Week 2 · Radical Ownership · Beyond FMF towards a Kingdom Mindset
In August 2024, about nine years after Ebenezer opened, I crossed the road from a hospital in Bengaluru, India, to my hotel with the medical reports in my hand. The room had automated curtains. The first thing I did was close them, and I locked the door.
The reports confirmed what I already feared. No hormone imbalance. No mysterious condition. Nothing hereditary that fully explained the dangerous weight I had accumulated. The only real issue was obesity, and the secondary problems it had already created in my body. I had flown there hoping for an external explanation, something I could point to and say, "See? It's not my fault."
There was none.
What the mirror brought back
I sat down in front of the mirror, and for two hours I had the most candid conversation I have ever had with myself. I said it out loud: "How did I get to this?"
The answers came as faces and rooms. First came the excuse I had used for years. My maternal grandfather was a giant of a man, and when people saw my size, most put it down to him. It runs in the family, they said, and I let them. The reports had said otherwise in black and white.
Then came the attempts. In the UK I paid for a full year of gym membership and showed up for one month. Friends and family tried to help. Nothing stuck. I remembered the people who had tried hardest, the ones who warned me plainly that if I was not careful, they were going to lose me. I heard the words. I did not see what they saw.
What the reports could not show
The tests had ruled out the body's usual excuses. What was left was in the mind. In occupational health we have a name for it: a psychosocial hazard, the harm that comes from the work itself, from long hours, constant pressure and stress carried for years with nowhere to put it down.
I traced my life after medical school: Iraq, the UK, South Sudan, coming home, starting Ebenezer from almost nothing, being everything to everyone, debt cycles that seemed to have no end. I had used food as a coping mechanism for years. It was not one dramatic event. It was small, daily choices that compounded, just like interest.
Then the man in the glass took me back to the boy. When my father died, I was ten. I went to live with my paternal grandfather, milked cows before dawn, and ferried a fifty-litre can of milk into town on the back of a bicycle. Years later, a woman from that milk run came to me for a blood pressure check. That boy had carried fifty litres before dawn. How did he end up like this?
It is on me
By the end of the two hours the excuses were gone. Not my grandfather. Not the town. Not the clinic. Not the debts.
Even if it is not my fault, it is still my responsibility. That sentence is the hinge. Ownership does not wait for fairness. If it is in your life, you own it.
Before I slept I made a vow. At 6 a.m. the next morning I was on the hotel treadmill. I have not really stopped since.
Turned outward
The same truth was waiting at work. In the chaos years, salaries were not always paid on time. I called a management meeting and said plainly: "I need to apologise. Some of the problems in this business are caused by me." The room went quiet. When I owned my part in public, the team had permission to own theirs.
This week, in our clinic, we are talking about blood pressure and stroke. High blood pressure often gives no warning. You cannot own a number you have never seen. Owning your health can start with something as small as knowing your reading and talking to a health worker about what it means.
Take thirty minutes alone, phone in the other room. Write down what in your life is yours to own. Watch for any sentence that begins with someone else's name.
This story is told in full in Principle 1 of my book, Beyond the Stethoscope, available from 10 November 2026. To work through ownership with me, for your health or your business, book a coaching session in our app: ebenezerclinic.org/coaching-booking.