My name is Dr. Rakesh Jotwani aka Dr. Rak (“rock”) and I’m a physician, husband, and father of 3 kids and one dog. I’m on a mission to INSPIRE you to take control of your health by optimizing your lifestyle habits.
It’s been my own journey to health that has really inspired me to create this resource. I’ve transformed my mind and body by changing my lifestyle habits.
And I did this not by punishing or torturing myself, but by learning how to make changes that are not only good for me but also feel good. Now in my 40s, I’m in the best health of my life, and it only keeps getting better.
This definitely wasn’t always the case. Far from it. In 2016, my wife and I welcomed our third child into this world, and I decided I should visit my primary care doctor. While I had always been overweight since I was kid, I learned I had obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and pre-diabetes, which is the precursor to type 2 diabetes.
None of this should have been surprising to me. I was eating a Standard American Diet (aka SAD), rooted in processed foods, and high in added sugar, saturated fat, and salt.
I had learned to deal with years of stress by comforting myself with trips through fast-food drive-thrus. My sleep was terrible and exercise was the last thing on my mind. All of this left me feeling physically and mentally exhausted. I would come home to my family in the evenings, a ball of negativity. I told them I had no choice because I was forced to be in a good mood at work, home was the only place I could complain.
One night my wife asked me something I'll never forget:
"Why is it that your family, the people you say you love the most, get the worst version of you?"
Looking back, my wife's brutal honesty was an act of kindness, as it made me turn inward and seek a new way forward.
As luck would have it, I learned about mindfulness meditation at an event at work. I downloaded a guided meditation app on my phone and started meditating for 10 minutes a day, in my car of all places, before coming into the house.
Within weeks my family noticed a difference. I was more positive and more present with them. That meditation habit started me on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. I realized my habits were choices, and they weren't just negatively impacting me and my health, but they were negatively impacting my family as well.
Since that time, in addition to a regular meditation habit, I've adopted a whole food, plant predominant diet. I lift weights and go running and hiking regularly. And I made all of these changes by focusing on feeling good and making them sustainable.
Within months of moving to a more plant-based diet, I had reversed my chronic disease, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and pre-diabetes, all with lifestyle changes. Most amazingly, I had so much more energy and a brand new outlook on what I am capable of achieving.
Soon after I experienced, I started asking why we weren't doing this for our patients.
After more than 15 years of working in health care, I’ve learned that in the United States we don’t have a health care system.
We have a sick care system.
And all this sick care isn't cheap. In 2021, the United States spent more than 4 trillion dollars on healthcare! That’s double per person what other industrialized countries spend, yet we have the lowest life expectancy compared to all of those countries.
Most of those 4 trillion dollars, almost 3 trillion dollars, go towards the fallout of lifestyle-related chronic diseases.
Despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, Americans continue to live unhealthier and shorter lives.
We spend very little on prevention and even less supporting lifestyle changes.
Unfortunately, this is true throughout our health care system. It's not the way the system was set up.
Traditionally doctors don't received training on the role of lifestyle habits on health. What's more, most of the systems in place to pay doctors and hospitals give financial incentives for more illness.
Even if your doctor does talk to you about lifestyle habits, they often lack the time or training this type of counseling requires. As a result, the default has become to prescribe pills to deal with the high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes that results from a poor lifestyle. The problem is that pills don't treat the root cause of disease, which are unhealthy lifestyle habits.
We’re up against a food industry that profits off feeding us the very foods that drive the disease.
Processed food companies literally design their food to be addictive, by tweaking the amount of salt, fat and sugar they put in their products. And the meat and dairy industries have spent years distorting research to create public confusion about the health risks that come from eating these foods.
You don’t need to wait for the healthcare system or food industries to wise up and start doing the right thing. Let me help you take control of your health NOW by addressing the root cause of disease by taking control of your lifestyle habits.
These days it seems like everyone EXCEPT YOUR DOCTOR is a health and fitness expert, so I get how confusing it can be to know what changes to make or where to start.
That’s where I come in. I’m board-certified in Lifestyle Medicine, which is uses evidence-based lifestyle changes to prevent, treat and even reverse most chronic diseases. Rak Your Life is rooted in lifestyle medicine.
Rak is short for my name, but it’s also short for the 3 essential ingredients to make sustainable changes to your habits.
Roots, Awareness and Kindness.
Rak Your Life is rooted in fist bumps- a reminder to show love for ourselves and others.
© 2022 Dr. Rakesh Jotwani