I recorded this podcast interview on a summer morning, and then I went whitewater rafting for the rest of the day. I’m telling you that up front because it’s honestly the whole story in miniature: I still work night shifts in the ER on purpose, I run two companies, and I build my calendar around a life I actually want to live. That’s not in spite of how I think about health. It’s because of it.
Dr. Marissa Codil invited me onto the Super Doc Stories podcast to talk about the entrepreneurial side of my work, meaning how an emergency physician ends up running a coaching company and a telehealth practice at the same time. It’s a podcast made for physicians. But as we talked, I kept noticing that almost everything we covered is really about you, the women we work with every day.
So here’s the story I told her, and the parts I most want you to hear.
This Didn’t Start as a Business. It Started 22 Years Ago.
I’m a hippie at heart. I went into medical school genuinely thinking I was going to learn about food and movement and stress management. I didn’t. Almost none of us did.
So as a fourth-year medical student in Philadelphia, I took the train to New York once a month and earned an integrative nutrition health coaching certificate alongside my medical training. That was 22 years ago. I’ve been coaching in some form ever since: through residency, through a year-long medical acupuncture course, even through studying Ayurveda in India as a student. I have always wanted a wider range of knowledge than I was being given.
When lifestyle medicine emerged as a formal specialty in 2017, I remember thinking, this is what I thought medicine was going to be. I certified, and in 2018 I formalized two decades of coaching into Wholist.
Why I Still Work Nights in the ER
People are sometimes surprised that I still practice emergency medicine. I love it. It’s acute care, which Western medicine genuinely does well, and it’s for everyone. It does not matter how much money you have, how old you are, or who you are. You show up, and I take care of you.
But the ER also shows me, over and over, what happens when the foundation underneath someone’s health has been ignored for decades. Emergency medicine is where I treat the crisis. Wholist is where we work on everything upstream of it.
I Was Three Days Ahead of My First Clients
Here’s the part of the interview where Marissa laughed, because it’s the advice every entrepreneur gets and almost nobody follows: don’t wait until it’s perfect.
When I built the first version of Weight Wellness in 2018, I was writing and recording the content three days ahead of my first cohort. Twelve people, mostly nurses and friends, willing to be my guinea pigs. On my days off from the ER I’d sit in a shared workspace in Boise, gathering data, writing, recording.
Eight years and around 1,800 clients later, that program has been refined by every cohort since. But I’ve never forgotten what building it that way taught me. When you’re that close to the women you’re serving, you know exactly what they need next. Clients still tell me, “How did you know that today’s lesson was exactly what I needed?” That’s how.
And the coaches who deliver it alongside me now, many of them physicians themselves, all of them with real clinical backgrounds and their own lived midlife experience, keep that same closeness at the center of everything we do.
The Line I Want Every Midlife Woman to Hear
If you take one thing from this interview, I hope it’s this, because it’s the sentence I say most often:
It’s not that your lifestyle isn’t working for you anymore. It’s that your physiology has changed, and the lifestyle no longer fits the soup.
The habits that worked at 32 aren’t failing at 48 because you got lazy or lost your willpower. Your biology changed the rules, and nobody handed you the new ones.
Here’s the harder thing Marissa and I talked about. Women like us are remarkably easy to market to right now. Our clothes don’t fit the same, our sleep is different, our anxiety is different, and we want a fix, so we’re willing to put the money down. The wellness industry knows this about us.
So let me say here what I said on the podcast. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and it doesn’t have to be an easy fix, because those don’t exist anyway. Sometimes things take time. Sometimes they take actual work. But when you understand what’s actually happening in your body, that work gets a whole lot more effective, and a whole lot cheaper than the thousand-supplement approach.
That understanding is the entire point of what we build. See how Weight Wellness works »
Two Companies, On Purpose
Marissa and I also talked about why I run two separate businesses, and it’s worth repeating here, because I want you to always know exactly what you’re getting from us.
**Wholist is coaching and education.** Physician-developed, coach-delivered programs where we work on food, sleep, movement, stress, mindset, and the “why do I make the decisions I make” layer underneath all of it.
**WholistRx is my separate telehealth medical practice**, where I care for patients as their physician: menopause medicine, metabolic health, weight management, prescriptions when they make sense. It’s small and high-touch by design. Patients message me through an app, and we talk as often as their care actually requires. Because if starting hormone therapy or changing your metabolic health only took one appointment a year, we’d all have done it already.
Different lanes, one philosophy. The medical care and the foundation underneath it both matter, and neither one replaces the other.
Trust the Non-Linear Path
Near the end, Marissa asked what I’d tell myself a decade ago. My answer: be patient, and trust that none of it is wasted.
The nutrition school, the acupuncture course, the trip to India, the years of coaching squeezed around ER shifts. At the time, none of it looked like a plan. Now I’m really proud of that 22-year-old who kept putting her hand up to learn things she didn’t yet know how she’d use. Every detour built what Wholist is today.
I hear the same worry from so many women in our programs. That it’s too late. That they should have figured this out earlier. That the winding road disqualifies them somehow. It doesn’t. Your path so far, all of it, is the raw material for what comes next. We just help you build with it.
For My Physician Colleagues and Clinic Partners
This episode was made for physicians, so let me speak to you directly for a moment.
If you’re a physician or veterinarian working on your own health, there’s a Weight Wellness cohort just for us. I lead it myself, and it’s full of colleagues who are tired of recommending in the exam room what they haven’t been able to live in their own bodies. No judgment here. I built it because I needed it too.
And if you run a clinic, whether that’s direct care, menopause, metabolic, or functional medicine, this is the part of the interview I’d point you to. Wholist partners with clinics to deliver the lifestyle and behavior-change layer your patients need, co-branded to your practice. You keep the patient relationship and the medical care. We deliver the education and coaching foundation that makes your plan stick. It started because one clinic asked, and it has become one of my favorite parts of this work.
There’s more for clinicians on our physician resources page, including the Lifestyle Medicine training if you want to build this into your own practice.
Go Do This
- Listen to the full episode on Super Doc Stories. We go deeper on all of this, including the very unglamorous early days.
- If you’re a midlife woman thinking my lifestyle doesn’t fit the soup anymore, that’s exactly the conversation to have with us. Book a strategy call »
- If you’re a physician, a vet, or a clinic owner, the door marked “for you” is real, and I’m the one who answers it. Start here »
Thank you, Dr. Codil and the Super Doc Tech team, for the conversation, and for building a place where physicians talk honestly about creating careers that serve our patients and our own lives at the same time.
Dr. Heather
