7. Heather Hammerstedt, MD: Changing Our Relationship with Food

Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Darsha Shah, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined, a podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in healthcare. All right, before we get into the show, here's a quick message from Resolve, a physician-contract review company. At Resolve, they believe that knowledge is power for physicians, and that power gives you control over your financial future. Resolve believes that by mining, analyzing, and synthesizing data, they can provide you with the information and insight that empowers you to diagnose the health of your career, fully understanding your worth, and maximize your full potential. As a company founded by a doctor, four doctors, Resolve's focus is on the well-being of those whose purpose in life is to care for the well-being of others. To have this incredible company review your employment contract, find them at doctorpodcastnetwork.com for a slash result. The link will also be in the description of this show. Okay, it's time to drop the hammer on some knowledge, and that's because our guest today is none other than Dr. Heather Hammerstead. Dr. H is not only a board-certified emergency medicine physician for the last 10 years, but she's also a health curator, founding her company called Holist Health, which focuses on a team-based approach to help your lifestyle. Dr. H is also the host of Curate Your Health Podcast. In this episode, Dr. H shares her insights into mindful eating. Why are we addicted to certain foods? How do we break the patterns of food addiction, and how do we essentially change our relationship with food? And something I found really interesting in this episode was her implementation of something called the hunger scale. It's time for you guys to find out what that is as well. Let's get to it. All right guys, welcome back to another episode of Medicine Redefined. Today we have Dr. Heather Hammerstead with us. Hi, how you doing? I'm great. How are you guys? Good, good. Now that we got this figured out, finally, definitely excited to have you here. Dr. Hammerstead, obviously, you've done so many, I think last time we had chatted, you said, hey, I can wear multiple hats, and you've certainly done that. You're kind of all over the map with your podcast and your business, and obviously you're still practicing as a physician. There might be some folks, some of our listeners who don't really know much about you and what you do. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey, and basically your why? Why is it that you do what you do now? Yeah, sure. So yeah, Heather Hammerstead, I am an emergency medicine physician and lifestyle medicine physician, so double-boarded and I live in Boise, Idaho, and I've got two crazy little Muppet Boys and two big chocolate labs and an amazingly supportive husband. And we live out here because we like to kayak and ski and play, and we've been out here for about 13 years, and my labor of love is twofold. I run a nonprofit in East Africa doing emergency medicine education. I work full-time emergency medicine here in Boise. I was part-time, but COVID has taken that away. And I run this company Holist, which is why you guys asked me to be here. Holist is a lifestyle medicine coaching company where we help people figure out how their brains and their bodies work around food, really teaching people about why they're eating, when they should be eating, what they should be eating, and how that will affect them to create sustainable health behavior change, like not going on a diet, just figuring out how you can be as healthy as you can possibly be throughout your various stages of life. I got to this point because I keep putting my hands up for things. I keep wanting to know more. I mean, I was a medical school. I know Daria in Penn State. I grew up in state college, Pennsylvania, Penn State Proud, and went to temple for medical school, and I was in temple, and I was like, I'm not learning about nutrition and movement and mindfulness, and I thought that's why I was going to medical school. I went into medical school, clutching the Paul Pritchard, healing with Whole Foods Bible. I actually went to health coaching school when I was still in medical school for a year process, and I won't date myself for how long ago that was, but it was a really long time ago. Over the years, I just kept being like, I want to learn about medical acupuncture, and I want to learn about Ayurveda, and I want to do this. And finally, a few years ago, in the middle of the night, I was like, why am I still taking care of people at three in the morning with chest pain and strokes and all these alcohol-related things that could have been prevented if I had met them five or ten years ago? So I created a whole list, which is basically a playoff of gastroenterologist or hospitalist or whatever, but whole person, and just figuring out, how can we really approach what I think is the first step into wellness, which is food, in a way that seems sustainable? So that was long-winded, but that's me. I love that. I absolutely love that. Again, I think that we're starting to appreciate that. I think we have, obviously, there is such a role for when that comes to acute care. There are some things that physicians are absolutely needed, but health coaches are being utilized more and more in their practice, and you mentioned that you were wearing multiple hats. You've got the lifestyle medicine stuff, and at least on the western side, most of the diseases that we face today are these chronic illnesses. They're not the acute illnesses, and that's what's being a burden on the system. So I definitely want to learn more about how you balance both the EM acute side, because you mentioned you were still doing some night shifts, but you touched on Ayurvedic medicine, right? I think you spend some time in India during medical school. Marsha and I are both South Asian, so we have that running through our blood, but I wanted to ask you, why did you spend time doing that, and what was the inspiration for that? Well, I always have this desire, just wanting to know all the pieces and sides of a story, and so whether that's politics or whether it's medicine, it doesn't really matter. I just kind of want to keep asking questions from a different way, and so I had the opportunity to take four months sabbatical from medical school, and I went to Ayurveda and followed around an Ayurvedic physician, and I learned a lot, and it has certainly colored the way that I approached what I do with my clients, for sure. It was an amazing experience, and just a lot of sacred cows over there, that's for sure. That's right. That's honestly phenomenal. I mean, a holistic medicine exactly what me and Ultima are all about, and I just want to mention, I went to Temple University for undergrad, so it seems like our footsteps have definitely crossed the times, right? I might end up in Idaho, who knows? Yeah, you should come. It's pretty great. One of the things I know you like to talk about is mindful eating, our relationship with food, especially with your patients or your clients. First off, I want to talk about sugar addiction. I think it's just such a common issue that we're seeing. I was reading up some stats from the AHA, American Heart Association, and they were saying that on average, human will consume about 70 grams of sugar per day, and per year, that's about 50 to 60 pounds. How serious of an issue is it in your perspective? Oh, man, I'm surprised at 70. I think that would be low. That's what I thought, yeah. Yeah, no, it's an impressive thing. Sugar is just to kind of like baseline it and knock it into super details, but sugar, meaning sucrose, or mostly sucrose, is just basically is one of the only things that can actually flood your brain with serotonin, like literally just floods your brain with it. It's like it's opening little pathways and you get that same neurotransmitter rush that you do when you do other feel good things. And serotonin and dopamine, very related, we all know as physicians that dopamine is the primary feel good, although serotonin is similar, feel good neurotransmitter. And so when you do things like gambling, or sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or any of those other things, you push those neurotransmitters up. And then when they fall down, you have that classic, like I need to refill it back up. And the easiest thing for it to do for people who are sugar addicted, who are a lot of people, most people, is that's the easiest thing to do is fill it back up by feeding yourself. So there's a lot of ways to think about it. I mean, when you think about the word addiction, right, like really we're talking about doing something, doing an action continually, despite it having very detrimental effects to your life, right. And so if your goal is to be healthy or to lose weight or to feel better or sleep better, and you know that sugar is a part of that, but yet you keep reaching for that as the thing to be pushing down your emotions or buffering your emotions, that's what that's what's happening. It's like the perfect definition of addiction. So I like to really reassure people that like, it's not your fault that you're reaching for cookies, right. It's not the alcoholics fault that he's reaching for bourbon, right. It's just like what your body is doing. And so it's not a matter of like this is like classic phrase that I'm constantly saying, but it's not a willpower problem. It's a skill power problem. It's figuring out what are the skills that you need to overcome those behaviors that you're having that aren't getting you where you want to go. Yeah. Do you think do you think you've seen certain populations who are more prone to sugar addiction or is it kind of just anyone from childhood? I remember eating honey buns. Scooby-Doo snacks when I was younger. And I do have a sweet tooth. You think it's more genetic? Do you think it's something that, you know, it's just something that happens to you? I think it's a crap shoe. I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, I think like I have one kid who will only eat snacks. And if we call it a meal, he won't eat a meal. He is going to only get to eat it if you call it like evening snack. You know, and I have another kid who says he's plant-based, right. And so it's very plant-based with bacon. I should phrase that differently. To full transparency. But so, you know, I don't know. I mean, we have a menu come to us. We have adult women who come to us. We have other people who come who are like, I've never had a sugar problem. And so, but they're like maybe crunchy, salty people, right? And so they're buffering their need by chewing, which one of my holoscouches could talk about for like an hour about why crunch is like this biological mental need that some people have. And so I don't I don't know the answer about who's who, but we can see them when they're coming. That's for sure. Dr. Hammer said, I absolutely love that. I think that, you know, when we're talking about addiction, when just the classic when we look at drugs and individuals, we talk about alcohol, it's people are pretty quick to say, okay, that's a problem, right? But you alluded to, hey, in our addiction is that you know that this reward pathway is detrimental to your health. But a lot of times that that detriment is not till 2030, 40 years down the road. So I think it's a lot harder for people to acknowledge hate that we're actually doing self harm in some way. But at the same time, the other challenge is like, again, you're touched about like the relationship with food, right? And so people have that urge, then you have the behavior, then you have the dopamine reward or the hit. And then afterwards, sometimes we have this guilt and shame that you've succumbed to those cravings or that addiction. And then you become more depressed and then you need a greater dopamine hit and more neurotransmitter response. And then it's kind of this perpetual cycle. So when it comes to mindful eating, I think the one thing you touched on is you have your coaches mentioned, okay, slow down, focus on the crunch. That's one aspect of it. What are other strategies that maybe your coaches use that you have in your conversations with your patients, your clients that, hey, let's first, let's not villainize the person in the mirror that you've maybe failed or succumbed to a craving or stuff, be kind to yourself. Because it's okay, especially then now that we've just passed the holiday season where people probably were giving in to a lot of sweet tooths and stuff and people weren't indulging a little bit. So what are some other things that you talk about when you're coaching your clients in that regard? Yeah, so I think first off, I think giving it like a, the word craving is like, is a little bit of like a, I don't know, it's an excuse a little bit. Like I think, I think you need to, when you have it, when you feel an urge, let's call it an urge, right? When you feel an urge for anything to do anything, I think it's our responsibility as being adults to think about what that urge is and to think about what it's going to give you and to delay an action to the urge that you're getting. Because we always make a better decision in the future than we do in the moment, right? And so delaying an action, giving yourself some disparity between where you are right now and where you want to be and sitting in that moment. And when you do that, you're able to think about, is this really right? Because that's what we're saying craving is really is hunger, right? Is this really like, is it body hunger? Is it social hunger? Is it emotional hunger? Is it, you know, what is that feeling that you're feeling? Because most of us in America, thankfully, especially those of us listening to this podcast, we're not hungry really. Like we're not starving. Like we know that people can go several days of fasting and be fine. And so our bodies know how to transition from a glucose energy to a glycogen energy to a, you know, lapolacist energy, right? And so maybe those sensations that you're feeling are like actually a biological hunger where you're shifting from one energy source to another. Does that mean you need to feed it? Not necessarily. It means you need to let your body do what it knows how to do, right? Or maybe you always eat potato chips with your dad when you're watching the Steelers, right? Like that's like, that's another craving that you have. It does that mean you're hungry? I mean, you think the most important thing is really just like understanding your urges in your body. Another tip that I always talk about is like, in terms of hunger too, is like figuring out, do you have a hunger scale? Like if you, like do you understand how when you feel that sensation or that urge and you decide I am actually hungry? Like where are you on the hunger scale and does it actually need to be fed? And so, you know, classic teaching of a hunger scale is you have a minus 10 where you're like ravenous and you have a neat and in days and you can't even think about anything else versus a plus 10, which is like a post Thanksgiving. Like can't get up off the couch, right? So if you try to eat between, you started a minus five and you ended a minus, you ended a plus five, like you're sitting in that middle ground where you're never making terrible decisions and you're never feeling terrible. So like I teach this to my kids, they're little, right? They're like six and nine and granted, yes, they manipulate the hunger scale, get desert, don't get me wrong, but they can easily understand like, oh, hey, like I think I'm hungry enough to eat right now, I'm around like I could, you know, I'm kind of fine not eating, but I kind of feel like I should or I'm done eating. I feel like I could run around the block and still feel comfortable, right? And so I think those are two really good tips. My last before you guys ask me other questions is, is the other thing with mindful eating is just like being very thoughtful about what you put on your plate and making it look beautiful and very colorful and varied. So you have all of the micronutrients you need because the more colorful your plants are on your plate, the more you're getting from that and just understanding and being thankful for where the process of that food getting to you was. I think helps you slow down and be more careful about how you're consuming the effort of the world or other people or your community for bringing you that food. Yeah, I mean, those are definitely some some some great tips right there. And to your point, we recently had AC St. Kowski come on and talk a lot about nutrition quality and quantity and you know, one of the things she talks about in her podcast is as you touched on is overindulgence is such an issue for a lot of people, especially those who listen to this podcast today, you know, often we can afford that extra dessert or cake and or extra pie and it's it's always there's always a time rate. Okay, well, thanksgiving. Well, it's Christmas. Well, it's Tuesday and you know, so just go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and enjoy it. And so we really have to be honest with ourselves and say, Hey, why am I really doing this? And this is why I love the folks over precision nutrition. I've given them a shout out so many times is because, you know, they won't tell people that hey, you should restrict, but you know, how do you create maybe? I mean, I don't want to say barrier, but an obstacle. So you won't be likely to maybe give into that hunger. And then the other thing that I want to mention is recently I read this book called Mindless Eating by I think it's Brian Wansink or something. I forget his name, but essentially the key takeaway that I had from it him talking about how little control we actually have on our eating habits and how the restaurant and the food industry uses these covert tricks to kind of knows that. Yeah, you know, for and and I thought about that. And just like, for instance, for you darshes, you know, using descriptive adjectives in front of dishes like a zesty chicken sandwich, they know that the data shows that people tend to find that to be much more, you know, delicious than it is just a regular chicken sandwich or on larger plates and putting smaller portions on this with people think they they haven't eaten as much. So again, that goes back to your points of, Hey, you got to pay attention to your environmental cues and say, Hey, really, why am I eating and am I just eating because it's Sunday football and the Steelers are losing. I mean, I think the why is is essential. I mean, the we've helped hundreds and hundreds of people figure out how their bodies and brains work around food and using real food. And most importantly, though, is that like anybody can lose weight, right? But like figuring out like how your brain works around making sustainable health change, regardless of what it is, whether it's a healthy exercise pattern with this healthy sleep pattern, whether it's healthy eating pattern, whatever that is, like takes, you know, a serious work because we have habits and experiences that we've had throughout our life that have changed our brains so that we just kind of follow these like wrote thought train tracks, right? And it takes work to rewire those and kind of get the neurons to play together to make new tracks. And I think the best way to do that is just like serious contemplation. And I think a lot of us just don't have time to think about doing that or not putting ourselves first. And I, you know, most of us are not eating because we're hungry. Most of us are not going to sleep at night because we think it's a badge of honor to stay up late and keep working, right? There's like all these things that we have to work through, but we know that like 80% of our diseases and our mortality in the United States at least is from preventable diseases, from food and sleep and exercise and mindfulness and other kind of high risk behaviors like alcohol and tobacco and drugs, right? And so um that's one of the reasons why what what we do is we concentrate so much on mindset work. Like really let's talk about like what is it that it's having you reach for that? Like what are the experiences in your life that are having you reach for that? Like what happened when you were a child that you were rewarded with that, right? That you go to swimming exercises because your mom gave you donuts afterwards, right? Like what are pulling those things up? And for a lot of people, there's a lot of like physical and emotional trauma that they've suffered that brings them to like I said sort of pushing down their voice with food or pushing down their emotions with food. And um and so that's one of the reasons why you know we're successful is because we we don't just tell you what not to eat because everyone can restrict you. But the moment you start feeling restricted, like we're all rebellions inside, right? Like you're going to want to do what someone told you not to do. So what you have to do is figure out what is it that works for you in your life? What is your choice? What is the reasons why for you so that you can move forward and make those choices so that that becomes sustainable, right? It's so no one's telling you externally what your health behavior change needs to be. Absolutely. And I love that because there there's two podcasts that I just heard. One was from Dr. Andrew Huberman who talks about the brain and how we function as humans. And he talks about when we understand the mechanism behind something, we're more likely to grasp that concept and make the change. And the other was by BJ Fogg who is actually just on Dr. Mark Hyman's podcast. And he talks about instead of us thinking like you need 66 days to change you know to have a healthy lifestyle or change a habit, it comes down to actually having that emotional why that you just talked about understanding that why. And once you have that emotional trigger, that's when you're going to start to see the change it is. So yeah, good. Yeah, we don't even let anyone in to work with us until we get on a phone call and discuss the why. Like if you don't have enough of like a a why or enough of like a like a tangible emotional reason for you to want to make behavior change, then like it's not time for you to it's not time for us to help you, right? And then the other thing is I'm so serious about education. I mean, I mentioned working in East Africa, we've been working there for 13 years and educating people at an emergency medicine. We started emergency medicine in that country really. But we, but here we're doing the same thing. Like I literally make everyone who comes in like study the weight science and study like the neuroplasticity work of behavior change for the same exact reason. I don't care if you work at the post office or I don't care if you're another colleague of mine who's a physician, right? Like we all need to at least get our brains around the portions of it that we can to make that sustainable change. I think that's what we're missing in healthcare right now is that educational piece and that real like big like you have to be your own advocate understand how your body and your brain are working because otherwise like people going to selfishly make the easiest choice for themselves, which is not the healthiest one in most cases. Absolutely. 100% agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. And I love that too. I think that it is so important. You know, Dr. John Brarty in his new book Changemaker, he talks about that there's a gap, right? There's a gap between folks like us who are in the health and fitness industry and the folks who might need us the most. And you know, essentially what he was saying, so I have a background working in the fitness industry and a performance coaching and I was surrounding myself with a lot of folks with similar mindset, focusing on sleep, nutrition and those types of things. And this was, you know, to me, it was like everybody's familiar with this. This is what we're all talking about. It honestly wasn't until that I started medical school and I got out of that world and I started talking to people and and realized that even physicians are very ill informed when it comes to these things and how we have to do a better job at educating folks. So you mentioned that you won't even take somebody as a client until you figure out that why. What about, I think that us three, we can have this conversation, we can all get super excited about it and we'll go back and we'll focus on the the minds that we know that sustainable change takes a long time. But there are a lot of people who need our help. I mean, if you look at the data, there's in 10 years, 50% of the American population is going to be obese. That's terrifying. Diabetes is just skyrocketing. You know, a lot of those folks need our help more than anybody, less so than people on this podcast. I think that those people need our help a little bit more. How do you impart that wisdom to them that, hey, you need to be your own advocate? Like do you or do you not even try until they're ready to make that change? No, I do try. I mean, I think things like this are important because I think the powerful thing about physicians is that the more we educate and talk to each other, like imagine the bend diagrams that go out from each person, right, into their communities and how they can speak to people. So I, you know, in terms of like, whole list, I love to do things like this. I do tons of training in our public Facebook group where we have, you know, seven, you know, we've like 10,000 people that we talk to almost every day. And I think that those are important outreaches. I also have like an online course where I teach other physicians about lifestyle medicine so that they can take care of their patients, even if they don't want to board certify in it. But more importantly, in the emergency department, right, like I'm the last person in emergency physician that you would think would sit down and be like, you need to do this with your diet and your food and everything like that. But you can do this in two minutes or less, really. Like if someone is showing you an inkling that they are ready to hear something, and I like to think about it, like some people come to me with true emergencies, which is my decision to decide if that's what they have and other people come with perceived emergencies. But to that person, it doesn't matter whether it's true or perceived because for them, it's the same feeling, right? And so if they're coming and they're terrified about their chest pain and I'm like, you just had some esophageal spasm, right? Like, you're cool, you can go home and take some pepsid. But they're like, oh god, like how can I make this not happen again? If you see an inkling of that, you have the opportunity to be like, this is what you can do. You need to eat mostly plants. You need half of your, you know, half of your plate to look like this and the other have to look like this and you need to move this much per week and let's start with that. So what I've actually done and put into my EMR is I have like a nutrition prescription and an exercise prescription. And I print them out like literally like prescriptions and I'll give them to people because I think that like, you know, in primary care, you could talk about this all day long, but if someone doesn't have their ears on, they're not going to hear you. Whereas like, if you're an anesthesiologist and, you know, you're taking care of someone who's coming in and they're, you know, just are coming in for cardiac surgery, right? Like, they're ready to hear it. Maybe you're the person to tell them, right? That's, that's so awesome. You know, to me, that's like having a dot phrase, right? And I think when I go back into the, yeah, when I go back, I'm going to have to change my dot phrases because right now they're so generic, right? Eat a healthy diet with fruit, vegetables, and anyone reads them, they say, okay, great, common advice. But if you can make it a little bit more personalized, you know, I guess you're really going to see that effect. So it's really interesting. I was shadowing a functional medicine doctor last year and he was telling me that most people who go into functional medicine or lifestyle medicine are actually EM doctors. Is there, is there a reason why you kind of went into functional medicine? I know you kind of touched on it earlier, but did you feel like EM wasn't really giving you that chronic, you know, forming a relationship with a patient? Like how do you kind of balance the two out? Oh, I don't know. I love emergency medicine. I can't imagine having gone into any other like primary specialty, like the, the ability to make an impact on someone's life at the moment where they actually need you is an, and to use your hands to do it and use your brain to do it until like never know what's coming. I absolutely love. But like I said, you know, at the beginning to kind of round out how we started, right? Like I've always wanted to put my hands up for all sorts of different things. And, and this aspect of like food and movement and mindfulness has always been part of my personal life. And so finding a different way to serve our populations to become more healthy and more well out kind of out for me outside of the medical system is how I decided to approach it. Um, but I, um, you know, I mean, I, I, I, I'm a, I'm a full-time night emergency position. Like I, I, I'm in it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I think that obviously, man, working night shifts, I mean, so you work nights every single time or are you going to shift work back and forth? Just know I'm a full-time Okay. Okay. Good. All right. So at least you're not, you know, administrators around people are crazier and the staff is crazier. It's perfect. Yeah. Definitely exciting and sure there's never a dull moment. Um, you mentioned that, hey, you are putting those dot phrases in and you're giving that personalized nutrition, nutritional or whether it's sleep or whatever lifestyle management intervention that you're doing. And, you know, when I think about this, one of the things that I'm more interested about is how do we implement this change, you know, on, on a systemic level? I think that we're talking at the individual level. How do we communicate with our patients? How do we educate our fellow colleagues to kind of spread out on that Venn diagram? Like you said, um, but, you know, after we've done that, because I mean, a lot of our patients know that I shouldn't say all of them, but I, I think generally people have a good idea of what healthy is, right? Hey, we need more sleep, get more sleep, eat your fruits and vegetables because our grandma has been saying that forever. It is really hard to do. But let's just say let's fast, let's be optimistic. Let's fast forward 20 years from now, um, where everybody has gotten the education. But at the same time, I know that in your, in your podcast, you've talked about the value of herbal medicines and acupuncture and all these other things that we know have value. But unfortunately, because of the way the healthcare model is set up, uh, the medical paradigm and insurance doesn't reimburse. Um, you know, like how do you think that that is going to like people are going to start looking at those things, nutrition, sleep, acupuncture, complimentary medicine, what we don't consider that to be complimentary medicine. But do you think that, you know, how is that going to be in the model? Well, geezer, now you're going to get my legal advocacy flag all up here. Are you? I think our healthcare system is filling us on multiple levels. Um, you know, where we're not reimbursing primary care doctors to keep us healthy, but we're reimbursing procedures. Like there's just so, so many levels of things that are challenging. Um, we're not going to fix them all here on this podcast. But what I can say is that I, um, I do think that, um, there is a movement for wellness and that people are paying for it outside of the medical system, which I think will leak into what the insurance companies consider to be important. I don't know when that's going to happen, but I do think it's going to happen. I mean, think about 10 years ago, could you imagine 10 years ago that they were paying for telemedicine visits or that they had, you know, with their own, like, wellness, you know, programs that you could buy into. I mean, those, those kind of things were not heard of. And so I think, um, maybe the most important thing is for us to, as physicians, to be leaders in education and also to be breaking into the corporate world around convincing the big corporations about what is important for them and for their, um, employees to be learning and seeing and doing, um, and they may be able to divert more, um, more input onto the insurers because they have more cash than we do, right? About what's important. Um, my thoughts off the top of my head, I mean, it's really, it's a big, big deal. It needs to change or because we're breaking, you know, the healthcare systems breaking. For me, that's entirely why I went outside of the healthcare system to provide the services that we do and do it all as coaching, um, because I just, I don't see that there is a way to help as many people and serve as many people as we are and can, within a conventional medical model and be actually be solvent. Yeah, and I think that with the most recent pandemic and that's been more evident than ever, you know, how, how fragile it can be when it does get overloaded and how the trickle-down effects. But, uh, you know, but not only that, like, it's what, it's shown that it within the healthcare system, what we've also seen in the online wellness and health space is that since COVID started, we've tripled our business. Okay. So people are willing, still willing to pay for their own health. Yeah. Even in the context of something like this. And I love that. And I think ultimately, that's what it comes down to. And it's kind of what you're talking about. It's, hey, as a demand goes up for folks to, hey, really be advocate for them health and really take, really take, you know, the matters into their own hands, the Darshaast, Dr. Jocke Patelist, last time, you know, why aren't people investing their own health? And it sounds like you're, you're seeing that. So that, that's encouraging for me. So I'm excited to hear that. And I think from that perspective, physicians, um, we need to fulfill that demand, right? The supply has got to be 100%. Yeah. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine, I don't think they were around in 2005. So they're relatively, I think as a board, they're 2017 or 16, I'm not 100% sure, but relatively new. So I think that that is something to be optimistic about. And I think for us coming out of residency, I know that that's something that's that I'm considering. Darshaast, we were just having this conversation before you joined us. So, um, you know, we, we want to thank you so much. I know you're limited on time. So we want to be respectful of your time because you have other things to do. But we want to thank you so much. You've been inspiring for, for us both for everything you're doing over at whole last year podcast. We're huge fans and hopefully we can, you know, continue this conversation at another time with them. Yeah, I'm happy to come back whenever I can talk for hours. I do have, I have one thing that I always want to share with someone, with people. And especially now where we are in this like uncertain time on so many various levels, um, that there are lots of things we can control. We can control our fuel. We can control how we move our bodies. We can control our thoughts and we can control our inner state. And I think if we just concentrate on those four things, um, you're going to get the vast majority of what lifestyle medicine can bring you. And if you need accountability and help and skills that come along with how to do that, there are people, there are organizations that can help you do that. But I think it's really important to realize like how much of your life you actually have control over in those four things. I'll leave you with that. Right on Dr. H, right on that is sound advice. Um, so I know you're everywhere from websites, social media podcasts. Where can people find you when they want more information? Yeah, website is, um, www.holisthealth.com. The company is called, uh, holist wh-o-l-i-s-t. Um, again, that's spin off of whole person. Um, and we're at holist health on Instagram where we have, I'm at mama EM doc. That's m-o-m-m-e-m doc, um, on Instagram as well, personally. And then we have a, uh, Facebook group called curate your health where we have about 10,000 people in there. And we do tons of free trainings and, um, free ebooks and just lots of information for people who want to, you know, don't want to pay for help at need help and, uh, podcast the same name, uh, curate your health anywhere where you listen. So thanks for the opportunity, guys. Awesome. Thank you for joining us. Well, we're going to make sure we link to all that, uh, and the show notes as well. Thank you, Dr. Hammer said. Wow. That was such a great show with Dr. Heather Hammer said. Now, before we end, let's give you the link for our sponsor again. If you need help reviewing your employment contract before you sign, reach out to a company with great online reviews and reputation for doing that and more. Find resolve at www.Drpodcastnetwork.com for a slash result to get the review process started today. Now, everyone, if you enjoyed this episode, you're in luck because Dr. age will be back again dropping some more insight in the near future. Be sure to check out Holis Health as well as her podcast curate your health. Now, time for that quick disclaimer. Everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute the practice of medicine and we are not providing medical advice. No physician, patient relationship is formed and anything discussed in this podcast does not represent the views of our employers. We recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health related issues. 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