[00:00:00 – 00:00:07] Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Pratik Patel. Pratik, welcome on the show.

[00:00:07 – 00:00:09] Pratik Patel

Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:10 – 00:00:13] Nitin Bajaj

Glad to have you here. Let’s start with who is Pratik.

[00:00:14 – 00:00:50] Pratik Patel

Well, if, you know, I’m gonna have a bio of my social media tagline, I just say I’m a father. First, I’ve got an 18 old Indian son. I by trade, I am a health and performance coach. So dietitian, strength and conditioning coach, spent time working in a variety of different college athletics programs and in the NFL. And I think the the tagline my friends like to say about me is because they don’t have a lot of experience with it. They’re like, well, you’re in shape. You’re jacked. You’re Indian and your dad. We’ll just call you the jacked Indian dad. So I think those things check all the boxes of, you know, who I am at the core.

[00:00:51 – 00:01:12] Nitin Bajaj

I love that. I might even steal that even though people around me may not approve as much. But who cares? I like to ask people why they do what they do, and even more so in your case. Tell us what is it that you do, and why is it that you started doing this, and what was the journey leading you up to this point?

[00:01:13 – 00:01:45] Pratik Patel

Yeah. So currently, what I have is it’s a health, wellness, and coaching business, and I’m focusing specifically on South Asians and Indians. And the reason is I have I’ve had my own health journey over the past twenty, twenty five years. I’m I’m turning 40 this year. And many others many of my clients, many others that are either first or second generation born here in The States, you grew up liking certain things, playing sports, being active, but academics was always a priority. And it wasn’t my family too. We didn’t learn a lot about health, wellness, and fitness.

[00:01:46 – 00:01:46] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:01:46 – 00:03:28] Pratik Patel

So it it took a back seat, and that’s no fault of my parents. They were busy. They were working. We had a a small business. They owned it. They provided for the family. We’re very grateful for it. And I was an active kid, played a lot of sports, and then went through a very sedentary period, which it becomes very common. It’s not just for Indians and North Americans, but Americans too. And it really influenced me, not in a great way, where transition into high school and was very unpopular, so to speak. I’m an Indian boy living in a non Indian situation, so I’m already a little bit of an outsider or not like anybody else. And then I isolate and ostracize myself. Because I’m a little bit more introverted, and I’m not a popular kid. And it wasn’t a fun period going through. I didn’t really have an identity, wasn’t really sure of myself, and wanted to just be more social and make more friends, had dreams of if I had this ideal body or physique that would equate to having a better life. Mhmm. And at that time, I didn’t really have a lot of Indian or South Asian role models to settle. This person did it. I can do the same. It was athletes, other people in and around me. I’m like, okay. I wanna look like that. I wanna look like that body builder. So I went through this transformation, loved everything about health and fitness, got back into playing sports, and it really had a positive impact on me. Like, I can transform my body, but also transform others’ perceptions and my perception about myself. So studied in school, went to Kansas State undergrad and grad school, and just see somehow got connected into the sports realm. So and like, my major professor back from grad school said, you just have this meteoric rise in sports. And it was very unique because you don’t see a lot of Indian coaches

[00:03:28 – 00:03:29] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:03:29 – 00:04:19] Pratik Patel

Get a lot of publicity and press at that level. At that time, there are two or three total in the NFL, and I made it all the way to the Giants coaching staff. And because of a lot of the turnover, I was the longest tenured coach right before I ended up transitioning out and got to a point where my health wasn’t great. So all the great stuff I had done to get back into shape went by the wayside because I put my career first, which is a very Indian, South Asian thing to do because I wanna be the best. So went through a major transition and transformation in 2019 when I realized, like, okay. There’s not a lot of growth left for me Mhmm. In this in this industry. And with all the the firings and hirings, I didn’t really have a coach or a GM I could tie myself to to really propel me to a high level position and get paid a lot of money. It was, you’re really good at what you do, so we’ll just keep you around.

[00:04:19 – 00:04:19] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:04:19 – 00:07:03] Pratik Patel

But you won’t have the autonomy or control over what you do. We tell you what to do because the new coach wants it, and that didn’t feel very good. My impact with the team was diminishing, and all that time spent in work away from family, away from friends, at the expense of my health was now like, is it worth it anymore? Because it’s not what I intended to do. So I took a step back, assessed everything from a health standpoint, same way we were doing with the athletes. And I’m like, let me just be methodical about this. I’m not gonna try to fix everything in thirty days or three months. I want this to stick. So 2019 to 2020, just this massive transformation. I’ve posted about it online. I’ve got this up on my website. And I was like, wow. The person I wanted to be when I was 13, 14, 15 years old, I ended up becoming. And it wasn’t chasing somebody else’s program or physique. It’s a look. I’m Indian. I have all these predispositions. I’m a small frame dude. I’m never gonna be this massive athlete looking person, like someone that plays American football. But I can maximize what I can do for my own situation, and it was it it changed everything. It had a huge mental shift for me. It changed my outlook on work and my career, and I’m like, look. If I can do this for myself, I can do this with others Mhmm. In my own control. If I create my own company and I do it for athletes or I do it for high performers, and I started doing that. I left the NFL in 2020. When you do things on your own for the first time ever, you think you could do it on your own, and then you rise up and realize I need to hire people. I need help. I can’t be the stubborn, not only Indian person, but the stubborn person who had a lot of success doing things on my own. Like, I have to get out of my own way. And things are progressing nicely. Not only had I built up a business, I have a social media presence, and the majority of it was in and around sports wellness and health and fitness and athletes and got connected to a lot of VCs and startups and did a lot of consulting just using the knowledge and everything that I’ve learned over the past fifteen, twenty years, which is very unique at that time. Still is very unique. And then 2022 comes around, I meet somebody. 2023 comes around, I have my first child, my son. And that really changed everything for me. It resonated much stronger because now it’s I don’t really care about I do care about how I look and feel, but it’s not the most important thing. It’s all about taking care of him, but also being at my best, which does have a very strong health and fitness connotation because that’s not rampant in our culture. So it’s just resonating in my head where I’ve climbed this mountaintop in sports and had a lot of success and been able to transition out. But the next mountaintop is how do we address the issues and problems we have within our own culture as it pertains to everything health and fitness wise?

[00:07:03 – 00:08:22] Nitin Bajaj

I love that. So you’re taking the best practices that you get from these high performing elite sports physical, realms, and you’re bringing that and marrying that with the vulnerabilities we have as a population, as a phenotype. And you’re saying, okay. Let’s get this intersection and help us lead better, healthier versions of ourselves. And I think a lot of that is cultural where we believe fundamentally just going for a walk is good enough. Right? That’s healthy enough and which we know is not the case. So, you know, on one end, you have this experience, this great amount of data that you have seen that works, taking people to the highest level of health and physical performance. On the other end, you have this extreme challenge of going against, essentially going against what’s in our DNA, what’s in our culture. As I think about this, I would love to ask you in your assessment as you scale what you have built. What’s the one big challenge that you would like to call out?

[00:08:22 – 00:10:02] Pratik Patel

It’s a great question. And, really, I would say just the reality of people of our background recognizing that we are different, but what we’re currently experiencing as being different doesn’t mean we’re on the same level field as everybody else. When I make posts online and some of it is joking, some of it is serious, but some of it is a call to action to say that, look. As as South Asian men, as Indian men, we have smaller statures, and this is in the published data. We’ve got smaller bone mass. We have less muscle mass. We’re more predisposed to visceral fat Mhmm. Subcutaneous fat in and around the midsection driving insulin resistance. Our fitness levels are the lowest out of all the other ethnicities. Our strength levels are the same thing too. So when I address it, people are just saying that, oh, you just say that because you look a certain way or you’re trying to get everybody to do what you do, but I’m saying it because it’s published in the literature. And I’m trying to get people to realize that you are the way you are. And it’s not just because of genetics, but a lot of it has to do with our lifestyle choices too. And getting people to think that way and realize, look, you can still be South Asian. You can still be Indian and still have a very strong connection with your culture and do things that push the needle to improve your health and fitness without losing your identity. But re the reality is if we don’t do anything about it, we’re gonna continue to develop with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, three to five times risk of type two diabetes. Now it’s progressing into cancer and degenerative brain diseases.

[00:10:03 – 00:10:03] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:10:04 – 00:10:25] Pratik Patel

So if that’s what it means to be Indian or Hindu, to be predisposed to have all these issues, then maybe we need to think about how can we actually improve that. So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges is getting people to realize, like, your current situation isn’t what you always will be, but being very transparent.

[00:10:26 – 00:10:31] Nitin Bajaj

Now on the flip side of challenges come opportunities, what’s the one that you’re most excited about?

[00:10:31 – 00:12:44] Pratik Patel

I think it’s really just getting people to understand their own situation. When I work with a client, when I work with somebody, it’s not doing some kind of cookie cutter. Mhmm. Hey. This worked for me, so you have to do it. It’s and it it’s one thing that worked out really well when I was working with elite athletes in the NFL where people are who they are. They have certain programs in their head. They have default settings. They default actions, habits, whatever you wanna call them. And getting them to do the healthy things or the right things can be difficult for anybody at any age. So if you go and get blood pressure done, if you go and get blood work done, if you go and get a body composition scan and you see where you’re at, it can be very eye opening. So the second we get I get results from a client and they share it, they’ll see it. And then I’ll give them my interpretations, and we’ll start crafting the plan. They’re like, I didn’t know that. That’s very humbling. And when I tell them to do something, it’s always based on this is where you’re at Mhmm. And it’s the reason why I want you to do it. And they’re like, hey. That makes sense. I never thought of it that way. I always thought I was this or that or healthy, but now I see that I wasn’t. Now it’s more empowering to wanna do those things. So I think that’s a big opportunity, but also providing the education behind it too. We’re inundated with more health, wellness, fitness information than ever before. It’s so easy to get our hands on anything we wanna learn and know about. But a lot of it isn’t applicable to everybody’s situation, but having done a lot of really in-depth information and and research and looking at the literature and lit reviews, it’s easy to me to see I know what we struggle with and where our issues are in the downfalls. This is the testing we need to get done. And now I can provide you not only with the plan, but the education behind it too. So that’s what gets me excited about helping people see that. And when they see that and they step away from this is what the media outlets say, this is what my doctors always told me. And then no offense to doctors. I got a lot of family members that are doctors. I got a lot of client Indian clients that are doctors. It’s just that they’ve been taught things in a very certain way. It’s textbook material, and it hasn’t really come up to speed with now we have to be very open minded and creative with what we think about and how we apply our recommendations.

[00:12:45 – 00:13:21] Nitin Bajaj

We’re playing into that stereotype that has been built and becomes a a spiral in the wrong direction that we just believe that this is our Patel. This is what we are doomed for, which is obviously not the case. Mhmm. Now as we look at that opportunity, I’d love to pause and reflect, and you shared a little bit of this earlier. I would love for you to call out two moments from your life. One where things did not work out as you had expected, and there was failure. There were lessons. And, another one where things exceeded your own expectations and became a success beyond your imagination.

[00:13:22 – 00:15:08] Pratik Patel

Yeah. And and I’ll attribute it more to my journey on health and fitness and not necessarily my career journey because that’s something a little bit different, and not everybody can relate to that if you’re not really into sports. But the first is after I went through this initial weight loss in high school, I I became just the the skinny Indian kid. So before, I was the skinny fat one who was very weak, and then I dropped a bunch of weight. And I I didn’t do it the right way because I was figuring it out myself. And I looked a certain way, which is perfectly fine, but I had a lot of friends that were in very good shape. Their parents played sports in college, and they have a little bit better background in genetics. And from then on, I was chasing this physique or the way I wanted to look for a very long time up until post grad school, up until I got a chance to work within my career. And all I was doing was following what everybody else is doing, so I’m just following the crowd. Back then, it was more of these forums on bodybuilding.com. We didn’t have the same exposure. Social media wasn’t a thing. K. It was, what do you see in magazines? What’s getting posted out there in TV and print? And then or, hey. I go to a gym. I go to twenty four Hour Fitness. There are a bunch of guys there that are big and strong and lean, and I wanna look like that. So let me just talk to them. What is it that they’re doing? Not knowing a lot of these play these people are cycling steroids or doing whatever, and they don’t wanna tell you because, it’s a little bit of a full and they wanna keep that to themselves. So I would just follow and do everything and not really have any strategic reasoning behind it. You know, I thought, look. If I just lift, I’m gonna automatically get bigger. If I buy these supplements

[00:15:09 – 00:15:09] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:15:09 – 00:16:33] Pratik Patel

That’s marketed for fat loss and muscle gain, then I’m automatically gonna get the results, not Nitin, do these ingredients even have any impact or implication? What else do I need to do? So it’s not just a static thing that’s gonna fix all my problems. It’s a combination of a variety of different factors. I went through and played this game, different training programs, p 90 x, beach body, buying bands, lifting in the gym, trying to do longer distance endurance type programs, changing the way I eat, the six small meals a day, doing fasting. I never was able to get that physique that made me feel really confident and happy. So that was a big mistake and and something that I had to go through to learn. And then everything culminated until when I told you there was this huge shift in my mindset of once I started working in team sport, I wasn’t able to stay on top of my health as much because I put all my eggs in the basket of wanting to be the best. And weight started creeping up, still exercising, still lifting, was getting stronger, but putting on way too much weight for a smaller frame person. And in my mind, I kept comparing myself to these football players I’m working with, some of the best of the best, not knowing, look, it’s not in the cards that look like that. I want them to be two hundred two hundred and five pounds, ten percent body fat. That’s not even possible with all the modern medicine and drugs or whatever. Even right now, I couldn’t do that.

[00:16:33 – 00:16:33] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:16:34 – 00:19:02] Pratik Patel

So we got to the point where it’s okay. I need to do what’s right for me. Instead of doing these willy nilly plans, following what everybody else is doing and trying to implement for my situation, let me assess myself in a variety of different areas and slowly do the right things. So what does my blood work say about me? Oh, it shows that I’m not as healthy as I thought. Okay. What is my body composition? Yeah. I’m carrying way too much fat mass. Even though I have a good amount of muscle mass for my frame, I really don’t care about maximizing it because that’s not gonna get me to two zero five or 10% body fat, so I have to think differently. How well am I sleeping? Not very well. The Oura ring, the Gen one, my I got it way back when says things are not doing well. Am I moving throughout the day consistently? Mhmm. No. I’m not getting as much steps. My practicing self care techniques just to calm myself down, become more parasympathetic, like, call that stress management. I I could be doing a better job there. So it’s okay. Let me be methodical about how I approach this. So it wasn’t all or nothing. Didn’t try to be perfect. Because before, one thing also failed at was I tried to be perfect in spurts where every meal that I ate had to be perfect. Supplementation is good. I had to lift, cut out alcohol, no socializing. And then I would get some results in a short amount of time, a few months, but it never get me to where I wanted to be. So I’m like, you get discouraged. You’re like, I’m putting in all this time and effort and work, and I see other people who are telling me the same thing, and they’re getting the results that I’m hoping to get, but I’m not. So you get discouraged. You say, f it. Whatever. I’m going back out. I’m eating pizza. I’m gonna drink. I’m gonna socialize. And then you gotta start over from square one. So for me, I’m like, I’m not gonna try to be perfect because I tried in the past and it didn’t work. I’m gonna give myself some grace. So, yeah, I’m a if I don’t get all my workouts in, but I get the majority of them, great. I don’t have to be perfect eating seven days of the week, but five or six days, I’m eating what I need to be eating 89% of the time. Cool. Then I can enjoy something or strategically add something in. And methodically, slowly went through that process, saw some results, stuck with it. And then basically over the course of a year, it snap my fingers, and I’m like, I’m a completely different person. But now I’m like, I look the way that I’ve always wanted to, and it just took me a little bit of time and intentional effort based on my genetics, based on my schedule, based on the resources I had available to me. And I was like, that wasn’t as hard as I thought. I wish I would have done that twenty years ago.

[00:19:04 – 00:19:36] Nitin Bajaj

It’s it’s that perception that we have, that, image that we have that is projected upon us by people that are around us or by these hand me downs that we get as part of this is who you should be. I’m glad you were able to make that transition and now are helping several others make that transition for themselves. So kudos to you. Now onto my favorite part of the show, Pratik. We call this the one line life lessons. Would love for you to share a few of your life lessons with us.

[00:19:37 – 00:23:05] Pratik Patel

Yeah. And I’m sure it’ll continue to evolve as I continue to get older and learn more. One big one, and I think it goes back to what I hold dear as my core values, family is a really big one. So spending as much time with family and and really relishing that is something that shouldn’t be overlooked and something that you don’t appreciate once you leave home to go to college or turn out a high schooler past that. You wanna be independent, and you don’t think twice about mom and dad or your older family members. But I think having a good core group of loved individuals, family, and friends is really important, because they’re the ones that are gonna support you and be by your side no matter what. When tough times happen, they’ll show their true colors. The second is really chasing health and fitness can have a massive positive impact on all other areas of your life. I think a lot of times we worry too much about we have to get good grades. We have to get into a good program. We have to get into the graduate school, medical school, law school, engineering school, whatever it is. We have to get a good job. We have to continue to progress in our career, and that should be at the forefront at the expense of everything else because we feel like we have to grind and take all that time to do that, not knowing that ultimately it’s gonna be a massive drag on the body, and it’s gonna take the toll, not only mentally and physically. And you might know what you wanna achieve mentally, but if your capacity physically isn’t very good, you’re not gonna be able to continue to push hard. But on the flip side, if you take care of yourself physically, but you don’t have any drive mentally or a purpose or something that you’re wanna aspire to, you’re just gonna spin your wheels, and you’re just gonna feel lost even though you have this healthy and fit body. So I think the combination of both of those is really important. So being able to at least lean on things that you can positively impact yourself physically can have a an impact on you mentally, but also vice versa. So these things are mutually exclusive. And I think the biggest thing that I was missing for a very long time was the connection between the two. And the last is one thing that I hold true as one of my strong values is not just self discipline, but self ownership. Like, you it’s easy to play the blame game and the victim, especially in this day and age, but, ultimately, like, you are responsible and in charge of you, your decisions. No one else is gonna force you once you become an adult. Now if you’re a minor, that’s a totally different story. But once you become an adult, especially here in The States, like, you were responsible for you. A lot of times, I would forget that would always be playing that victim mindset. If you didn’t have what you wanted, it’s because of x, y, and z as opposed to I can do something about it. I have complete and utter control to do something about it. And that was a lesson that I definitely had to learn and get to a point where it’s okay. Now this starts to make sense. Everything you want in life is definitely accessible and available to you. It’s made it’s why our parents came over and and came to this country to country to be able to have these freedoms. So I think those are just a few I could probably ramble on about a lot more, but those are the ones that really resonate strongly with me that I have to teach and share with others.

[00:23:06 – 00:23:52] Nitin Bajaj

Pratik, thank you so much for sharing your journey, your story, your life lessons, but most importantly, for becoming a cause for the community, helping us be the best version of ourselves. And I really appreciate that this is something as as close to my heart. So I really applaud you for doing what you’re doing. It’s not something that’s easy, especially going into our community and telling people how to eat, what to think, and what to do. So I applaud you and cheering for you, not just from the sidelines, but looking forward to collaborating with you on this journey. So congratulations and kudos again, and glad to have you on the show and talk about what you’ve been doing.

[00:23:53 – 00:23:54] Pratik Patel

Thank you for having me.