Dr. Mangalore
Vittal Kamath

I started because I was embarrassed

For thirty-eight years I ran a multi-speciality hospital in Haveri, a small town in northern Karnataka. Patients came through my doors, farmers among them, with blood sugar and blood pressure readings that frightened me, and I found myself giving all of them the same advice: move more.

I realised the main reason was lack of exercise. As doctors, we must practise what we preach. That thought made me start walking.

On 1 January 2008 I walked five kilometres. Two months later, ten. Six months later, fifteen. It settled at twenty-four kilometres a day and it has not moved since — not for weather, not for travel, not for work.

The job that had to go

The routine costs five and a half hours a day. When it stopped fitting around senior posts as Principal and Medical Superintendent at private medical institutions, I resigned them. I had to choose between my walks and a lucrative job, and I happily quit my job.

I kept walking through my mother’s final illness, caring for her without missing a day. I have since moved to Bengaluru, where I teach at a private dental college and cover my 24 km inside my apartment complex — a route I know down to the metre.

Eighty countries, one routine

I have travelled to more than eighty countries and completed the day’s walk in every one of them. High-altitude mornings at Pangong Lake in Ladakh. Eastern European winters. Seattle in April, where the thermometer read between zero and five degrees when I set out.

• Hungary
• Australia
• Croatia

More from abroad in the gallery

Remember, your mind is way stronger than your body.

What I eat, and what I do not take

Millets, green vegetables, dal, fresh salads, protein. A shot of garlic, turmeric, ginger and curry leaves after the pre-dawn walk. Water through the day, and a rule I repeat to anyone who will listen: “One must eat only about eighty per cent of what the body demands.”

My vital signs sit within normal limits. I have not caught a cold in more than fifteen years and have not needed a tablet for any ailment in that time.

Before the walk, the Gita

I wake at 2:45 am in Brahma Muhurta, the hour before dawn, and spend it chanting verses from the Bhagavad Gita — the whole scripture, from memory — and practising acupressure before I put my shoes on. The walk is a mental exercise as much as a physical one.

In April 2026 I stood in front of 1,500 people in Seattle and told them, in plain language, how to start.