When her seven-year-old son returned from school and announced, “I am very stressed, I want pizza for lunch,” Chinchak Satapathy was stunned.
“I realised that my son had begun associating food with coping with stress” from watching his parents, she says. “I thought, ‘What are we teaching our child’?”
The moment, in October 2023, was a wake-up call for Satapathy and her husband, Himanshu Thakur. The corporate executives had moved with their then-toddler Ameya to Hong Kong from New Delhi in India in 2018.
Both had been physically active while growing up, but began putting on the pounds once they started working – and even more during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We were stuck at home and found ourselves trapped in a cycle of stress and unhealthy eating. The stress fuelled the unhealthy eating, and the unhealthy eating created more stress,” Satapathy says. They were drinking alcohol three to four times a week either socially or alone at home.
