From a shy stay-at-home wife and mother to a world-stage bodybuilder, celebrity trainer, mountaineer, DJ and photographer, Kiran Dembla’s transformation is a reminder that life is what we make it.
Her journey shows there is no age limit to starting life’s greatest adventures and is captured in her 2024 biography, Fitness Machine: The Extraordinary Life of Kiran Dembla.
Dembla grew up in Agra, India, in a middle-class family. She had a passion for music, performing on stage and earning a master’s degree in Indian classical music. At 23, she got married and soon had two children, daughter Priyanka and son Kshitij.
“After marriage, my life was confined to the four walls of my house,” Dembla recalls. “Every day, I’d wake up, clean and cook. Ten monotonous years went by. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything I loved. I was tired of asking my husband for money for every little thing. I began asking myself, ‘What if I were financially independent? What did I want from life?’”
The cover of Kiran Dembla’s 2024 biography. Photo: Amazon
She began teaching music to children from home, but that was not enough. The stress and unhappiness manifested physically. At the age of 33, she weighed 76kg (168 pounds) – 24kg more than when she got married. Then she began having excruciating headaches.
“On some days, I felt as though my head would explode,” she says.