Any success stories from India??

This is quite the thread I've been looking for on MFP! Thanks for starting it - it's a little bit easy to feel demotivated when everyone's eating salmon and cutting out pasta and no one has any context for the extreme lack of exercise opportunity alongside of the continuous carbohydrate service we are all born to in India!
I don't think I want to call myself a success story yet, but yes, a work-in-progress story. I gained the Indian equivalent of the freshman15 in moving from South India to North India in my early twenties, but in those days, going from 4 rotis per meal (!!!) to 2 (all served up hot at the hostel mess!) was enough to restore proportions. But then, in my late twenties, I found out what was what. Tons of processed foods, trans-fat in mostly booming Punjabi neighbourhoods (the kind where folk drive up of a Sunday morning to eat Chole-bature seated in their expensive Audis or Beetles) all did their bit to give me a new body type.
I realised too late that I'd after all had a very flat stomach the first 28 years of my life and alas had never celebrated it till one alphabet dropped out of flat. Then one thing after another, I taught myself to eat better - oat bran+wheat half-and-half rotis, sprouts, regular eating (!!!whodathunk) became my friends, to slowly build activity into even my sedentary workday, such as taking the stairs, sitting much less at work, and walking five minutes at least and so on. My weight fell from approximately 70 kilos (and I'm 5 foot nothing) to a more manageable 63 today over a slow crawl of about two years. Many of my ills like aching knees, a constantly grumpy stomach, breathlessness, and my short temper, all new frenemies from the sub-70kg zone of my life, fled.
There was also a brief moment in which I even glimpsed the magic 60 kilo figure, sometime last summer. The 55 kg my body quite contentedly lived in till my late 20s is really still far far away (I'm 32 now), and my fLat belly shows no nostalgic desire to return to me alas.
In the course of trying to eat right, I learned it is amazingly easy for Indians to eat right, it gave me a terrific sense of control and power, knowledge of the ability to shape my own body - which is something almost no one ever teaches us till it's too late - but I still struggle with eating on time, with needing a veritable IV line for tea into my bloodstream every waking hour, with getting enough exercise. I'm okay with the slowness of it, and in many ways feel gaining 15 kilos in 3 years and then trying to reset my body has given me insight I would never ever have had if I'd never become "healthy" (North India's code for "fat"). At the same time, I wonder, where's that flat stomach again when I know its worth? Youth is wasted on the young
Long post, but I had to say hello to all you ladies!