Your Body Clock Is Not Society’s Clock: What VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0’s Fitness Panel Said About Energy, Gut Health, and Why Wellness Is a Philosophy – Not a Trend

Moderator Ritvik Pundari opened the Fitness Panel at VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0 with an observation that drew immediate recognition: we live in an era where people meticulously track the calories in a samosa and then ignore the gut damage from the fries they ate alongside it. We have more fitness information available to us than any previous generation and we are, by most measures, less healthy than any recent one.

The session that followed was not about more information. It was about a different relationship to the body – one that begins with curiosity and self-knowledge rather than external prescription.

Dimple Jangda, who left a Wall Street career to found a global Ayurvedic movement and has coached figures including Dev Patel and Juhi Chawla, brought a practical ancient framework to contemporary health questions. Dr. Manjari Chandra, a functional nutrition specialist with twenty years of clinical expertise and author of Brainwashed by Your Gut, brought the science of the gut-brain connection to bear on the same questions. Together, they offered one of VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0’s most immediately applicable sessions.

• Dr. Chandra‘s opening framework explained the holistic wellness talks, globally. Genetics, she told the audience, accounts for approximately 20–30% of health outcomes.
• The rest 70–80% depends upon the lifestyle choices: what you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how you manage stress and what content you scroll everyday!
• She defined fitness not in the conventional sense of exercise and body composition, but as a four-part integration: Physical Resilience + Mental Clarity + Digestive Health + Emotional Regulation.

A person can exercise daily and remain functionally unhealthy if sleep is poor, gut health is compromised, and stress is unmanaged. These systems interact with each other. Optimising one in isolation while ignoring the others produces partial results.

Dr. Chandra explained the gut-brain axis in accessible terms. The gut microbiome – the ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that inhabit the digestive system – regulates not only digestion but energy, mood, immunity, and the capacity for sustained concentration. When this ecosystem is disrupted (dysbiosis – harmful bacteria outnumbering beneficial ones), the effects are not merely digestive. They include brain fog, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and persistent fatigue that no amount of sleep fully resolves.

Symptoms such as anxiety, low motivation, and concentration difficulty among students is not only a psychological phenomenon. It is, in substantial part, a nutritional one. The diet most students eat – high in ultra-processed foods, low in fibre and fermented foods – actively disrupts the gut-brain axis. Simple rules for gut health:

• Eat fibre-rich foods daily – vegetables, fruits, whole grains – to feed beneficial bacteria
• Include fermented foods: curd, idli, dosa, buttermilk – these actively support microbiome diversity
• Reduce sugar: it is the primary fuel source for harmful gut bacteria
• The 80-20 rule: 80% nourishing food, 20% flexibility – sustainability matters more than perfection

Dimple Jangda‘s contribution was built around a framework she called the Three Ds – three forms of compression that accumulate silently in modern bodies and must be actively addressed rather than passively endured.

Decompress: the body, particularly the spine and joints, accumulates physical compression from prolonged sitting – the default posture of students spending hours at desks or on phones. Regular movement is not optional for people in sedentary academic environments. It is structural maintenance.

Destress: stress accumulates in specific physical locations – the neck, shoulders, and gut – and must be actively removed, not merely tolerated. Jangda’s distinction was precise: tolerating stress is not the same as managing it. Stress that is normalised but not addressed creates hormonal imbalance, immune suppression, and the kind of chronic fatigue that no amount of sleep fully resolves.

Detox: not as extreme fasting, not as the commercialised cleanse industry describes it, but as the daily practice of eliminating what harms normal functioning. “If food can survive on a shelf for six months,” she said, “it can disrupt the gut for equally long.”

She also introduced Ayurvedic food philosophy – the idea that every food has a ‘personality’ that influences physical, emotional, and mental states. What you eat is not neutral: it is information the body integrates into its current state of functioning. The Ideal Daily Plate she recommended:

• 2 bowls of fruits – morning and evening
• 2 bowls of vegetables – at lunch and dinner
• 2 bowls of millets – replacing refined flour as the carbohydrate base
• 2 bowls of protein: lentils, legumes, pulses
• 1 handful of nuts and seeds daily

• The session’s most directly useful exchange for students came around a behaviour most of them recognised. When the moderator asked how many had pulled all-nighters before exams, most hands went up. The Fitness Panel addressed this from a biological angle.
• Every individual has a personal energy rhythm – a natural cycle of peak performance, maintenance, and recovery that is not identical to the social schedule imposed by academic timetables.
• Society’s standard clock – study at night, sleep during morning lectures, caffeinate to compensate – runs directly against the body’s natural functioning for most people.
• The capacity to understand your own energy rhythm is, Jangda argued, a professional skill as valuable as any technical knowledge. The person who knows when they are at their clearest, and who structures their most demanding work around those windows, outperforms the person of equal ability who does not – not through greater effort, but through greater alignment between effort and the biological conditions that make it most productive.

Do this activity for a week and track your results mindfully!
Track your energy across the day, not your productivity, but your actual felt energy. Notice when you are at your clearest, when you fade, when you recover. Use that data, not a social convention, to structure your study schedule.

The session closed with a statement that connected the practical content to the broader aspirational context of VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0.

“Health is the foundation of ambition.” Not because sick people cannot achieve things – they can, and many do – but because the capacity to sustain effort, to maintain clarity, to recover from setbacks, to show up consistently across years rather than sprinting and collapsing – these are the qualities that determine what becomes of long-term professional ambitions. And they are not primarily a matter of motivation. They are primarily a matter of biology.

For students who came to VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0 motivated by speakers on leadership, entrepreneurship, and career, the Fitness Panel offered something those sessions implicitly depended on: the biological substrate without which motivation, discipline, and ambition cannot function at their full capacity. Attending the body is not separate from attending to your aspirations. It is the precondition of them.