This week Dr. Hallowell had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Beth Frates. Dr. Frates is a trained physiatrist and health and wellness coach who practices lifestyle medicine, helping individuals and groups to adopt healthy habits for a lifetime. She was recently voted the President Elect of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine which is the largest growing medical specialty society and now has over 7,000 members. Teaching is a passion for Dr. Frates, and she is an award winning teacher at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard Extension school where she teaches lifestyle medicine courses. Writing is another focus of Dr. Frates’s work and she has co-authored three books, Life After Stroke: The Guide to Recovering Your Health and Preventing a Second Stroke, The Lifestyle Medicine Handbook: An Introduction to the Power of Healthy Habits and most recently PAVING the Path to Wellness: A Guide to Thriving with a Healthy Body, Peaceful Mind, and Joyful Heart.

She and Dr. Hallowell engage in a lively conversation that includes discussions about her background in lifestyle medicine/wellness, her writing, and how she uses her difference to not only help herself, but help others as well.

Show Notes

Podcast: Dr. Hallowell’s Wonderful World of Different

Episode: Beth Frates

Welcome to Dr. Hallowell’s Wonderful World of Different, a podcast hosted by Dr. Ned Hallowell! By interviewing a wide range of guests from various backgrounds, we will uncover and celebrate the different ways people have of approaching life, solving problems and having fun. Together, we will break down the notion of normal and abnormal, and instead tap into the talents everyone has.

Today’s guest is Beth Frates, a pioneer in Lifestyle Medicine education and an award-winning teacher at Harvard Medical School. Her interest has always been educating people on how to keep themselves healthy all the time, not only just when they need medical assistance. She was just elected president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the largest growing medical specialty.

Beth’s most recent book is called PAVING the Path to Wellness: A Guide to Thriving with a Healthy Body, Peaceful Mind and Joyful Heart. To begin the conversation, Beth describes lifestyle medicine as the use of exercise, nutrition, sleep, social connection, stress reduction and avoidance of risky substances. To really be well, she believes all of these six pillars need to be honored. Once we figure out where we find joy and love, we can focus on the rest. For example, finding an exercise you enjoy is important to holding yourself accountable to follow through with it.

More and more doctors are becoming interested in helping their patients practice wellness instead of just getting over sickness. When physicians adopt certain habits themselves, they are much more likely to recommend them to patients. Beth reveals that five servings of vegetables per day will decrease the chance of having a heart attack by 20%. Lifestyle medicine is very individualistic, and not one size fits all. Additionally, lifestyle medicine is free! Beth discusses the ways controlled breathing changed her life. While whole foods provide the best nutrition, she explains that supplements can be beneficial within the context of certain diets. Even having pets can be a positive pillar of lifestyle medicine!

Links:

Learn more about Beth Frates and purchase her book here.

If you have a comment about this episode or a suggestion for a future episode, send it to different@hallowellcenter.org!