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 Programme

The 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 Tips

1. Understand and creating your ‘Why’ by creating a statement of your personal purpose of why you want to become healthier 
2. Have the resources on hand which includes a variety in foods, recipe book or websites, and consider planning the first week of your transition 
3. Have an accountability person to help you with changing your lifestyle 

Quotes

“Reasons for resistance to change is multifactorial as it depends a) it is change b) it is new ideas c) they have other stuff to do without realising the impact it may have.”

Sam Feltham

“It is always difficult to create a future for somebody when they’re having to put out fires all the time but if we can show them a painting of a vision of the future then that will go a long way to preventing that resistance.”

Sam Feltham

“Understanding the reasons for resistance come from understanding that people are busy, not being able to see the vision that they are trying to create and resistance to new ideas.”

Sam Feltham

“It is such a foundational thing to demonstrate that this works in the real world for people to accept the fact that this is something that could work.  So, having the Ambassadors Program functioning is as it is paramount to the changes we want to see.”

Sam Feltham

“Ambassadors tend to be more experienced in terms of the day to day living experience of how to keep to a low carb diet when you’ve got a family who eat a standard diet of the practicalities.” 

Sam Feltham

"I was in a calorie surplus and I had two very different reactions with my body."

Sam Feltham

"Different foods have different reactions."

Sam Feltham

"Quantity comes into the equation somewhere but it is not as simple as ‘calories in, calories out’."

Sam Feltham

"“I started recommending low carb / real food diets and the results spoke for themselves, clients got better results than they had before”"

Sam Feltham

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Music by Bob Collum

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