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Journalism of Courage
People keep asking Pune-based fitness startup Omfit the names of the stars that they train. Omfit, an online personal training and nutrition coaching app, says their kind of celebrity is the obese woman who has switched to a healthier lifestyle, or the person who started exercising to get fit, graduating to running marathons or powerlifting.
“They did not rely on some magical pill or powder but fixed their daily habits and made lifestyle changes,” says Omkar Chincholkar, an electronics engineer, who founded Omfit with Divita Kaushal in 2018. The bootstrapped company says that it has transformed 7,500 lifestyles and has an ambitious goal of reaching a billion. Almost 85 per cent of their clients are from the city’s IT offices.
India has the dubious distinction of being one of the world capitals of lifestyle diseases. Among the many worrying trends revealed in the Health of Nation report by Apollo Hospitals, published in April 2024, is that three out of four people undergoing health checks at Apollo were either obese or overweight. The report also mentions that “with a whole host of environmental and lifestyle factors that have increased stress levels and triggered obesity, the spotlight is on blood pressure”.
Divita, an engineer who has trained in entrepreneurship and management at IIM Bangalore, was among those with an unhealthy lifestyle until, in 2018, she was diagnosed with Benign Intracranial Hypertension (BIH). “I was just out of college, working in a good company and didn’t even imagine that something big could go wrong,” she says.
“Omkar, whom I knew from college, mapped out a routine and, in three to four months, I was down to four medicines from 16 and then it eventually went to one medicine. I have not suffered a relapse though, in my condition, the chances of a relapse are more than 80 per cent,” she says.
Chincholkar says that stress levels are especially high for techies. “They live for the weekend as the rest of the week is filled with a lot of work. We have seen that people are in a very bad relationship with food. Stress eating leads to more stress eating and one is caught in a vicious cycle,” says Chincholkar.
Many a time, clients come to Omfit when they are suffering from back pain after sitting long hours or a blood report shows that they are pre-diabetic. At Omfit, whose doors open to a big skeleton and charts of the muscular system, experts put clients through an exercise and nutrition regimen focussed on lifestyle changes.
Fitness outlets are mushrooming across the country as are the quick-fix diets, dubious supplements and unsafe shortcuts advised by social media. These are Omfit’s biggest challenges as they expand.
The startup is familiar with clients willing to go through extreme measures “to lose 15 kg in two months for a wedding”. “We tell them that we believe in long-term solutions,” says Chincholkar, who is pursuing his PhD in Management of Metabolic and Musculoskeletal Conditions with the help of Exercise and Nutrition. “Our agenda is to make people independent and strong in a scientific way,” he adds.
