If Our Bodies Could Talk

Best-selling author and physician Dr. James Hamblin

dr-james-hamblin-catalyst-podcast
Catalyst - Health, Wellness & Performance Podcast

Full Transcript

Brad Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching Podcast. My name is Bradford Cooper, and I’ll be your host. Have you ever wished your body could talk? Well after today you might just pick up some keys to what it’s already telling you. We have medical doctor health editor for the Atlantic and author of the frankly, pretty entertaining and informative book titled If Our Bodies Could Talk, operating and maintaining a human body. The interview with Dr. Hamblin was a lot of fun and we covered everything from the ridiculous nature of some of these immune boosting claims that you see on products these days to why we should eat the entire apple, yes core and all, to the way in which pushups might be a better measure of overall health than our BMI. I think you’re gonna enjoy this one and hopefully pick up some insights that are not only practical for everyday life, but also based on the evidence. Just a reminder, there’s still time to join us for the first ever Rocky Mountain Coaching Retreat and Symposium and Estes park, Colorado, September 6th to the 8th. We’ve got a great group, incredible lineup of speakers. I’ve been going through some of their talks lately and a pretty hefty first-year discount for this, this event. If you would like to jump in at the last minute here. The next wellness coach certification is November 9th and 10th in Colorado, and there’s also a distance learning option available if that’s better for your plans, by the way, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in a really long time. If it helps there’s a six month, no interest option available both for the retreat and the certification. So just want to throw that out there. All the details can be found at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com or feel free to email us anytime Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.com with any questions we’re happy to discuss career plans, details about the national board certification, or basically anything coaching related. Now on with the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching Podcast.

Brad Cooper

Well, Dr. Hamblin, welcome to the show.

Dr. Hamblin

Thank you for having me.

Brad Cooper

Absolutely. Your background is fascinating. I read through your book this weekend and, and I just I’ll I’ll do the short version. Then you can broaden it out for us a little bit, but you finished med school. You start your residency in radiology at UCLA of all places, but then your mentor’s little conversation you realize, I don’t think this is for me. You go on to become the editor for the health section of the Atlantic. My friend, that’s quite a journey. Can you kind of fill us in on the backstory?

Dr. Hamblin

Um, yeah, well, it’s kind of a long story, but I realized that there are lots of ways to practice medicine and that we need more voices in public health and prevention and working in the radiology reading room is, um, kind of, it starts to feel like a churn. Like you’re seeing all these chronic problems and follow ups and I didn’t feel personally like I was making a difference. Obviously radiologists are super important professions don’t mean to say that, I didn’t feel as motivated by purpose as I needed to be to kind of devote my whole life to it. So I stepped away and I found the found writing, and I had enough success with it to make a career out of it. And I’ve had fun with it and I hope I’m making, I feel like I’m making a little more of a difference than I was back then.

Brad Cooper

And do you ever go to those mentors and say, seriously, why did you not bring this up seven years ago?

Dr. Hamblin

Um, you know there are good and bad things. I think people practicing clinically have a much more, um, much more stable career, honestly, writing and doing media is, is a much more uncertain and you don’t have that sort of face to face clinical patient contact that most clinicians have. So, so nothing’s perfect, but I personally am very fulfilled by this and I find it actually more intellectually stimulating to take on these bigger population level problems.

Brad Cooper

Very cool. We just interviewed David Epstein with the book Range and it, your story reminds me of what he basically encourages is don’t feel like you have to stay the course in this one thing, just because you started that. So, uh, interesting combo between the two of you. So you and I originally connected after you wrote the article about pushups and using that as somewhat of a, you know, a monitor of some sort, can you share some of the insights with our audience about that concept?

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah, that’s interesting because when I went to medical school, I graduated in 2009 and I still think it’s the case that most people are trained to kind of identify BMI or body weight as one of the primary indicators of a person’s health. You’ve got their age, any serious diagnoses and BMI or body weight is going to be right up there, um, in terms of issues. And it’s, we also know that it’s a terrible indicator of, uh, of health it’s that you have these people who are, have a lot of muscle mass and not a lot of body fat who can have high BMI’s. And that there’s also tons of people who have there’s various names for it, but skinny fat people who don’t aren’t overweight and don’t have a high BMI, but have really high body fat percentages, just as much at risk of metabolic disease as people with higher BMI’s. So, and that gives them a false sense of security if their BMI is not, um, in an abnormal range. So what is a better, and then, sorry, I could go on and on with the problems with BMI, you know, the ideas of the body, shaming, fat shaming and all the attendant, psychological things that come along with this as, as a measure that’s imbued with cultural judgment, um, as opposed to simply a clinical metric that, um, you know, it’s just very complicated. And if there was a way to, to have a simpler, less loaded way of assessing someone’s overall health real quickly and cheaply, what would that be? And that’s been something I’ve been wondering about for a long time, because I continue to talk about obesity and reference BMI and it came up that, uh, yeah, that, uh, maybe doing a pushup, a good predictor of health, that it seems like it really could be, um, that if you can lift your body weight, it’s sort of indicative of the fact that you have, you don’t have an enormous amount of body weight, but also it’s a good predictor of your muscle to fat ratio, which is a better predictor of health than BMI.

Brad Cooper

And I, can’t remember the number. Was it 30? Was that kind of the optimal as far as the number of pushups that if you can hit 30, you know, you’re, you’re in a good place or was there not really, it seems like I saw that somewhere, either in your article or Alex Hutchinson’s follow-up article.

Dr. Hamblin

I think I didn’t get anyone to commit to a number and that’s kind of another actually nice thing about it is that you can track it yourself, if you can do zero and it’s not because of a shoulder injury or something then, um, that, that there’s an issue, but it’s going to be more about tracking your own progress. There’s not, you know, we draw a line at 30 and that is where you are obese and you’re, you know, and that problem is that there’s not one perfect solution for everybody. Um, so, but this is something where you can actually track and see progress. You can get to one pushup and then you can get to two. Right. And, and what would be meaningful clinically is if, you know, last month you were able to do 10 and then suddenly you’re down to three. There may be something that could actually be some acute illnesses going on, to decompensate that quickly.

Brad Cooper

Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. All right. So I pulled up this video of you eating an apple and in 2013, you wrote about eating the whole thing. Now I’ll admit when I saw that, when I read it, it kind of sounded odd, but I think that’s just because I’ve been eating, not the core for the last 50 years, fill us in on why it doesn’t just decrease waste, but actually could be good for you.

Dr. Hamblin

Um, it’s funny that you say that because I just published another article, uh, about that. And it turns out that that is that part is loaded with fiber and it is also littered with microbes. And another thing I’ve written about is the importance of sort of keeping a diverse gut microbiome and how that influences your immune system and all different kinds of conditions. And a lot of people are out there trying to sell probiotic pills and supplements and things that we don’t know if they work and if they do, they might have all kinds of other side effects, but it turns out that fruits and vegetables are loaded with fiber to support the microbes and then microbes themselves. So an apple contains about a hundred trillion bacteria in it on average. And when you eat that you are exposing your microbes to more microbes in a healthy way. And most of those are in the fibrous core. So it’s actually not that bad. It sounds weird to eat an apple core, but when you eat it from the bottom, you get just a little bit of that central fibrous area, in each bite, and it’s barely noticeable. And, uh, you, yeah, you get more, more food for your money and you don’t waste things and you get more microbes. So what’s not to like?

Brad Cooper

And it seems like you even eat the stem is that true?

Dr. Hamblin

You could, I usually pull the stem off.

Brad Cooper

I’ll follow that one.

Dr. Hamblin

The seeds technically have a precursor to cyanide in them. That’s but that’s, you can eat one every day, a core every day, and it should be fine as long as you’re not a child or you’re just, already eating a lot of other seeds. So that’s not something to worry about, but it is something that people ask me about a lot.

Brad Cooper

Very good. And then you expand on that a little bit. So the gut biome, that, that is getting a lot of attention right now, any general advice or guidance or insights you could share with folks that might say, Oh, wait, go, go into that a little bit more. I want to hear more.

Dr. Hamblin

Oh yeah. I love it because it’s an area that’s both extremely promising and legitimately interesting and important, and also full of hyperbolic claims and bad information, trying to say that this is the cause of all different kinds of things we just don’t know yet. And so the real practical advice that everybody seems to be a lot of people emailing me about is just what probiotics should I be taking? How much? And, um, yeah, I’ve just written a piece that’s called, uh, the best probiotic is real food. That’s the headline that I have on it right now, um, which I could refer people to. But it is to say that we did not evolve to need to take bacterial capsules. And if you’re eating a plant heavy diet of minimally processed foods, you’re taking in a lot of microbes and a lot of fiber, and that is the best approach to thinking about probiotics. Um, just, just like taking vitamins. You don’t have to take them through a pill. If you’re getting a good diet, it’s going to be the same with probiotics. And I think that’s an actual nice way to think about it. This is another reason to wonder why, why is a salad healthier than a multivitamin? You know, if theoretically you’re getting the same amount of nutrients, we’ve, we’ve always known that we haven’t known exactly why. And it turns out probably like you’re getting millions of microbes in the salad and the vitamin C has none. So it’s a nice reason to kind of keep doing the same things you’ve always been taught to do.

Brad Cooper

Nice. Nice. It comes back to the basics. So great, great job on the book. I’ve got it sitting right here in front of me. If our bodies could talk, operating and maintaining the human body, what I loved about it, because what we try to do, there’s so much bologne out there in wellness. There’s so much of the, you know, fad chasing headline chasing stuff. And it’s nice when you bring an evidence-based, but fun to read book to the forefront that we can, we can go out and get. What were some of your favorite discoveries as you went through this, as you did your research, do you have a list off the top of your head? You can just say, Hey, you know what? I was stunned at this, or this really got my attention, or just take your time, hit it, whatever you’d like to hit.

Dr. Hamblin

Oh, wow. Well, it was, the book is a compilation of questions that friends and family and readers have sent in to me and wanted me to investigate. So some of it I knew and a lot of it, I didn’t. And the, maybe the biggest thing that I took away from it was thinking about the idea. A lot of people think about nutrition and food and what we eat in terms of just personal health and that as climate change impacts our health in terms of smog and, and the way that, uh, our food systems change and the way that our, uh, infrastructure is built and how much physical activity we get and all these things that are interrelated. Um, we can’t be thinking about our food, our nutrition, separate from where our food is coming from. So that, that, that just really changed my perspective in med school. I only thought I was only taught to think about whether food is good is if it prevents heart disease, basically, you know, or decreases obesity. And in fact, um, there was a question that actually came to me later, then the book, but I sort of deal with it in the book as well. Is people doing paleo diets and people like Jordan Peterson is doing an all beef diet right now and believes that it’s healthy and people want to come to me or want to know if that’s healthy. And to me, that’s almost like asking if eating only diamonds would be healthy. It’s going to run out. I can’t, you just can’t eat that, we can’t all eat beef all the time. Uh, I can’t recommend that at any wide scale. So it’s kind of irrelevant as to whether it has health benefits. It’s, it’s irresponsible and unsustainable. So it also just does seem to be the microbiologist I’ve talked to say that’s very bad for maintaining a healthy biome. Um, but it, but it’s also relevant. So, uh, yeah, just thinking about them in that holistic way of, um, was illuminating for me as a physician. I don’t think a lot of doctors or clinicians think about that and, yeah, sorry. I, I could go on and on about that.

Brad Cooper

Let me give you a related topic. Uh, I loved your section on Bulletproof coffee. Cause I, I think the guy’s a marketing genius, but I just don’t get it. I just don’t get it. And obviously you have plenty of questions as well. Why is it that we’re so drawn now I’m getting to the psychology side instead of the medical side, but why is it we’re so drawn to these dramatic claims, these go all in on this, any sense or anything that you discovered as you were looking at some of these things?

Dr. Hamblin

Um, yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons, but they’re just very seductive claims to tell you that you can think more quickly and effectively and be better. And, and so there’s optimization side and then there’s the fear side, which he always, he also does a good job of thinking that you’re preventing cognitive decline or Alzheimer’s or things that people are so truly afraid of. And you have even smart, skeptical consumers who will see that and say, ah, you know, I know it’s bogus, I know it’s bogus, but if there’s a 1% chance that it works, it’s worth my $20, you know, um, because you have what you have an enormous profit margin on these products, but also relatively low barrier to entry. You’re not asking for $2,000, the $20 is something that you have most people can find a way to make that part of their routine. So it’s, and, and tapping into things that people are really, really afraid of and really, really desire. Uh, it’s just always been part of, uh, any capitalist market marketplace, but especially in the US. People selling snake oil, it will continue to be, I realized that kind of trying to debunk that stuff just, it’s not even an intellectual decision. So many people know that that’s, that it’s bogus and yet they continued to try it. So I’m not certain the best way other than to, I’m trying to take a more proactive approach to giving people better solutions, like pointing them in the direction of, I’m not saying that your probiotic supplements are stupid and that you’re dumb for buying them. I’m saying the best approach is actually to eat a whole plant-based diet. I mean, I really, I re that’s really, really true. And if you really will focus on that, you can save money and you can enjoy eating and all these things people actually want. And I think just directing people toward that is probably going to be more effective than constantly trying to debunk these weird fads. Um, but I don’t know, that’s where I am right now.

Brad Cooper

Spin off of that slightly. I hadn’t planned on asking this, but, uh, I think it might fit in nicely here. So the Bulletproof coffee, one of the draws to that is obviously that people already like their coffee, so you’re not asking them to do much more. And then you get into the benefits of the caffeine. So the stimulant or the stimulation that comes from that a hundred to 200 milligrams of caffeine, there is a, a feeling you get with that. Can you talk to us about caffeine? I don’t want people throwing stuff at you, but any guidance on it, because most of the headlines, and I think you make this point in your book that, you know, you, you want to tell people things they want to hear. And so a lot of the headlines draw out, Oh, coffee does these positive things, what any just general guidance for us things to watch out for? Uh, my next question is, is kind of about the extent of things and in your statement that, you know, it’s generally things in moderation, okay. Things taken to excess are not, but can you just take us down the path of caffeine a little bit and what some of your recommendations might be if we were sitting face to face and I was asking you, should I be drinking it? How much should I be drinking? Any warning things, et cetera.

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah. I think that any report that said that there are health benefits is not strong enough to make anyone start to recommend that anyone start drinking caffeine, if they aren’t already and don’t enjoy it. Um, because those tend to be just correlations. We really can’t prove. Um, but if you, if you love caffeine and you enjoy it, it’s also very, probably safe. I think the two main things that people see and don’t realize they can attribute to caffeine are insomnia and anxiety. And I think if anyone, anyone who is dealing with either of those things before starting any kind of anti-anxiety medication or sleeping medication, which have their side effects, you should get off caffeine. I think it can have more far reaching effects than we realize, especially as you get a tolerance to it. And, and Americans drink a lot of it. Um, I forget the numbers off the top of my head, but almost everyone has some form every day. And it’s, it’s, it’s a lot, it’s in so many different products and it’s actually not that hard to stop and to get off of, it’s just hard for a few days, and then you end up out or it’s definitely worth testing out. And so that’s the thing to think of, but you know, if you’re not experiencing those side effects and you love your coffee and you’re doing great sleeping well and not feeling super anxious, then I would never tell someone to stop.

Brad Cooper

Uh, that’s, there’s a lot of wisdom there. I appreciate that. So anxiety or insomnia, your two kind of red flags that might make it worth reconsidering.

Dr. Hamblin

Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s all kinds of things that we tend to treat in this country with more pills or more treatments instead of working backwards and establishing these baseline lifestyle things. So when, and when you have anxiety or insomnia, then look at the lifestyle factors first and caffeine is going to be high on those lists of things that could just be the actual root cause.

Brad Cooper

Great, great, excellent advice. And I think for, especially for the wellness coaches listening here, they’re going to be able to put that into practice. All right. So I’m going to read a little section from your book. It’s just a sentence and a half here, but it builds on what we just talked about. And I’d love to get your thoughts about how it can kind of feed into how our coaches can address the questions they’ll get around this. So you said, even though we know better, we tend to resist the idea that most things are beneficial in some contexts or amounts and harmful in others, it’s easier to regard things as simply good or bad to be adored or avoided. So again, a lot of health and wellness coaches or folks thinking about going that route or just health and wellness is important to them obviously. And they’re wondering about the crazy diets, the fads, the, you know, the extremes of things that you and I have touched on up to this point, how can they kind of integrate this concept that you mentioned, or that you focus on, frankly, into these discussions that are having?

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah, well, I think that’s why that’s why coaches are so important. Coaches, doctors, primary care people, uh, all having this is we need our own individual person to make individualized recommendations for us because it is not so simple as making, making large decrees to the public about what is good or bad and different amounts in different contexts and different times. At one point, um, you might have really benefited from a certain lifestyle or practice that later on in life isn’t, uh, you know, some dietary change or something and, um, people need to be flexible and just not get these rigid ideas about, um, what works for them and what doesn’t, what works for them. And yeah, it’s, it’s vital to to stay flexible and to think about constantly adjusting to the various circumstances. At the same time, we need these national guidelines to sort of set standards of practice so that people aren’t radically, uh, you know, deviating from what science is telling us, but it’s almost, almost never the case. I think of, you know, there’s a few directives that you can take and, and be like, well, this is pretty clearly good for everyone. You know, eating, eating a high fiber diet, a lot of salads, plants, um, that’s good getting around eight hours of sleep, having meaningful work and a fulfilling social life and, uh, there, uh, and being active, um, it’s hard to say exactly what kind of activity or exactly how much you should be doing, but generally more is better. You know, you, you start getting really vague as you start to try to find guidelines about what’s actually good for everyone. So yeah, it’ll be constantly challenging. And, and, and I think anytime you hear about something like, Oh, this particular food is just good or, or, or it’s bad, or any other recommendations, you know, realize that might be some contexts where occasional glass of wine is it’s going to be not totally innocuous and four glasses a day is not.

Brad Cooper

Especially before 10:00 AM, right?

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah. I think you’re supposed to start around a 11, I think.

Brad Cooper

Exactly. All right. So good timing on our, our, our chuckles there, laughter is medicine. It’s a phrase that’s part of our lexicon. You mentioned it in the book. Can you talk us through that? The meaning of it, the value of it, those kinds of?

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah. Uh, I, you know, and it, it kind of the idea that everything can be, can be medicine and it would help to think about it that way. Um, this is sort of tangential to laughter, but I’ve written, but I’ve written about the benefits of nature exposure as well. And that we know that we need to get out into nature and just spending time in parks is good. You tend to move, you tend to, you know, meet other people, or at least see other people come in contact with animals and soil and fresh air. And, um, it just gets all these benefits. But when doctors tell people to go, you know, get outside more, you know, uh, or just get more physical activity, people don’t do it. But if you actually write a prescription for a park and tell people where to go, how many times a week, like find one that’s near their house, that they have a bus route they can get to and it’s safe and populated by people who they feel like they might, I don’t know, get along with whatever factors might keep them from going to that park, take them into consideration and actually write a prescription for me to do it. Then you’re written out on a prescription pad. It starts to feel like medicine, um, in a way that any, because we don’t take that approach to lifestyle, things like laughter it’s hard to write or harder to write a prescription for laughter. But if you were to write a prescription to go to, um, you know, start taking some improv classes or go, uh, you know, there’s other ways to create regimented approaches that actually give people a concrete thing they can do to incorporate this end results into their lives, which I’m sure that your, uh, your listeners are well familiar with, but it’s something that’s very foreign to a lot of, uh, MDs who think only of medicine as a pill that you take at certain times.

Brad Cooper

Speaking to that, do you see that changing at all? Our son is a junior neuroscience heading to med school. You know, we hope that him being around us will kind of take him down that path because he naturally is, is more holistic in the way he lives his life, even as a 20 year old for goodness sake. But do you see the profession changing to more lifestyle versus prescription? What is your, because you’re right there. I mean, you’ve been living it.

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah. Um, it’s gotten too expansive I think, and not to mention our, our healthcare system is bankrupting itself. So I think at the same time that we’ve realized that health is this whole holistic thing that has to do with lifestyle and how communities are built and social determinants of health. Um, we are also having to realize that that all can’t fall under the purview of doctors because the primary care doctors are overworked as it is. And we need these interdisciplinary teams and people don’t have access to high levels of medical care. And if we’re to expand any sort of universal health care coverage, it’s not going to be able to include, um, you know, park prescriptions and, uh, nutritional coaching for everyone in a way that ideally would, I think just as a kind of political reality. So actually the role of MDs might be going back to more of the basics of actually performing surgeries and doing things that you really need the MD to be able to do, making the diagnosis and then incorporating bigger, more interdisciplinary teams to think about the overall lifestyle approaches because it’s inseparable. Um, sorry, that’s, that’s a, that’s a long answer, but I don’t know that it’s tenable for, um, yeah, that, that’s the way we have to think about health. Um, but we need to break down who does what in what part of that, and in order for us to have any actual plan for, for how to overhaul entire lives and entire communities.

Brad Cooper

Right. Right. Well, and hopefully wellness coaches will play a big role there. Um, so you, you mentioned immune boosting claims and it’s kind of with a little chuckle or a wink in the book. Talk us through that a little bit, that the concept a what’s reality, what’s not et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Hamblin

Um, yeah, that is mostly bogus. I think anything that is claiming that would be too simplistic. Um, these are mostly supplements and, uh, that is a claim that you can make legally without having any backing.

Brad Cooper

Oh, is that right? Interesting.

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah. Yeah. The whole supplement industry, um, had a big lobbying campaign, the 1990s that let them advertise and market, um, without any evidence of efficacy and without even the ability of the government to recall, to force a recall on products. Um, so you can make claims that don’t, as long as you’re not making a disease carrying claim, uh, like this, this will cure multiple sclerosis or this will cure celiac disease. You can say immune boost boosting our immune modulating and, and people can read into that. Anything they want, anything not relating to a disorder. So it’s a really rich area for fraud. And the way the immune system is made healthy is by exposure to, uh, all kinds of different microbes, healthy, good microbes, which you get by going outside and eating this diverse diet and coming in contact with lots of people and getting physical activity and sleep. And yeah, all the same things we’ve been talking about that is, it is, it is a holistic picture. Um, so there’s no, there’s no single pill that you will take to boost your immune system. And there’s also the harm that if you do rely on those pills and you think they’re taking care of your immune system, you’re less likely to actually take these holistic lifestyle approaches, which would actually work. So that’s that.

Brad Cooper

Yeah. I love that second point. That when, when you depend on a, you are like, yeah, I’m good. I’m covering that with my little pill.

Dr. Hamblin

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It’s some sort of psychological fallacy that happens with multivitamins and everything then. Yeah. Yeah, sure. You might, you know, maybe you take multivitamins, they cost you $20 for a six months supply. Not really hurting you financially. Probably not hurting your body, but yeah. What if you eat one fewer salad, like, uh, every few days just because you feel like you’re covered, then you actually did harm.

Brad Cooper

That’s a, that’s a great point. I love that. Love that. All right. Let’s turn the mirror around a little bit. We’re all a work in progress. I’ve got mine. Have you made any discoveries in your research recently that have influenced your own health and wellness pursuits? So something that maybe you weren’t doing two, three years ago, but as you’re reading, as your research, as you come across something new, you say, you know what, I’m going to do a little bit more of that in my life.

Dr. Hamblin

That has happened to me um, many times

Brad Cooper

I like hearing that.

Dr. Hamblin

Um, I guess it’s mainly been with regard to the diet. Um, I have tried to, uh, just spend more time in nature for all the reasons that I’ve been talking about and that that has to do with my forthcoming book, um, which, which gets into that. And the rise in autoimmune disorders are removed from nature. But I think that, I do think about it more as akin to medicine as something that it’s an, it’s not a luxury it’s, you know, it’s more like going to the gym that you should feel good about doing that and you should make a point of it for your health. And then, yeah, it also happens to be fun and relaxing, but just going and walking, disconnecting, taking a walk alone in the park or running, or just sitting in the grass, just lying in the grass and just relaxing. It’s sort of, um, something that I don’t think most people would think to do, uh, or would feel like they’re just kind of wasting their time or being weird or frivolous. But as soon as you start thinking about it as like, this is really therapeutic and good, and we need to actually make an effort to get back in touch with nature, that becomes, it becomes, um, good. And it’s added into my life.

Brad Cooper

I love it.

Dr. Hamblin

It’s not that revolutionary.

Brad Cooper

Well and I think that’s part of your point is when we’re looking for revolutionary, we miss the basics that are the things that will actually impact our lives in a much bigger way. So it’s not revolutionary, but it is cause, it’s, it’s, it’s there for most of us. We have that opportunity and yet we don’t, I don’t consistently take it. Yeah.

Dr. Hamblin

It’s about, it does require some being deliberate. It’s that thing of mindfulness and allowing yourself to, to, uh, of, of making yourself take time to do these things and you realize, well, I’m overall, I’m actually more productive and I feel less anxious and all these other things sort of trickled down. And, um, yeah. And so it’s, it’s a mindset that is kind of actually radical and revolutionary, even if the actual thing you’re implementing is not

Brad Cooper

Right. Right. Very good. Just two more questions. So you get to design, this giant billboard that can be seen by thousands of people every day on their bikes or cars that are walking through the park, whatever they’re doing, but thousands of people are going to see it every single day. What does it say? What is that one message that you’d like to get out there that, that we see? And we go, Oh!

Dr. Hamblin

Oh man. Yeah. That’s, uh, that’s, I’m, I’m going to be terrible at that because I am not an advocate. And, uh, my old thing is, you know, everyone’s got their individual things, I guess not to be too redundant, but maybe it would be like go outside, go to a park.

Brad Cooper

It sounds like be you is what it would say.

Dr. Hamblin

I don’t know. I don’t know if, um, I mean, you know, I’m a storyteller and a writer and I like to make people laugh when I can, but I don’t have any one particular mission with what I’m trying to do, trying to change people. Um, I want people to be, uh, happy and satisfied and feel like they’re getting what they’re wanting out of their health, but I don’t have one sort of vision about what health needs to be to everyone. Um, so I, yeah, I’d actually, I, I think that I’d want to take the billboard down. Zones, places with fewer billboards. People tend to be happier and that’s probably a sort of weird correlation that’s reflective of other things, but you get away from the billboards and you’re probably gonna live a happier life.

Brad Cooper

Ooh. So there you go. Good answer. We took a little circle there, but in, in the end to get there, but yeah, I like it. I like it. All right. Last one. Any final words of wisdom again, we’ve got a lot of current or future people kind of on the fence, thinking about being wellness coaches, anything that, that you would kind of, and it can be a couple of things. If you want. Just things that I haven’t asked you about. You’d like to get out there to share for them to be aware of, to be looking for that. Maybe they haven’t thought about just kind of open-ended anywhere you’d like to take it.

Dr. Hamblin

You know, wellness and I’ve written about this too. It’s a really, it’s a tough industry because there’s so much incentive to monetize products. And the nice thing about being a coach is you can monetize this service that people need just to cut through the marketing claims and all that. So you can, if you can overcome the instinct to launch your own line of supplements or whatever other ways are commonly practiced in that industry, just like they are in medicine, you know, not everyone’s, it’s rampant everywhere, but to be, to actually try to help people just get back to these simple, uh, tried and true things is a life’s work in itself and will be much more fulfilling than any products that you could kind of convince people into thinking they need and be more fulfilling for you. And there’s a, certainly there’s certainly the need and demand for it. And I’m sure that there are great careers to be had just doing that.

Brad Cooper

Fantastic. What a great way to wrap up. Thanks for your time. I know how busy you are really appreciate you joining us. Uh, what the title of your upcoming book. Do we have a timeline on that yet?

Dr. Hamblin

Uh, yeah, it’s going to be the end of May in 2020, and it’s called Clean.

Brad Cooper

Beautiful. Well we might have to get you back on. I appreciate you taking the time.

Dr. Hamblin

Oh, I’d love to come back. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Brad Cooper

Absolutely. You’re going to try that apple thing aren’t you? I actually did. Yeah, of course, right after the interview and you know that it’s pretty good. I think I’ll do it again. A big thanks to Dr. James Hamblin. Again, his book is titled If Bodies Could Talk, operating and maintaining a human body and it’s filled with insights and frankly, it’s just a fun read. His writing style is a lot of fun. I appreciate you joining us. I had a lot of fun reading some of the reviews of the podcast, the other day. And I just want to say, thank you, those of you taking the time. I know you’re busy. I get that. I totally understand that, but I really appreciate it. Those of you who have popped onto iTunes and have done a review done a rating, I don’t understand how the process all works, but I understand that really helps people find us on iTunes. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For those of you who are looking at becoming national board certified some interesting news, the NBHWC just added another exam date for 2020, which lines up perfectly with our November fast-track weekend in Colorado. I believe it’s November 9th and 10th. So feel free to reach out to us with any questions about those details, how the board certification works, how it all fits together, the email is Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.com, or you can check them out at anytime on our new website at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com, make it a fantastic rest of your week, keep pursuing better, and let’s help those around us, our clients, our families, and our communities do the same thing. Thanks for being a catalyst. And I’ll speak with you soon on the next episode of the Catalyst Health and Wellness Coaching Podcast.