitch meeting. Nitin signed up for a class on the platform. His wife attended too. The next day, Nitin called Dilip to his office, asked how much he needed, and wrote the check.

“That is how simple it was. But it required the cold email. It required someone saying here is my product, here is what I am trying to do, I want to show you.”

He made a point about luck that I think every aspiring founder should hold onto.

“Luck is a huge factor in entrepreneurship. Everyone who succeeds is hardworking. Everyone has grit and determination. But you cannot time luck. What you can do is keep knocking. Keep showing up. The more doors you knock, the better your odds. Sometimes it takes one year. Sometimes ten. You have no way of knowing.”

Part 10: Health Versus Wealth

I asked him the direct question near the end. Health versus wealth: what does he actually believe?

His answer was honest and unresolved in the best way.

“Both are important. And most people, including me, do not actually know how much of either they want.”

He does not have a number in his head for wealth. He does not have a target fitness metric he is chasing. His metric for both is the same: can I do what I want to do, when I want to do it?

His example: he wants to be able to take his son cycling when the mood strikes. His health needs to be good enough for that. His finances need to be stable enough for that. Neither requires a private jet. Neither requires being on a podium.

“If you tip too far into either direction, the other suffers. Balance matters. But before you can balance, you need to know what enough looks like for you. Most people never figure that out.”

The One Thing

Everything Dilip shared traces back to one idea:

You cannot fix what you cannot see. And most people in India are living inside their own health crisis without the data to understand it.

Fifty to sixty percent have a lifestyle disorder. Thirteen crore are pre-diabetic. Most do not know their HbA1c. Most do not know their Vitamin D level. Most do not know how much protein their body needs.

The path forward is not a supplement or a marathon training plan or a gym membership. It starts with a Rs 500 blood test, taken every six months, followed by honest reading of what the numbers say.

You cannot out-run bad data. But you can make better decisions once you have good data.