Interview with Dr. Katrina Ubell – 472
In today's replay from 2022, John invited Dr. Katrina Ubell back to discuss her weight loss business, podcast, and book How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss.
She covers the training path she took in integrative medicine, obesity medicine, and health coaching, and the business structure she built to support a fully virtual, cash-pay model across five states.
Today's Special Sponsor
I just discovered that an old friend of mine is selling his 15-year old nonclinical business. His business broker sent me a copy of the Offering Summary and it looks like an awesome opportunity.
It's currently a one-person online business, but it is scalable by the right physician buyer. My friend trains doctors looking for part-time nonclinical work to help lawyers manage personal injury cases for generous insurance settlements. So, if you want to get the report that I read, call my friend's broker Glen Cooper, at 303-919-2694.
Call him any time. And leave a message for a call-back.
If I were younger, I'd buy it myself! – John
CALL 303-919-2694 to learn more with no obligation.
Dr. Katrina Ubell's Journey
Dr. Ubell's battle with her own weight started in medical school, where physicians typically learn to “eat when you can, and sleep when you can.” Like many physicians struggling to maintain a healthy weight, she found that her clients were emotional eaters who consume food even when not hungry.
The approach she uses addresses feelings, thoughts, and beliefs differently, as often the root causes of our poor eating patterns.
Beginning with one-on-one coaching, Katrina developed her flagship program “Weight Loss for Doctors Only,” which has been very successful in helping members to achieve a harmonious relationship with food and the permanent weight loss they seek.
Building a Winning Online Weight Loss Business
Dr. Ubell shares the strategies for weight loss from her flagship program to her book “How to Lose Weight for the Last Time.” The key, she says, is not to be found in unrealistic diets, unsustainable supplements, or demanding workout regimens, but to follow the brain-based strategy outlined in her book.
Dr. Katrina Ubell's Advice
Once I understood how to asses and act upon my true physiological hunger, the weight started to come off…
Summary
You can find Dr. Ubell's book, and the audiobook version that she recorded, on her website at katrinaubellmd.com, and at major bookstores. You can also find information about her podcast “Weight Loss for Busy Physicians,” and several free downloadable resources on her website.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Links for Today's Episode:
- Dr. Katrina Ubell's Website
- How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss
- First, Optimize Your Attitude – Interview with Dr. Katrina Ubell – 035
- How to Be an Author and Nonclinical Career Expert with Dr. Heidi Moawad – 063
- How to Build a Platform and Create Authority with Dr. David Geier – 049
- How to Become an Author, Consultant and Online Authority with Dr. Tom Davis – 047
- How Physicians Can Use Online Courses to Boost Income – 239
- How to Get Started on Your Nonclinical Online Business
- How to Select the Best Online Business Niche – 110
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How to Build a Winning Online Weight Loss Business
Interview with Dr. Katrina Ubell - 472
John: Today, I'm presenting my conversation with Dr. Katrina Ubell from four years ago. She's a master certified life and weight loss coach, retired pediatrician, and the author of How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss. She also produced a popular weekly podcast from January of 2017 until September of 2024, and it had over six million downloads as of four years ago. And created a phenomenal online business that some of you might want to emulate. So, she was talking about the GLP-1 meds back then, before most of us even knew anything about them.
But first, I have an important message. I just discovered that an old friend of mine is selling his fifteen-year-old non-clinical business. His business broker sent me a copy of the offering summary, and it looks like an awesome opportunity. It's currently a one-person online business, but it is scalable by the right physician buyer, I'm sure. My friend trains doctors looking for part-time non-clinical work to help lawyers manage personal injury cases for generous insurance settlements. So if you wanna get the report that I read, call my friend's broker, Glenn Cooper, at 303-919-2694. Call him anytime and leave him a message for a callback. You know what? If I were younger, I'd buy it myself.
Alright, now let's get into our presentation. Dr. Katrina Ubell is a master certified coach and weight coach. She struggled with her weight for years before finding a permanent solution. In 2016, she founded a weight loss program that has helped over thirteen hundred physicians address their struggles with losing weight and becoming healthier. She hosts a very popular podcast called Weight Loss for Busy Physicians. I know it's popular because it's had millions of listens. She recently released her book, How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss. So I've invited her back on the podcast to tell us more about what she's been doing since she was my guest on this podcast in May of 2018. I find her journey from practicing physician to coach to author to be quite inspirational. We'll touch on those topics and discuss her book in some detail today during our interview. One of the things that's remarkable about her story is that her coaching, creating courses, podcasting, and writing this book has really extended her reach and impact on the world well beyond what she probably would have been able to do as a practicing physician. Dr. Katrina Ubell, welcome back.
Dr. Ubell: So glad to be here, John. Thank you for having me.
John: There's so much I think we can learn from you since I talk my listeners are people that are looking for non-clinical jobs or even just side gigs or different things to do, and you've done so many things once you left clinical that again serve as really a good example of what's possible, plus the content of your book is so important for most of us, if not all of us, that this is just gonna be a twofer today for all of us.
Dr. Ubell: Amazing, so glad to be here.
John: Alright, so let's we talked at the previous episode four years ago that how your background as a pediatrician and your transition, but I'd like a little brief summary of that. You were practicing, you were I think you were happy as a pediatrician, but you saw something more and decided, "Okay, I'm gonna do something different." So just kinda give us a touch about how that came about.
Dr. Ubell: Absolutely. So, yeah, I was working as a general practice pediatrician in a private practice. I was employed and definitely never had any dreams of leaving medicine. I went into medicine like so many people do, thinking like, envisioning myself as like the seventy-five year old or eighty-year-old, you know, pediatrician still taking care of families and things, and really didn't feel like I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body. That was just not a thing for me at all. So it was really much more of a surprise that I went down that path.
And really it was a twofold type of situation. The first was that I essentially had my own problem that where I was struggling with my weight, with overeating, and I couldn't figure out how to solve it permanently. So like, I'm a good student, you give me a bunch of rules, and I can follow them, so I am a lifetime member of Weight Watchers. Say I'm a lifetime member, but my results were nothing even remotely close to lifetime. I could do the means to an end kind of behavior to get the weight off, but then I wasn't willing to do that ongoing, and of course, then I gain the weight back again.
So I was struggling, it really became more of an issue in medical school, and as we know, the way we're trained is to eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't, you know what, mess with the pancreas, right? And so I took that seriously, and also just found myself with no other coping strategies, no other ways to feel good in my life, and so I turned to good old faithful food, and not so much alcohol for me, but a lot of my clients will do that too. They're not necessarily like an addiction situation or alcoholics, but they're drinking more than they know is maybe good for them or more than they would like to.
So I really just went on a journey to try to sort myself out, and through the process of doing that, just it was a very long circuitous path of trying lots of different things that didn't really ultimately work, but they were the stepping stones to get me to a place where I started to understand, wait a minute, I think this might be I think it could be that I'm actually an emotional eater. I hadn't known what that was, but really what that is when we eat when we're not hungry, right? We're eating for reasons outside of our body needing nutrition. And so I was like, "Oh, wait, if that's what that is, then absolutely do I do that. So if that's the case, then how do I stop?" And that I didn't know how to do.
So it was really through life coaching that I was able to learn how to deal with my emotions in a different way, understanding that it was truly changed my life and helped me to essentially separate food from the problems that I was using food to solve. You know what I mean? 'Cause like, food is there to help keep us alive and give us some occasional pleasure, and then I was using it for all these other things, and I stopped doing that. And lo and behold, when you do that, you lose weight and it stays off. So that was cool.
And then at the same time, I was feeling in my practice like I definitely wasn't burned out. People will say, "Were you burned out?" I didn't I felt I was, the way I would describe it is that I was stagnant. I felt like after about ten years in practice, I was like, "I, it's not like I knew everything, you can never know everything, but I didn't feel really, truly challenged that much anymore." I remember thinking, "Bring me any baby that can't sleep, I'll get it to sleep. Bring me any baby that has some nutritional feeding intolerances, I will figure it out." I just felt like it was just the same thing again and again, and I didn't really understand or know how to even think about other ways to engage myself. I knew within the practice structure there weren't really opportunities for me there, and my very limited thinking at the time led me to believe that the only other options would join a committee at the local hospital or something, and I was like, "I have no interest in doing that, so I guess I'm just stuck."
So it was through that life coaching as well where I started going, "Maybe I could actually do something else," and starting to realize, too, I'm not sure that I like this kind of setup, this dynamic that I have. Again, telling myself stories about what was available when I didn't actually know, I hadn't actually explored it. So I definitely don't recommend that somebody do it that way. But I thought I knew everything that was available to me. So in my mind, it was pretty much either take a break from practice or keep doing what I'm doing, quite big extremes, right?
But then at the same time, I experienced all these benefits from life coaching and this help with my weight, and I thought, I wonder if there's some other women physicians out there who are struggling the same. I was literally thinking there women physicians out there who might want some help. I really thought there might just be like a couple, and it's so cool, maybe I could have a little business on the side and help them with that. 'Cause I know I had thought with my busy schedule and all the idiosyncrasies of being a pediatrician, that was also largely to blame for my weight issues, and I learned that wasn't true. So that was really when I started going, you know what? Let me just take a break from practice. It was a big decision. I'd spent ten years building up this but also I couldn't see myself doing it ongoing. When I first opened up to the idea of leaving, I thought, "Okay, I'll do this ten more years, twenty years. That's a good career. People can't scoff at that, 'cause of course everyone else would think." But once I opened that door, once I just gave myself permission to even think about stopping, within two weeks it went to five years, then two years, then six months. I was like, "I think I'm gonna be done by the end of this year," and that's what I did, that was 2015.
John: Yeah, it's like a door, that's a solid door that you can't see through, and it's just like, "I, there's just no way, I don't know what's on the other side." And we see so many people that are, whether they're frustrated or just not fulfilled, and they just so where in that process did you go? 'Cause you were being coached prior to that, right? Or maybe you still are.
Dr. Ubell: I still am. I take advantage of the service I provide for sure. It's so great. Yeah, it was basically all happening around the same time. I first got that certification as a life coach a couple months after I finished, and then did that for a couple years, and then the opportunity for master certification became available, and I did that as well, just to improve my skills, just to work on serving my clients better and becoming a better coach.
And here's the thing is, like, when I left, I didn't look at it like, "Now you're gonna run a successful business and off you go." I really looked at it like, "I wonder if I'll miss being in practice." I thought I can probably go two or three years easily without meaningfully losing my knowledge in a worrisome way or where it would really be a lot of work to get myself back into it. So, to a certain extent, I had this little timeline for myself. Let's just see what happens, and my kids still go to that same practice, I got my allergy shot still, and I started to notice I was happy to go say hi to everybody, it was nice to get an update, and I walked out of there and I never missed it once. I wasn't one ounce of me wished that I could go back and see a patient. And so it was so starting to become, you know what? I think that I'm done with this. I think I'm, I think this part of my life is complete.
And of course, as the business grew, and it really is like a real business, I have twenty employees, it's a real business, so that's taken up so much of my creative energy, my problem-solving energy, and I feel so much connection to helping people who are struggling like me. And what I have to tell you is what so many of them say to me after working with me is, "Yeah, I lost all this weight, but that's not the best part." And this is a consistent thing that we see again and again, where they say, "Yeah, I lost weight, but what's really great is I love being a doctor again. My work experience is so much better. I'm not burned out anymore. My marriage is so much better. My relationship with my kids or my aging parents is so much better." They what they're really describing is the result of no longer using food to solve for all these other problems. So we use coaching to improve all these other things. And they stopped using food to solve those problems. Guess what? Then your body releases that extra weight, which is awesome. But so many of us get confused and think, if I could just get this weight off, then I'd feel better. But it's really not the truth. We have to feel better to get the weight off, and that's what they're describing when they say that.
John: Okay. It's like a yin yang. It's really like a circular thing. It's all intertwined. It affects the other, yeah. One of the things that you mentioned, I think in the book what we talk about here is that when you go into a non-clinical job or some other form of clinical, many times, if not almost all the time, you end up helping as many, if not more, people than you did as a physician. I can only see so many patients as a clinician, and I had a whole lot more impact as a CMO of a hospital on the quality and the length of stay, on what happened in the community, and you have obviously touched lots more patients ultimately, and in a way that you really wanted to.
Dr. Ubell: Absolutely, and I always think of it too is, do we really want, do I want to be cared for by a doctor or some family member or loved one being cared for by a doctor who's miserable, who doesn't wanna be there, who's arguably burned out or unfulfilled? No, thanks. I want a doctor who wants to be there and is engaged and cares and at least to some extent feels challenged and interested in being there, and I feel like that's what I help so many doctors to do. We know the latest data showing that at the end of 2021, two thirds of US physicians experienced at least one symptom of burnout. Doctors are struggling hard right now, and they really need help. And all of us suffer, every one of us suffers when doctors are suffering. So I feel, yes, I help these physicians, but by doing so, I'm really impacting everybody.
John: Yeah. And you did make a point in our previous conversation that the solution to burnout isn't always leaving your job. If you can fix that problem or start to deal with the problem that is contributing to that, it may not just be the employer, then you oftentimes can find happiness in the same job you were doing.
Dr. Ubell: Yes. And I've seen that time and time again of clients being so done, like as done could be, just really wanting out, and six, twelve months later saying I genuinely love being a doctor again, and nothing about my job has changed. It's all the same people, same administration, same job. All that's changed is me, and that's just so powerful. And I just wanna be very clear that by saying this, I'm not saying that the onus is entirely on the physician or the blame is on the physician if they're burned out. That's not what I'm saying. We can all agree that the system is broken. It is a real issue right now. It's, again, like a yes and situation. It's broken, and what are we gonna do? Are we gonna sit around and complain and wait for some time along to fix it? Hopefully that will be soon. If we're being honest with ourselves, it's probably not gonna be super soon. Maybe not even in our lifetimes. So then what? So now what do we do? How about we really work to figure out which parts of this we're responsible for, or which parts maybe we're not even responsible for it, but we can make our experience of it better by adjusting our outlook, the way we think about it, the way we possibly even contribute to the culture that's not so great, right? There's a personal responsibility part that we're being invited to take part in, and some people really just wanna sit around and complain, and I totally get that, and I've been that person too. But after a while, it starts getting really old and exhausting to be that person, and for some people, they get to that point of going like, "Okay, then you have to do something, right?" And so maybe they're looking at a non-clinical career, or maybe they're looking for just that can help them get to the place where they can even consider a side gig or some other option for them.
John: Right. Absolutely. We are interested also, I'm sure, in hearing about how this morphed into your current enterprise, as you said, you have twenty employees, and I have no idea what goes inside, goes on inside your business, but I know what I've seen. So can you take us from that transition to really and a lot of physicians are going to coaching of various types, and I think a lot of them face an issue of, "I can't help, I can only help so many people. I can't leverage this in any way" or the steps, just on a high level really, 'cause the things you've added over to where you are now.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, I have to say, it wouldn't sound so great if I had some huge master plan that I was just fulfilling. It really hasn't been that so much, it's been much more of, what do our clients need and want, and what do we want and need, and what can we offer, how can we meet that or match that? And so really first I built the program, which is called Weight Loss for Doctors Only, really making that a great program. And then we found, hey, some people actually they want some more help, so how could we offer that? What might that look like? And so we started to work on creating our continuation program and then started offering some live events for those people. And it's just grown from there.
With COVID is when we started offering one-on-one coaching in addition to the group and written coaching that we offered, which was a huge hit and needed so badly. That was something that was just clearly doctors were just so afraid, and it just, they really needed it, and it's been a really nice addition to the program. So then to fulfill that requires more coaches, right? So you have to hire people and all of that. And then another part of it really, there's of course like the fulfillment, there's tech stuff, there's people who are manning the main inbox and doing customer support and things like that. And then also we have a small marketing team as well, just working to get the message out to the people that we serve that we can help them.
And now with the book really was written for the general population. And so the point of the book, 'cause the book is called How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss, the point of that was multiple, right? First of all, a bunch of people need help with losing weight, just like all comers, and they need to understand that there's a mental component to this, and I wanted to put that all out there in a way that they could more easily digest it. Also, I noticed that a lot of doctors, like in terms of reviews on�my doctor recommended that I listen to this, or I'm not a doctor, but this has helped me so much. My friend who's a doctor told me that I needed this. Imagine if you need help, you go to your doctor, and your doctor says, "Hey, I have a solution. You need to listen to a podcast, and there's three hundred episodes. Where do you even start? It's so overwhelming, right?" So the thought also was, so great that doctors are recommending the podcast, but maybe they could just recommend the book. That would be a lot easier for the average patient. They could maybe get it from the library if their budget gonna work with that. Also, not everybody's a podcast listener, and not everybody's an auditory learner. There's lots of ways that people consume information and can learn. So I was thinking, so many doctors, right? There's so many things to talk about, so many problems to discuss, they don't have time. But they could recommend this book, that's at least a way to introduce the ideas to the patient, and then the patient can decide for themselves. The book can definitely help someone. There's additional book resources that they can download and all kinds of things. But someone who wants to dig in further, they would have that opportunity and would know, okay, there's, this coaching thing is a thing, it's different than Jenny Craig or whatever weight loss app they've been using or macros or whatever. So that was a point as well. But then to also help doctors to know, hey, with that. So thinking about it just from the bigger picture, like impacting the way that people in healthcare even approach people who struggle with their weight, educating themselves. I know when I shared the book with my internist who doesn't struggle with his weight, he was, I just said to him, "Hey, maybe go ahead and share this with some patients. You could have a little lending library here." And he was like, "I wanna read it first. I have to say, this isn't an area that I've really kept up on in terms of my own continuing education." There's oh, it's keto, it's low carb, it's this and that, the other thing. You can eat however you want. This delves into, it kind of backtracks up. Why are we even eating in the first place?
John: Yeah. I mean, I was, I read the book and it's the emotional eating, it's the habits, it's the, we were maybe trained to eat, it's a reward, and you get into its chapter after chapter of the different versions of what makes us eat, and it has nothing to do with because you're like, I just haven't looked at it.
Dr. Ubell: I haven't found anything that I like it. Yeah.
John: Exactly. I definitely would recommend it to anybody just to know, because if you may not have a weight problem, but your children might, your sibling might, whatever, if people wanna know sort of the root cause. Now, as you were doing this, oh, by the way, here's the book, so Casey maybe wants to see that. You did a study, and I don't, I don't, I couldn't really tell or I didn't recognize whether it was.
Dr. Ubell: Part of work that we did that was actually initiated by some of my clients. Like they were just looking around at each other going, "Hey, this is working, and you should probably be collecting data on this, 'cause people need to know." And I said, "Okay, if you're willing to design the study and to help us with all of it, then, yeah, maybe we'll do that." And that's exactly what has happened. So we essentially supply the data, and then they're crunching the numbers. So we're actually working on taking it to peer-reviewed journals to actually have it published.
John: Give us the highlights of what you found.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, yeah, I mean, basically what it comes down to is the program really works, and the big thing right now is this medication called Ozempic that a lot of people are talking about. It's actually an injectable medication. There's another one called, I think it's pronounced Wegovy. These are GLP-1 agonists that initially were created to help people with type two diabetes to help with regulation of insulin and things like that, and then they found, oh, hey, and people are actually losing weight while they're on it. So now this is the big thing of people going like, "Oh, maybe I wanna do this." So it's actually an injectable, and you have to take it the rest of your life, most likely. And it comes, of course, with significant side effects, as often medications really do. But what we found is when you take that medication, you're supposed to also make some lifestyle changes, right? It's not, oh, you're on medication, and then you're like hitting up McDonald's three times a day, but never moving, right? So lifestyle changesis almost as effective, so just slightly less effective than lifestyle changes plus that medication.
And what I'm interested to see, 'cause this is a bit of a newer faddish thing, people talking about it on TikTok, like Elon Musk was talking about how he's taking it and whatever. I think with all these kind of trends that we've seen over the years, for a while there was like all the lap band surgery and, you know, all those types of things and Fen-Phen and all those things, that we're gonna find that there's this big interest, there's a certain subset, and then everyone else who was just essentially looking for the magic pill, like it was just not really for them. And the thing is that medication also, particularly for people who don't qualify for it, it's usually you have to pay out of pocket, and it's quite expensive as well. Actually, about the same cost as our program, interestingly. So what we've really found is that it's really effective, and people, when they take part in the program, they really get great results.
John: I think people, it's human nature, if they have a pill they can take or a shot they can take, and they think it's gonna solve their problem. And I had patients on dozens and dozens of expensive meds, and they were still obese, and they were still complaining about their blood pressure and their heart diseases. Like, okay, we know it's a difficult thing, but I think to have the crutch that takes you off, your eye off of what you really should be doing is maybe not helpful.
Dr. Ubell: What I think is, take the medication or don't, regardless, you still have�this is what I love, it's like the medication makes you feel fuller faster, and I'm like, and how�so when has feeling full stopped an emotional eater from eating? Like, maybe it�at first you'll be like, "Ooh, I feel full," and then as time progresses, you'll go back to your same behaviors. It's the same work that needs to be done. It'll be waiting for you whether you do it now or you do it later. That's the way I look at it.
John: Yeah. I will eat a piece of pie or a piece of cake if I love sweets. I'm never hungry when I eat them, absolutely not hungry. It's not solving for hunger, no. So, probably not gonna solve the problem. Okay, tell us some hints or more common things to be aware of.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, one of the big things that people get really confused about is how to know essentially what to eat and how much to eat, and the whole diet industry has made a whole industry on helping us to figure out what to eat and how much to eat, and really that is something that we innately know, almost no babies, these rare genetic problems that, aside, babies know when to eat, when to stop eating, when they've had enough. This is ingrained in us, we know how to do this, but over the course of time, for any number of reasons, we've lost that connection. So it's not that those messages aren't there anymore, it's just that we're not listening, we're not paying attention at all.
So when we complicate things like we have to count points or put food into boxes or weigh and measure things or count stuff like all the macros and the, all the things and what we find is that it's so cumbersome, it feels hard, it's very hard to live a life outside of eating just in your home, and it just tends for most people not to be something that they're willing to keep doing for the rest of their lives. And I totally get that. The number of times I told myself, or tried to convince myself that counting Weight Watchers points ongoing for the rest of my life might not be that bad, and then I was just like, but deep down, I was like, no, I don't wanna do that. And also deep down, I think it makes sense that it has to be this hard. Like, why is it so complicated?
And so what I spent some time talking about in the book is how to reconnect to your body. The amount of food that I forced myself to eat because it was "quote unquote" healthy that either didn't taste good to me or didn't feel good in my body. If I really paid attention, my digestion wasn't good. I didn't feel well when I ate that way, yet I forced myself to do it anyway because some supposed expert out there was telling me that's the ticket to getting what you want. That creates a lot of problems, and we have to undo that line of thinking.
So when we start to pay attention to what do I actually like to eat, what actually tastes good to me, what makes me feel good and energetic and I sleep well when I consume this, that's a great place to start. And then in terms of starting, when should you start eating? Probably when your body's giving you some hunger signals. So what might those feel like? For some of us, we're very in tune with what hunger feels like. A lot though, a lot of us eat to prevent hunger, and tthere can be even people who grew up with food uncertainty, you know, like really not sure that they were gonna have all their meals or having to miss meals, like it can even bring out the trauma response of their fear of feeling hunger. But for a lot of us, we were just trained to, it's time to eat, doesn't, it's six o'clock, this is when we eat dinner, whether you're hungry or not is not relevant, right? We've trained ourselves it's time to eat or confused. We have to recognize the purpose of eating, the majority of the time, is to solve the problem of hunger, so maybe let's wait till we actually have that problem. Let's actually start feeling hungry.
And then on the flip side of that is figuring out when we've had enough. And that was something that I had totally messed up being in myself, being in Weight Watchers, because they would let you eat as many vegetables as you wanted without having to count points. So in my scarcity and my fear of being hungry later and not having points left, 'cause remember I'm a good student, God forbid that I actually meet my body as the slider thing told me how many points I could have, and I was done. So I would overeat vegetables, I would eat these huge salads to the point of truly abdominal discomfort, distension. It's really, in hindsight, like it makes no sense, but that feeling that way started to become normal. I thought, "Oh, when you feel that way, is when you stop eating." And I had to re-educate myself on that, and so many of my clients as well, right? We're so used to emotional eating. What does it actually feel like to have had enough food where you feel good and settled and energetic, and this is gonna last you for a few hours? It's something new to explore.
So the difference with this is that no expert can tell you when you're hungry, and no expert can tell you when you've had enough to eat. And so when we are in this mindset of other people know better than us, which is what we've been trained to think, right? We're the ones, this is what they say, we're the ones who created this predicament in the first place, we're the struggle. So obviously something's wrong with us. So we need to hire an expert who's gonna tell us what we're supposed to eat, that they know better than us what we should be eating and how we should be eating. And then if that doesn't work, it's not because that plan isn't good for us, it's because something's wrong with us, right? We're weak, we're undisciplined, right? We go into this whole shame spiral. So what I'm working on doing is undoing that and saying, "Hey, guess what? You are actually the expert. You, what it feels like to be you in your body when you eat certain food and when you start eating, when you stop eating. So when you're open to taking on that expert role, you do have to do a little legwork, right? You gotta pay attention. But what's so great about this is those signals are with you no matter where you go, when you're on vacation, when you're on call in the hospital, when you're home, it's all there.
And then we can even apply that even further to like, how about we start paying attention to when we're tired and we try to work on going to sleep when we're tired instead of pushing ourselves through or staying up late or all those things that we do or eating to try to keep ourselves awake? How about we just start really listening to the signals that our bodies are giving us, and we work on meeting those needs and see what happens from there. So what I love about this is it's so simple. I'm not, it's not necessarily always easy for people, because there is work to undo it, that conditioning. But at the same time, it's kind of liberating too, right? We don't have to keep searching for the latest guru who's got the latest whatever medication or whatever. We already have everything we need. We just have to tap into it and know how to interpret what those messages are.
John: I'm glad you brought that part up about recognizing when we're hungry and when we're not hungry, because you do spend a lot of time in the book, and you actually use a scale, and you give a lot of examples of people who have to learn how to even recognize that. Again, I can relate to that myself. I often confuse thirst with hunger. I never get thirsty, but then I eat, and now I have a cup of coffee, it's like, that didn't solve my issue. Well, obviously I wasn't hungry, I was thirsty. So I think maybe men have a bigger problem not recognizing what their body's telling them.
Dr. Ubell: I think women do too.
John: Yeah, they probably both do. That is manifested by the results demonstrated. Alright, so there's a lot of stuff just like that in the book, so tell us again, where should we go to find everything that you do? The website?
Dr. Ubell: Yeah. So my website is katrinayubelmd.com. Through there, you can find where the book is sold. It's really sold at all the major retailers, and Audible. I did record it myself. There's some bonus material in there, and my voice sounds better. I'm a little sick right now, so I sound like this. It's actually better quality voice in there. And then if you purchase the book and you get your order number and come back to the website, you can actually submit that and get access to a free workshop called Guarantee Your Weight Loss Success, and that will help set you up. It's just a ninety-minute workshop that helps to set you up for success in applying what you're gonna learn in the book, right? So we never actually read it, or we read it and we go, "Yeah, I should do that," and then we don't actually do it.
John: Yeah.
Dr. Ubell: This is gonna help you to start actually taking action.
John: Awesome. Yeah. There's a lot on the website too. I think even before the book came out, I think you have some freebies that people can download and get a free resources on there, taste of some of these concepts and the podcast is awesome, so don't forget about that.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, that's called Weight Loss for Busy Physicians.
John: Cast app. Oh, so tell me how many downloads have you had so far?
Dr. Ubell: You said that, and I was like, "Oh my God, I think total we're past six million."
John: I think I saw that number. Oh my gosh, that is a lot of people. That shows you're helping a lot of people. You wouldn't have that many downloads unless people were getting something out of it. So definitely hit a home run in terms of reaching out and helping people in something that you enjoy doing. So again, that's why you're such a good role model, I think, for many. OK we're pretty much out of time at this point, so I wanna thank you again for coming, Katrina. This has been great, and maybe we'll see you again down the road.
Dr. Ubell: Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me.
John: Keep doing all that good work.
Dr. Ubell: I will, I will.
John: Alright, bye-bye. I hope you found today's replay instructional and inspiring. If you want to download a transcript of our interview and access all of the links mentioned today, plus links to related episodes, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/weight-loss-business. And don't forget, if you're thinking about or looking for a non-clinical physician-run business, call Glenn Cooper at 303-919-2694 again, that number is 303-919-2694 to learn more with no obligation. That number will also be in the show notes at nonclinicalphysicians.com/weight-loss-business.
Finally, don't forget that the opinions expressed here are mine and my guest's, and while the information provided in the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there's no guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life, or business. Always consult an attorney, accountant, or career strategist before making any major decision about your career. Bye for now!
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How to Build a Winning Online Weight Loss Business
Interview with Dr. Katrina Ubell - 472
John: Today, I'm presenting my conversation with Dr. Katrina Ubell from four years ago. She's a master certified life and weight loss coach, retired pediatrician, and the author of How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss. She also produced a popular weekly podcast from January of 2017 until September of 2024, and it had over six million downloads as of four years ago. And created a phenomenal online business that some of you might want to emulate. So, she was talking about the GLP-1 meds back then, before most of us even knew anything about them.
But first, I have an important message. I just discovered that an old friend of mine is selling his fifteen-year-old non-clinical business. His business broker sent me a copy of the offering summary, and it looks like an awesome opportunity. It's currently a one-person online business, but it is scalable by the right physician buyer, I'm sure. My friend trains doctors looking for part-time non-clinical work to help lawyers manage personal injury cases for generous insurance settlements. So if you wanna get the report that I read, call my friend's broker, Glenn Cooper, at 303-919-2694. Call him anytime and leave him a message for a callback. You know what? If I were younger, I'd buy it myself.
Alright, now let's get into our presentation. Dr. Katrina Ubell is a master certified coach and weight coach. She struggled with her weight for years before finding a permanent solution. In 2016, she founded a weight loss program that has helped over thirteen hundred physicians address their struggles with losing weight and becoming healthier. She hosts a very popular podcast called Weight Loss for Busy Physicians. I know it's popular because it's had millions of listens. She recently released her book, How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss. So I've invited her back on the podcast to tell us more about what she's been doing since she was my guest on this podcast in May of 2018. I find her journey from practicing physician to coach to author to be quite inspirational. We'll touch on those topics and discuss her book in some detail today during our interview. One of the things that's remarkable about her story is that her coaching, creating courses, podcasting, and writing this book has really extended her reach and impact on the world well beyond what she probably would have been able to do as a practicing physician. Dr. Katrina Ubell, welcome back.
Dr. Ubell: So glad to be here, John. Thank you for having me.
John: There's so much I think we can learn from you since I talk my listeners are people that are looking for non-clinical jobs or even just side gigs or different things to do, and you've done so many things once you left clinical that again serve as really a good example of what's possible, plus the content of your book is so important for most of us, if not all of us, that this is just gonna be a twofer today for all of us.
Dr. Ubell: Amazing, so glad to be here.
John: Alright, so let's we talked at the previous episode four years ago that how your background as a pediatrician and your transition, but I'd like a little brief summary of that. You were practicing, you were I think you were happy as a pediatrician, but you saw something more and decided, "Okay, I'm gonna do something different." So just kinda give us a touch about how that came about.
Dr. Ubell: Absolutely. So, yeah, I was working as a general practice pediatrician in a private practice. I was employed and definitely never had any dreams of leaving medicine. I went into medicine like so many people do, thinking like, envisioning myself as like the seventy-five year old or eighty-year-old, you know, pediatrician still taking care of families and things, and really didn't feel like I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body. That was just not a thing for me at all. So it was really much more of a surprise that I went down that path.
And really it was a twofold type of situation. The first was that I essentially had my own problem that where I was struggling with my weight, with overeating, and I couldn't figure out how to solve it permanently. So like, I'm a good student, you give me a bunch of rules, and I can follow them, so I am a lifetime member of Weight Watchers. Say I'm a lifetime member, but my results were nothing even remotely close to lifetime. I could do the means to an end kind of behavior to get the weight off, but then I wasn't willing to do that ongoing, and of course, then I gain the weight back again.
So I was struggling, it really became more of an issue in medical school, and as we know, the way we're trained is to eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't, you know what, mess with the pancreas, right? And so I took that seriously, and also just found myself with no other coping strategies, no other ways to feel good in my life, and so I turned to good old faithful food, and not so much alcohol for me, but a lot of my clients will do that too. They're not necessarily like an addiction situation or alcoholics, but they're drinking more than they know is maybe good for them or more than they would like to.
So I really just went on a journey to try to sort myself out, and through the process of doing that, just it was a very long circuitous path of trying lots of different things that didn't really ultimately work, but they were the stepping stones to get me to a place where I started to understand, wait a minute, I think this might be I think it could be that I'm actually an emotional eater. I hadn't known what that was, but really what that is when we eat when we're not hungry, right? We're eating for reasons outside of our body needing nutrition. And so I was like, "Oh, wait, if that's what that is, then absolutely do I do that. So if that's the case, then how do I stop?" And that I didn't know how to do.
So it was really through life coaching that I was able to learn how to deal with my emotions in a different way, understanding that it was truly changed my life and helped me to essentially separate food from the problems that I was using food to solve. You know what I mean? 'Cause like, food is there to help keep us alive and give us some occasional pleasure, and then I was using it for all these other things, and I stopped doing that. And lo and behold, when you do that, you lose weight and it stays off. So that was cool.
And then at the same time, I was feeling in my practice like I definitely wasn't burned out. People will say, "Were you burned out?" I didn't I felt I was, the way I would describe it is that I was stagnant. I felt like after about ten years in practice, I was like, "I, it's not like I knew everything, you can never know everything, but I didn't feel really, truly challenged that much anymore." I remember thinking, "Bring me any baby that can't sleep, I'll get it to sleep. Bring me any baby that has some nutritional feeding intolerances, I will figure it out." I just felt like it was just the same thing again and again, and I didn't really understand or know how to even think about other ways to engage myself. I knew within the practice structure there weren't really opportunities for me there, and my very limited thinking at the time led me to believe that the only other options would join a committee at the local hospital or something, and I was like, "I have no interest in doing that, so I guess I'm just stuck."
So it was through that life coaching as well where I started going, "Maybe I could actually do something else," and starting to realize, too, I'm not sure that I like this kind of setup, this dynamic that I have. Again, telling myself stories about what was available when I didn't actually know, I hadn't actually explored it. So I definitely don't recommend that somebody do it that way. But I thought I knew everything that was available to me. So in my mind, it was pretty much either take a break from practice or keep doing what I'm doing, quite big extremes, right?
But then at the same time, I experienced all these benefits from life coaching and this help with my weight, and I thought, I wonder if there's some other women physicians out there who are struggling the same. I was literally thinking there women physicians out there who might want some help. I really thought there might just be like a couple, and it's so cool, maybe I could have a little business on the side and help them with that. 'Cause I know I had thought with my busy schedule and all the idiosyncrasies of being a pediatrician, that was also largely to blame for my weight issues, and I learned that wasn't true. So that was really when I started going, you know what? Let me just take a break from practice. It was a big decision. I'd spent ten years building up this but also I couldn't see myself doing it ongoing. When I first opened up to the idea of leaving, I thought, "Okay, I'll do this ten more years, twenty years. That's a good career. People can't scoff at that, 'cause of course everyone else would think." But once I opened that door, once I just gave myself permission to even think about stopping, within two weeks it went to five years, then two years, then six months. I was like, "I think I'm gonna be done by the end of this year," and that's what I did, that was 2015.
John: Yeah, it's like a door, that's a solid door that you can't see through, and it's just like, "I, there's just no way, I don't know what's on the other side." And we see so many people that are, whether they're frustrated or just not fulfilled, and they just so where in that process did you go? 'Cause you were being coached prior to that, right? Or maybe you still are.
Dr. Ubell: I still am. I take advantage of the service I provide for sure. It's so great. Yeah, it was basically all happening around the same time. I first got that certification as a life coach a couple months after I finished, and then did that for a couple years, and then the opportunity for master certification became available, and I did that as well, just to improve my skills, just to work on serving my clients better and becoming a better coach.
And here's the thing is, like, when I left, I didn't look at it like, "Now you're gonna run a successful business and off you go." I really looked at it like, "I wonder if I'll miss being in practice." I thought I can probably go two or three years easily without meaningfully losing my knowledge in a worrisome way or where it would really be a lot of work to get myself back into it. So, to a certain extent, I had this little timeline for myself. Let's just see what happens, and my kids still go to that same practice, I got my allergy shot still, and I started to notice I was happy to go say hi to everybody, it was nice to get an update, and I walked out of there and I never missed it once. I wasn't one ounce of me wished that I could go back and see a patient. And so it was so starting to become, you know what? I think that I'm done with this. I think I'm, I think this part of my life is complete.
And of course, as the business grew, and it really is like a real business, I have twenty employees, it's a real business, so that's taken up so much of my creative energy, my problem-solving energy, and I feel so much connection to helping people who are struggling like me. And what I have to tell you is what so many of them say to me after working with me is, "Yeah, I lost all this weight, but that's not the best part." And this is a consistent thing that we see again and again, where they say, "Yeah, I lost weight, but what's really great is I love being a doctor again. My work experience is so much better. I'm not burned out anymore. My marriage is so much better. My relationship with my kids or my aging parents is so much better." They what they're really describing is the result of no longer using food to solve for all these other problems. So we use coaching to improve all these other things. And they stopped using food to solve those problems. Guess what? Then your body releases that extra weight, which is awesome. But so many of us get confused and think, if I could just get this weight off, then I'd feel better. But it's really not the truth. We have to feel better to get the weight off, and that's what they're describing when they say that.
John: Okay. It's like a yin yang. It's really like a circular thing. It's all intertwined. It affects the other, yeah. One of the things that you mentioned, I think in the book what we talk about here is that when you go into a non-clinical job or some other form of clinical, many times, if not almost all the time, you end up helping as many, if not more, people than you did as a physician. I can only see so many patients as a clinician, and I had a whole lot more impact as a CMO of a hospital on the quality and the length of stay, on what happened in the community, and you have obviously touched lots more patients ultimately, and in a way that you really wanted to.
Dr. Ubell: Absolutely, and I always think of it too is, do we really want, do I want to be cared for by a doctor or some family member or loved one being cared for by a doctor who's miserable, who doesn't wanna be there, who's arguably burned out or unfulfilled? No, thanks. I want a doctor who wants to be there and is engaged and cares and at least to some extent feels challenged and interested in being there, and I feel like that's what I help so many doctors to do. We know the latest data showing that at the end of 2021, two thirds of US physicians experienced at least one symptom of burnout. Doctors are struggling hard right now, and they really need help. And all of us suffer, every one of us suffers when doctors are suffering. So I feel, yes, I help these physicians, but by doing so, I'm really impacting everybody.
John: Yeah. And you did make a point in our previous conversation that the solution to burnout isn't always leaving your job. If you can fix that problem or start to deal with the problem that is contributing to that, it may not just be the employer, then you oftentimes can find happiness in the same job you were doing.
Dr. Ubell: Yes. And I've seen that time and time again of clients being so done, like as done could be, just really wanting out, and six, twelve months later saying I genuinely love being a doctor again, and nothing about my job has changed. It's all the same people, same administration, same job. All that's changed is me, and that's just so powerful. And I just wanna be very clear that by saying this, I'm not saying that the onus is entirely on the physician or the blame is on the physician if they're burned out. That's not what I'm saying. We can all agree that the system is broken. It is a real issue right now. It's, again, like a yes and situation. It's broken, and what are we gonna do? Are we gonna sit around and complain and wait for some time along to fix it? Hopefully that will be soon. If we're being honest with ourselves, it's probably not gonna be super soon. Maybe not even in our lifetimes. So then what? So now what do we do? How about we really work to figure out which parts of this we're responsible for, or which parts maybe we're not even responsible for it, but we can make our experience of it better by adjusting our outlook, the way we think about it, the way we possibly even contribute to the culture that's not so great, right? There's a personal responsibility part that we're being invited to take part in, and some people really just wanna sit around and complain, and I totally get that, and I've been that person too. But after a while, it starts getting really old and exhausting to be that person, and for some people, they get to that point of going like, "Okay, then you have to do something, right?" And so maybe they're looking at a non-clinical career, or maybe they're looking for just that can help them get to the place where they can even consider a side gig or some other option for them.
John: Right. Absolutely. We are interested also, I'm sure, in hearing about how this morphed into your current enterprise, as you said, you have twenty employees, and I have no idea what goes inside, goes on inside your business, but I know what I've seen. So can you take us from that transition to really and a lot of physicians are going to coaching of various types, and I think a lot of them face an issue of, "I can't help, I can only help so many people. I can't leverage this in any way" or the steps, just on a high level really, 'cause the things you've added over to where you are now.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, I have to say, it wouldn't sound so great if I had some huge master plan that I was just fulfilling. It really hasn't been that so much, it's been much more of, what do our clients need and want, and what do we want and need, and what can we offer, how can we meet that or match that? And so really first I built the program, which is called Weight Loss for Doctors Only, really making that a great program. And then we found, hey, some people actually they want some more help, so how could we offer that? What might that look like? And so we started to work on creating our continuation program and then started offering some live events for those people. And it's just grown from there.
With COVID is when we started offering one-on-one coaching in addition to the group and written coaching that we offered, which was a huge hit and needed so badly. That was something that was just clearly doctors were just so afraid, and it just, they really needed it, and it's been a really nice addition to the program. So then to fulfill that requires more coaches, right? So you have to hire people and all of that. And then another part of it really, there's of course like the fulfillment, there's tech stuff, there's people who are manning the main inbox and doing customer support and things like that. And then also we have a small marketing team as well, just working to get the message out to the people that we serve that we can help them.
And now with the book really was written for the general population. And so the point of the book, 'cause the book is called How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss, the point of that was multiple, right? First of all, a bunch of people need help with losing weight, just like all comers, and they need to understand that there's a mental component to this, and I wanted to put that all out there in a way that they could more easily digest it. Also, I noticed that a lot of doctors, like in terms of reviews on�my doctor recommended that I listen to this, or I'm not a doctor, but this has helped me so much. My friend who's a doctor told me that I needed this. Imagine if you need help, you go to your doctor, and your doctor says, "Hey, I have a solution. You need to listen to a podcast, and there's three hundred episodes. Where do you even start? It's so overwhelming, right?" So the thought also was, so great that doctors are recommending the podcast, but maybe they could just recommend the book. That would be a lot easier for the average patient. They could maybe get it from the library if their budget gonna work with that. Also, not everybody's a podcast listener, and not everybody's an auditory learner. There's lots of ways that people consume information and can learn. So I was thinking, so many doctors, right? There's so many things to talk about, so many problems to discuss, they don't have time. But they could recommend this book, that's at least a way to introduce the ideas to the patient, and then the patient can decide for themselves. The book can definitely help someone. There's additional book resources that they can download and all kinds of things. But someone who wants to dig in further, they would have that opportunity and would know, okay, there's, this coaching thing is a thing, it's different than Jenny Craig or whatever weight loss app they've been using or macros or whatever. So that was a point as well. But then to also help doctors to know, hey, with that. So thinking about it just from the bigger picture, like impacting the way that people in healthcare even approach people who struggle with their weight, educating themselves. I know when I shared the book with my internist who doesn't struggle with his weight, he was, I just said to him, "Hey, maybe go ahead and share this with some patients. You could have a little lending library here." And he was like, "I wanna read it first. I have to say, this isn't an area that I've really kept up on in terms of my own continuing education." There's oh, it's keto, it's low carb, it's this and that, the other thing. You can eat however you want. This delves into, it kind of backtracks up. Why are we even eating in the first place?
John: Yeah. I mean, I was, I read the book and it's the emotional eating, it's the habits, it's the, we were maybe trained to eat, it's a reward, and you get into its chapter after chapter of the different versions of what makes us eat, and it has nothing to do with because you're like, I just haven't looked at it.
Dr. Ubell: I haven't found anything that I like it. Yeah.
John: Exactly. I definitely would recommend it to anybody just to know, because if you may not have a weight problem, but your children might, your sibling might, whatever, if people wanna know sort of the root cause. Now, as you were doing this, oh, by the way, here's the book, so Casey maybe wants to see that. You did a study, and I don't, I don't, I couldn't really tell or I didn't recognize whether it was.
Dr. Ubell: Part of work that we did that was actually initiated by some of my clients. Like they were just looking around at each other going, "Hey, this is working, and you should probably be collecting data on this, 'cause people need to know." And I said, "Okay, if you're willing to design the study and to help us with all of it, then, yeah, maybe we'll do that." And that's exactly what has happened. So we essentially supply the data, and then they're crunching the numbers. So we're actually working on taking it to peer-reviewed journals to actually have it published.
John: Give us the highlights of what you found.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, yeah, I mean, basically what it comes down to is the program really works, and the big thing right now is this medication called Ozempic that a lot of people are talking about. It's actually an injectable medication. There's another one called, I think it's pronounced Wegovy. These are GLP-1 agonists that initially were created to help people with type two diabetes to help with regulation of insulin and things like that, and then they found, oh, hey, and people are actually losing weight while they're on it. So now this is the big thing of people going like, "Oh, maybe I wanna do this." So it's actually an injectable, and you have to take it the rest of your life, most likely. And it comes, of course, with significant side effects, as often medications really do. But what we found is when you take that medication, you're supposed to also make some lifestyle changes, right? It's not, oh, you're on medication, and then you're like hitting up McDonald's three times a day, but never moving, right? So lifestyle changesis almost as effective, so just slightly less effective than lifestyle changes plus that medication.
And what I'm interested to see, 'cause this is a bit of a newer faddish thing, people talking about it on TikTok, like Elon Musk was talking about how he's taking it and whatever. I think with all these kind of trends that we've seen over the years, for a while there was like all the lap band surgery and, you know, all those types of things and Fen-Phen and all those things, that we're gonna find that there's this big interest, there's a certain subset, and then everyone else who was just essentially looking for the magic pill, like it was just not really for them. And the thing is that medication also, particularly for people who don't qualify for it, it's usually you have to pay out of pocket, and it's quite expensive as well. Actually, about the same cost as our program, interestingly. So what we've really found is that it's really effective, and people, when they take part in the program, they really get great results.
John: I think people, it's human nature, if they have a pill they can take or a shot they can take, and they think it's gonna solve their problem. And I had patients on dozens and dozens of expensive meds, and they were still obese, and they were still complaining about their blood pressure and their heart diseases. Like, okay, we know it's a difficult thing, but I think to have the crutch that takes you off, your eye off of what you really should be doing is maybe not helpful.
Dr. Ubell: What I think is, take the medication or don't, regardless, you still have�this is what I love, it's like the medication makes you feel fuller faster, and I'm like, and how�so when has feeling full stopped an emotional eater from eating? Like, maybe it�at first you'll be like, "Ooh, I feel full," and then as time progresses, you'll go back to your same behaviors. It's the same work that needs to be done. It'll be waiting for you whether you do it now or you do it later. That's the way I look at it.
John: Yeah. I will eat a piece of pie or a piece of cake if I love sweets. I'm never hungry when I eat them, absolutely not hungry. It's not solving for hunger, no. So, probably not gonna solve the problem. Okay, tell us some hints or more common things to be aware of.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, one of the big things that people get really confused about is how to know essentially what to eat and how much to eat, and the whole diet industry has made a whole industry on helping us to figure out what to eat and how much to eat, and really that is something that we innately know, almost no babies, these rare genetic problems that, aside, babies know when to eat, when to stop eating, when they've had enough. This is ingrained in us, we know how to do this, but over the course of time, for any number of reasons, we've lost that connection. So it's not that those messages aren't there anymore, it's just that we're not listening, we're not paying attention at all.
So when we complicate things like we have to count points or put food into boxes or weigh and measure things or count stuff like all the macros and the, all the things and what we find is that it's so cumbersome, it feels hard, it's very hard to live a life outside of eating just in your home, and it just tends for most people not to be something that they're willing to keep doing for the rest of their lives. And I totally get that. The number of times I told myself, or tried to convince myself that counting Weight Watchers points ongoing for the rest of my life might not be that bad, and then I was just like, but deep down, I was like, no, I don't wanna do that. And also deep down, I think it makes sense that it has to be this hard. Like, why is it so complicated?
And so what I spent some time talking about in the book is how to reconnect to your body. The amount of food that I forced myself to eat because it was "quote unquote" healthy that either didn't taste good to me or didn't feel good in my body. If I really paid attention, my digestion wasn't good. I didn't feel well when I ate that way, yet I forced myself to do it anyway because some supposed expert out there was telling me that's the ticket to getting what you want. That creates a lot of problems, and we have to undo that line of thinking.
So when we start to pay attention to what do I actually like to eat, what actually tastes good to me, what makes me feel good and energetic and I sleep well when I consume this, that's a great place to start. And then in terms of starting, when should you start eating? Probably when your body's giving you some hunger signals. So what might those feel like? For some of us, we're very in tune with what hunger feels like. A lot though, a lot of us eat to prevent hunger, and tthere can be even people who grew up with food uncertainty, you know, like really not sure that they were gonna have all their meals or having to miss meals, like it can even bring out the trauma response of their fear of feeling hunger. But for a lot of us, we were just trained to, it's time to eat, doesn't, it's six o'clock, this is when we eat dinner, whether you're hungry or not is not relevant, right? We've trained ourselves it's time to eat or confused. We have to recognize the purpose of eating, the majority of the time, is to solve the problem of hunger, so maybe let's wait till we actually have that problem. Let's actually start feeling hungry.
And then on the flip side of that is figuring out when we've had enough. And that was something that I had totally messed up being in myself, being in Weight Watchers, because they would let you eat as many vegetables as you wanted without having to count points. So in my scarcity and my fear of being hungry later and not having points left, 'cause remember I'm a good student, God forbid that I actually meet my body as the slider thing told me how many points I could have, and I was done. So I would overeat vegetables, I would eat these huge salads to the point of truly abdominal discomfort, distension. It's really, in hindsight, like it makes no sense, but that feeling that way started to become normal. I thought, "Oh, when you feel that way, is when you stop eating." And I had to re-educate myself on that, and so many of my clients as well, right? We're so used to emotional eating. What does it actually feel like to have had enough food where you feel good and settled and energetic, and this is gonna last you for a few hours? It's something new to explore.
So the difference with this is that no expert can tell you when you're hungry, and no expert can tell you when you've had enough to eat. And so when we are in this mindset of other people know better than us, which is what we've been trained to think, right? We're the ones, this is what they say, we're the ones who created this predicament in the first place, we're the struggle. So obviously something's wrong with us. So we need to hire an expert who's gonna tell us what we're supposed to eat, that they know better than us what we should be eating and how we should be eating. And then if that doesn't work, it's not because that plan isn't good for us, it's because something's wrong with us, right? We're weak, we're undisciplined, right? We go into this whole shame spiral. So what I'm working on doing is undoing that and saying, "Hey, guess what? You are actually the expert. You, what it feels like to be you in your body when you eat certain food and when you start eating, when you stop eating. So when you're open to taking on that expert role, you do have to do a little legwork, right? You gotta pay attention. But what's so great about this is those signals are with you no matter where you go, when you're on vacation, when you're on call in the hospital, when you're home, it's all there.
And then we can even apply that even further to like, how about we start paying attention to when we're tired and we try to work on going to sleep when we're tired instead of pushing ourselves through or staying up late or all those things that we do or eating to try to keep ourselves awake? How about we just start really listening to the signals that our bodies are giving us, and we work on meeting those needs and see what happens from there. So what I love about this is it's so simple. I'm not, it's not necessarily always easy for people, because there is work to undo it, that conditioning. But at the same time, it's kind of liberating too, right? We don't have to keep searching for the latest guru who's got the latest whatever medication or whatever. We already have everything we need. We just have to tap into it and know how to interpret what those messages are.
John: I'm glad you brought that part up about recognizing when we're hungry and when we're not hungry, because you do spend a lot of time in the book, and you actually use a scale, and you give a lot of examples of people who have to learn how to even recognize that. Again, I can relate to that myself. I often confuse thirst with hunger. I never get thirsty, but then I eat, and now I have a cup of coffee, it's like, that didn't solve my issue. Well, obviously I wasn't hungry, I was thirsty. So I think maybe men have a bigger problem not recognizing what their body's telling them.
Dr. Ubell: I think women do too.
John: Yeah, they probably both do. That is manifested by the results demonstrated. Alright, so there's a lot of stuff just like that in the book, so tell us again, where should we go to find everything that you do? The website?
Dr. Ubell: Yeah. So my website is katrinayubelmd.com. Through there, you can find where the book is sold. It's really sold at all the major retailers, and Audible. I did record it myself. There's some bonus material in there, and my voice sounds better. I'm a little sick right now, so I sound like this. It's actually better quality voice in there. And then if you purchase the book and you get your order number and come back to the website, you can actually submit that and get access to a free workshop called Guarantee Your Weight Loss Success, and that will help set you up. It's just a ninety-minute workshop that helps to set you up for success in applying what you're gonna learn in the book, right? So we never actually read it, or we read it and we go, "Yeah, I should do that," and then we don't actually do it.
John: Yeah.
Dr. Ubell: This is gonna help you to start actually taking action.
John: Awesome. Yeah. There's a lot on the website too. I think even before the book came out, I think you have some freebies that people can download and get a free resources on there, taste of some of these concepts and the podcast is awesome, so don't forget about that.
Dr. Ubell: Yeah, that's called Weight Loss for Busy Physicians.
John: Cast app. Oh, so tell me how many downloads have you had so far?
Dr. Ubell: You said that, and I was like, "Oh my God, I think total we're past six million."
John: I think I saw that number. Oh my gosh, that is a lot of people. That shows you're helping a lot of people. You wouldn't have that many downloads unless people were getting something out of it. So definitely hit a home run in terms of reaching out and helping people in something that you enjoy doing. So again, that's why you're such a good role model, I think, for many. OK we're pretty much out of time at this point, so I wanna thank you again for coming, Katrina. This has been great, and maybe we'll see you again down the road.
Dr. Ubell: Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me.
John: Keep doing all that good work.
Dr. Ubell: I will, I will.
John: Alright, bye-bye. I hope you found today's replay instructional and inspiring. If you want to download a transcript of our interview and access all of the links mentioned today, plus links to related episodes, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/weight-loss-business. And don't forget, if you're thinking about or looking for a non-clinical physician-run business, call Glenn Cooper at 303-919-2694 again, that number is 303-919-2694 to learn more with no obligation. That number will also be in the show notes at nonclinicalphysicians.com/weight-loss-business.
Finally, don't forget that the opinions expressed here are mine and my guest's, and while the information provided in the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there's no guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life, or business. Always consult an attorney, accountant, or career strategist before making any major decision about your career. Bye for now!
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