In this quick “coffee break” chat, book coach Ameesha Green and author Anand Chockalingam MD discuss Seeking Hunger, his short book on the evolution of humans and their appetite, the connection between our heart and our health, and the art of self-publishing.
Join book coach Ameesha Green and author Anand Chockalingam MD as they discuss Seeking Hunger, a short book about the evolution of humans and their appetite, and the connection between our heart and our health. Anand is an Academic Clinical Cardiologist practicing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, specialising in Cardiovascular Disease and Interventional Cardiology. His book gives back to the community with methods of cardiac rehabilitation, preventive health, and holistic heart health. This podcast on Anand’s writing journey takes us through the art of publishing, self-approval, modern medicine, and much more…
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TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE INCLUDE:
Nonfiction
The human body
Heart health
Holistic medicine
Modern medicine
Self-publishing
Writing your first book
Habitual eating
The evolution of hunger
Anand Audio Interview
Ameesha:
Welcome to Better Shelves, the podcast from The Book Shelf Ltd. We help aspiring authors to create life-changing nonfiction books. We’re based in Birmingham, but we work authors across the globe, and our mission is to make the world a better place through books.
By the way, we apologise for any issues with the audio in today’s episode. Full disclosure: we recorded this episode before we had an amazing microphone so please forgive us. The audio in future episodes will be much better. We promise.
Ameesha:
Hi Anand, thanks for talking to us at The Book Shelf today. You’ve just self-published your first book, Seeking Hunger. So, we just wanted to talk to you for a bit today about the book and your experience writing it and self-publishing. If you could start by telling us a little bit about the book, what it’s about and what inspired you to write it.
Anand:
Seeking Hunger is a book that I’ve been planning for the last… I would say twenty years.
Ameesha:
Wow!
Anand:
For the last ten years, what we have done is taken it as a concept. I’m a cardiologist, by profession, and I deal with so many people of all age ranges. Nowadays, what I’m seeing is people in the 50s to 70s-80s age range… When they come in with heart problems, sometimes it’s not easy for them to make lifestyle changes like increasing exercise, trying to change their diet to a heart-healthy diet, and taking care of 20 different medicines and 5 different tests they need every month to stay on top of the 6 other medical conditions they’re dealing with, unfortunately. That’s the type of patient we see every day.
So this programme that we’ve done now for 10 years called Heartful Living emphasises how we can take more ownership, responsibility and – actually – find it pleasurable to pursue our own health on our own terms. So that’s what I’ve been teaching on my own time. Formally, we’ve done this for veterans and for our local Missouri community now since 2015. In the Covid world, all of this is online. So, in 2020, what I figured is if I can write a little bit about the core concepts that is what is Seeking Hunger.
So in this, what we are emphasising is how we have evolved over the last 200,000 years and how our consciousness has related to hunger. Only in the last few generations has food become so plentiful for many of us, to the point, that it is turning around and hurting our health. So that is what this book takes you through, to understand how we can genuinely relate better with hunger and connect at a deeper level to develop a better mind-body connection. That way we can improve our health in so many ways. This not only includes high blood pressure, diabetes, and cholesterol control. People so often find that their mood, their confidence, and their level of optimism also improves once they find they can connect better with hunger. That’s why this book came out.
Ameesha:
That’s really interesting! I love how you tell the story about humans and how they evolved with hunger. I learned a lot from this book, it was really interesting and I didn’t think about hunger in that way before, I’d never really thought about it as something that we need. It’s something that we just think ‘Oh I’ll have a snack’ and ignore it and carry on with what I'm doing. So, I really enjoy how you educate people but also tell them that story. It’s a really, really interesting read.
Anand:
So for the first 45 years of my life, that’s what I did. I did what we can call ‘habitual eating’, which means 8am, 12-noon and 7pm. 3 times a day – at least – routinely I would eat. So for the first 45 years of my life, I have not missed a single meal. Both my parents are physicians, actively working still in India. So, only in the last two or three years have I recognised the value to connecting with my own natural hunger and waiting for that until I eat again. So that really has been a journey for me and I believe it's going to help so many more people when they experiment with themselves using these very simple tools.
Ameesha:
I agree, I’ve definitely learned a lot and I will be thinking more about my eating and my health, so thank you for that! You said that you’ve only just written the book this year, so you’ve been planning for a long time but how long did it actually take you to write it?
Anand:
Probably a couple of months. I got the work done and then, thanks to you Ameesha, it came out much better than I had written myself.
Ameesha:
Thank you, I appreciate that. Did you find any particular challenges in the writing process, or even in the process of getting ready to self-publish?
Anand:
As a cardiologist, we are trained to take care of heart patients and our discussions are more academic, I would say, and when we talk to our patients who are in their older age - which is the age range for heart disease - we don’t easily translate the material to younger people. So I deliberately wanted the Seeking Hunger book to be useful for anybody who is healthy, adult, a heart patient or facing any other medical issues, and even more importantly for students and even children. Anybody above the age of ten is who I’m genuinely hoping this book can reach. Because if we can make changes when we are younger, we have that much more benefit for our health, and for the health of people who matter to us as years and decades roll by. That’s the real challenge for me, to make it readable and interesting for all age ranges.
Ameesha:
And that is quite the challenge because it is difficult to talk to people of different age ranges and in different stages of life. I think you’ve done a really good job of that, making it interesting to different people, and making it relevant at different stages of health. Did you find anything difficult in the self-publishing process?
Anand:
Self-publishing? This is my first try and, thanks to you, I was able to get through it.
Ameesha:
Thanks! There’s a lot to learn, isn’t there? For your first book, there are so many different steps that you have to complete and different documents that you need, but it’s much easier for your second book and your third book.
Anand:
I hope so!
Ameesha:
It’s a steep learning curve at the beginning but it gets better.
Anand :
But I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Ameesha:
I’m really glad! How did you balance this with your day job? You said you’re a cardiologist and that’s quite an intense job. How did you find the time?
Anand:
Weekends, late nights, very early mornings!
Ameesha:
Well, you did well to balance it, especially in that short time frame. Really well done!
Anand:
I feel that’s my way of giving back to our community. We train for 20 years to be a cardiologist, and then we spend so many decades trying to help patients, but that is one-on-one. Whereas if I write something like this, and if people are able to read it, then my reach to our community is maybe even exponentially more this way. After this experience, I’m hoping to eventually write a few more books!
Ameesha:
I hope you do! And I think that’s one of the big benefits of writing books, you can have such a wide reach, much more than you could have when you just deal directly with people and work one-on-one. I really resonate with that aim. Do you have any guidance or advice for someone who is thinking of writing and self-publishing a book?
Anand:
Talk to Ameesha!
Ameesha:
Ah, thank you! Is there anything you would have done differently? Or, if you write your second book, would you do anything differently from the beginning?
Anand:
I might talk to you first before I actually put it down to paper because Having ideas is one thing, but the most important thing is, I feel, being able to connect and have the attention of our audience. For that, I am still learning and hopefully in the next few efforts it will be even more easier for people to follow my thought line and find my material useful. I’d definitely get your help sooner.
Ameesha:
I think the more you can do in the beginning - when you’re in the planning stages and thinking about how you will translate your ideas to a book - the better. Some people like to rush into it and just write down everything that they think, but I always say if you can spend some time planning and thinking about it, it is so much easier and it saves time at the end because you don’t have to spend as long on the editing.
Do you have anything else you’d like to say to people?
Anand :
The next book I’m going to hopefully write is Seeking Gratitude. That’s because in the last five years the maximum success I would say for our heart patients - and also I deal with so many physicians who have challenges and burnout issues while trying to improve their resilience, and I work with students and athletes who are trying to improve their performance - for everybody, what seems to be the most simple self-enquiry step is the hunger/gratitude experience. Hunger we have written already, and to have a different perspective on how to pursue gratitude, that’s what I want to get done as the next project within the next six months hopefully.
Ameesha:
That sounds really interesting, I can’t wait to read that!
Anand:
Thank you for having me today.
Ameesha :
Thank you for speaking to us, I really appreciate it. People can find the book on Amazon; they can order an e-book or they can order a printed copy, it's ‘Seeking Hunger.’
Anand:
Thanks so much and good luck for the new year!
Ameesha:
Thank you, and you! Thanks Anand!
We can’t wait for you to join us as we talk more about writing, publishing, and self-improvement on this podcast. And we’d love to hear from you! What tips would you find useful? What questions do you need answered? You can find us on our website, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter @thebookshelf.ltd. Send us your questions via social media! We’d love to hear from you.
In the next chapter, we’ll be featuring a cover-to-cover interview with Glen John Jones, author of Think and Grow Vegan, so stay tuned for the next episode!
The music featured in today’s episode is ‘Set Free’ by Katie Gray which you can find on Apple Music and Spotify.
Thanks for listening to the Better Shelves podcast, we’ll see you in the next chapter!