010: Sam Feltham – The Public Health Collaboration (PHCUK)

Sam Feltham  has been in the health and fitness industry for over a decade. Starting out as a party coordinator at a sports centre and working his way up to studying at the European Institute of Fitness and qualifying as a Master Personal Trainer. After 5 years of running a fitness boot camp business Sam decided to move away from that business in order to fully focus on improving public health by setting up and directing the Public Health Collaboration. Sam started as a personal trainer and then set fitness bootcamps called Smash The Fat. Sam used to have his own podcast for Smash The Fat. After reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes he started to recommend low carb, real food diets.In 2015 he felt he was in a philosophical quandary. He felt to continue the business would be an uphill battle against mainstream dietary advice, which Sam felt was bad advice. He felt the only way to tackle the issue was to get to the root cause.He decided not to continue with Smash The Fat and to set up a not for profit charity aimed at lobbying the government that the food guide lines need to be changed and suggesting that they might have got the guidelines wrong in the 80s.Sam proposed this to Dr Aseem Malhotra, Dr Trudi Deakin, Dr David Unwin, Dr Jen Unwin who thought it was a great idea and so the Public Health Collaboration (PHC) was started.Ambassadors ProgrammeThe Ambassadors are local representatives of the PHC, who liaise with healthcare professionals in NHS GP practices. They help set up free support groups and show the results the programme is achieving with patients improving metabolic health and saving money for the NHS.Andy Bishop is a PHC Ambassador who joined a patient participation group, then got the PHC on the agenda for a meeting. Eventually he was able to set up a group. It took 18 months to get the first group up and running but now has 4-5 groups in north Liverpool. Ambassadors are beginning to make breakthroughs by going through the patient participant groups. Sam's Top TipsUnderstand and creating your ‘Why’ by creating a statement of your personal purpose of why you want to become healthier Have the resources on hand which includes a variety in foods, recipe book or websites, and consider planning the first week of your transition Have an accountability person to help you with changing your lifestyle  Resources Mentioned Sam’s old training Smash the Fat http://live.smashthefat.com/ Sam’s high fat experiment http://live.smashthefat.com/why-i-didnt-get-fat/  Smash the Fat YT https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCFMZHxKvSFn-wLjaV2hf1g?feature=emb_ch_name_ex  Smash the Fat Podcast https://podtail.com/en/podcast/smash-the-fat/  PHCUK Resourceshttps://phcuk.org/resources/ Dr David Unwin’s Sugar Infographics https://phcuk.org/sugar/