Introducing Kilter

Kiran Jonnalagadda
Kilter blog
Published in
3 min readDec 31, 2016

--

kilter · \ˈkil-tər\
noun: proper or usual state or condition
example: “out of kilter,” out of harmony or balance

For many years we’ve been watching the growing waistlines around us with growing alarm. What is happening?

We are products of our environments. Maybe you want to eat healthy but your office cafeteria serves what it does, and you can no longer take the friction of going out of your way. Maybe you really intend to run in the park regularly, but getting there requires a commute in Bangalore traffic. Our environments wear us down, and sooner or later we give up and go with the flow.

The world’s population in 1960 was a mere 3 billion. Today, less than a century later, it’s well over 7 billion. Keeping so many extra people well fed has meant that the food we eat today is not what our grandparents grew up eating. Evolution designed our bodies for bouts of feasting and famine, but modern food security has given us a 24/7 feast. One popular adage says that you shouldn’t eat anything your grandparents wouldn’t recognise as food. The irony is that their childhood selves wouldn’t recognise most things we eat. The frames of reference our grandparents used to define healthy food and living need refreshing for today’s realities.

When your local cafe or food delivery startup runs a marketing campaign for a “sinful” dessert, the name itself should tell you that it isn’t good for you. But why? What frame of reference do you have to conclude that this dessert is unhealthy? If your only source of information on health is marketing messages, “sinful” devolves into a synonym for “tasty”.

A salad isn’t necessarily healthy and a dessert isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but you can’t tell them apart without a good frame of reference, something you’ve arrived at via reasoned debate rather than yet another marketing campaign.

Governments worldwide have taken on the mantle of defining health guidelines for their populations, but somehow that hasn’t stopped a growing worldwide obesity problem, and related lifestyle illnesses like diabetes. Governments, as it turns out, are susceptible to interest groups pushing their own agendas. The tobacco industry spent decades trying to convince everyone cigarettes weren’t harmful, and as we’re now learning, the sugar industry did too.

Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits. We were motivated to do this after trying a few simple but counterintuitive changes to our lifestyles, leading to dramatic improvements, and discovering a growing community of like-minded individuals experimenting with their own bodies. Your body is not without hope.

Kilter is a conference, a place where we will gather researchers and practitioners who will share what they’ve learnt, that they can demonstrate as being reproducible, but Kilter is also a community because this is about you. You’re not going to get anywhere without a support ecosystem to supply your needs, and a network of peers to lean on. Neither diet nor exercise are one-time or short-term affairs. They are habits that must be built and reinforced over a lifetime.

This is a community blog. Over the next two months as we lead up to the conference, we’ll have a series of posts to help you build a frame of reference and compare notes. Give us your time and attention before you invest your money on new year’s resolution schemes that go nowhere as usual. Follow us on Medium, Twitter and Facebook to stay in touch.

Here’s to a happier, healthier 2017 for all of us.

--

--

Tech and society enthusiast. I helped make @hasgeek, @internetfreedom, @kaarana_, @SpeakForMe, @hasjob, and @KilterClub.