In this first-person account facilitated by Nishtha Kawrani and narrated to The Better India, Mumbai-based software engineer Bhanu Singh reflects on fatherhood, lost routines, health, and why showing up for his family began with showing up for himself.
This story is about something I rarely see discussed honestly: what happens to a father’s health, identity, and sense of self after years of putting everyone else first.
When people talk about becoming a parent, they often talk about how life changes. What they do not talk about as often is how quietly you can disappear inside those changes.
Not all at once but gradually.
You stop prioritising your health because there is always something more urgent. You tell yourself you’ll return to your routines next week, next month, when things settle down. You keep showing up for your child, your partner, your work, and your responsibilities. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you stop showing up for yourself.
That is what happened to me.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that fathers know.
The unseen fatigue of early fatherhood—where responsibility grows, but personal well-being slowly fades into the background.
It is not just physical, it is something deeper. You wake up exhausted, get through the day, come home, stay present enough, and do what needs to be done. Somewhere in the middle of all that, you stop asking yourself how you are doing.
I stopped asking myself that question for years after I became a father.
I am a software engineer based in Mumbai, and for the past 16 years, work has been a big part of my identity. I spent five years at Accenture, another five at Deloitte, and now work as a Lead Technology Consultant with CastleBay Consulting. By most measures, I was someone who had life under control.
I was a top performer at work, disciplined with my time, and committed to my routines. For years, I woke up at 5:30 every morning, reached the gym before the city was awake, and still made it to my desk on time.
Then the lockdown arrived. Around the same time, I became a father. The life I had carefully built around discipline and routine suddenly had to make room for an entirely new reality.
‘I was present, but I was not really there’
I want to be honest about what the first two years of fatherhood looked like for me.
They were beautiful, and they were also exhausting in ways I had not prepared for.
My son needed my time and attention. My wife, who is also a working professional, needed a partner she could rely on. My job continued to demand the same level of commitment and performance it always had. So I kept showing up for all of it.
What I stopped giving to was myself.
The gym disappeared first, and then the early mornings. Then the clean eating and slowly, the discipline that had once defined my life dissolved into the background noise of daily responsibility.
By the time I noticed how far things had gone, I had gained significant weight. I was breathless climbing the stairs in my own building. I felt tired by two in the afternoon, and there was something else too — something harder to name and harder to admit.
I had stopped recognising myself.
Not just in photographs, though that was part of it. I mean the quieter kind of not recognising yourself. The version of me that had once been sharp, energetic and unhurried had slowly been replaced by someone who was simply managing.
What my wife saw that I wouldn’t admit
My wife never said it directly; she didn’t need to.
I could see it in the way she watched me after dinner, in the small questions she asked — whether I was sleeping well, whether my back was still bothering me.
She was scared. Not because of how I looked, but because of what might be quietly building inside a body I had stopped paying attention to.
On their anniversary, a simple promise became a commitment to rebuild health, routine, and selfhood step by step.
I understood that fear better when I noticed a few small skin tags on my neck — the kind my father had too, and read enough to know they can sometimes signal early insulin resistance.
It was a wake-up call. If left unchecked, what seemed like a small warning sign today could easily become a much more serious health concern tomorrow.
My body was giving plenty of signals, but I had simply chosen not to read them.
On our anniversary that year, I did not give my wife a gift in the usual sense. Instead, I made her a promise.
I told her I was going to fix this. Not overnight and not through some dramatic reset. Just steadily, every day, without excuses.
She told me later that it was the best gift I had ever given her.
The part nobody tells you about postpartum
While my wife was navigating postpartum, I was struggling with my own version of physical and emotional exhaustion as a new parent.
Postpartum is not always visible. Sometimes, it shows up as exhaustion that never lifts, confidence that quietly fades, and a growing distance from the person you used to be.
And in my own way, I was going through something similar.
There was the weight gain, the exhaustion, the mental fog. I did not have a name for it then; I just knew something was wrong, and I did not know how to say it out loud.
We were both struggling, just in different ways. And neither of us was really talking about it.
I decided to fix myself first. Not because I did not care about her, but because I knew that a man running on empty cannot pull anyone else forward.
As I began to find my footing again, we started making those changes together. What started as my journey gradually became ours.
We started slowly and reclaimed our mornings. We made more intentional food choices and brought movement back into our routine. None of it was dramatic. It was simply consistent.
Watching her come back to herself affected me more deeply than I had anticipated. What began as an effort to improve our health gradually became a shared journey of rebuilding our confidence, routines, and sense of self.
The father I wanted my son to see
I want to be careful here because I have read enough transformation stories to know how they usually go. There is often a dramatic turning point, a heroic effort, and a perfect before-and-after.
Mine did not look like that.
I started with mornings because they were the only part of the day that truly belonged to me. My son was asleep, my wife was asleep, and the house was quiet. That one hour of uninterrupted time became the foundation for everything that followed.
Children do not learn discipline from what you tell them; they learn it from what they see you doing when you think nobody is watching.
I also ended up focusing on food far more than I expected. Through months of trial and error, I realised that nutrition was doing most of the heavy lifting. There were no extreme diets or strict rules — just home-cooked meals, enough protein, and a growing awareness of how small choices added up over time.
The weight came down steadily, and health markers that had been moving in the wrong direction gradually returned to normal.
But what I remember most from that period is not a number on a scale.
It is the morning I was reading before sunrise when my son woke up earlier than usual, walked out into the room, and sat beside me. He picked up a book from the table and pretended to read it too.
That moment taught me something I had not fully understood before.
Children do not learn discipline from what you tell them; they learn it from what they see you doing when you think nobody is watching.
Why fathers need to hear this
At some point, I started sharing parts of this journey on Instagram through my page, @dadwhogotfit. Not because I wanted to build an audience, but because I kept meeting men who recognised exactly what I was describing.
Software engineers, doctors, teachers and men in their mid-thirties and forties who had spent years being excellent at their jobs and responsibilities, while quietly letting themselves go in the process.
Not out of laziness but out of priority, where everything came first, they came last.
Over time, I realised that this affects more than just the individual; it affects the entire family.
A father who is running on empty often brings that exhaustion into every part of his life. But a father who takes care of himself brings something different home each day: more energy, patience, and the ability to be truly present.
The ability to sit on the floor and play, not just supervise.
He didn’t transform through intensity, but through consistency—showing up every morning until discipline quietly became strength again.
That is what this journey ultimately gave me. Not just a healthier body, but a better version of myself to bring home every day.
I still have a long way to go, and I say that openly because I think honesty matters more than a perfect ending.
This is not a story about arriving somewhere.It is a story about choosing, every morning, to keep showing up — for myself, and for the people who matter most.
All images courtesy Bhanu Singh
