#207: Anthony Masiello - Making Plant-Based Physicians Accessible to All
Anthony Masiello, co-founder and CEO of Love.Life Telehealth
Rip welcomes Anthony Masiello, co-founder and CEO of Love Life Telehealth, who shares his personal transformation and innovative approach to healthcare through whole food plant-based nutrition.
Anthony recalls struggling with weight issues from a young age, trying various methods to lose weight, but lacking guidance and support. Despite his active lifestyle, his weight continued to fluctuate, leading him to question how weight gain occurs and the role of genetics and environment in this process.
After sharing his own personal journey, Anthony delves into the creation of Love Life Telehealth, a platform that aims to revolutionize healthcare by providing comprehensive support through coaching, education, and community. He explains the concept of telemedicine and how Love Life Telehealth connects patients with doctors across different states, offering lifestyle medicine consultations.
The ultimate goal of Love Life Telehealth is to change the way healthcare is practiced, prioritizing a lifestyle-first approach and using medicine only when necessary. The team of ten doctors work collaboratively with patients to understand their complete profile and help them achieve their goals. Anthony describes the development of other programs and offerings, such as a monthly payment model and a year-long program, all designed to help people not just live life, but love life and be passionate about enjoying it.
About Anthony Masiello
Anthony has been working in healthcare for more than 25 years. His professional career started in the 90s at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doing bioinformatics for the Human Genome Project. He later shifted into Research and Development at Novartis Pharmaceuticals, where he was interested in contributing more directly to the development of new disease therapies.
After transforming his own health, and learning there is a better way, he shifted once again and is now 100% focused on providing access to medical services centered on the prevention and reversal of disease utilizing lifestyle medicine rooted in whole food plant-based nutrition.
Anthony came to a plant-based lifestyle himself after being denied a 20-year term life insurance policy at age 33. He was morbidly obese, weighing more than 360 pounds, medicated for high blood pressure, and suffering from psoriasis, eczema, migraine headaches, and sleep apnea. Through the transition to a whole food plant-based diet and healthy lifestyle, Anthony lost 160 lbs. and reversed all of these conditions. He has maintained that weight loss, optimal health, and a greatly improved quality of life for more than 15 years and counting.
Anthony’s personal health transformation has been featured on the Megyn Kelly Today show, on PBS, in The Huffington Post, in the bestselling book Eat to Live, and by Forks Over Knives, Runners World, and numerous magazines, websites, radio shows, podcasts, and articles.
Anthony was Co-founder and CEO of Plant Based TeleHealth, a national lifestyle telemedicine service focused on the prevention and reversal of disease with lifestyle medicine and whole food plant-based nutrition. In 2022, Plant-Based TeleHealth was acquired by Love.Life, a national network of wellness hubs that is leading the convergence of food, medicine, and wellness for a one-stop transformative health experience.
Episode Resources
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Full Transcript via AI Transcription
Rip Esselstyn [00:00:00]:
PLANTSTRONG pals. I have a big, wonderful announcement to make. Today. We are over the moon excited to announce our latest whole food plant based product that we are launching into the universe. And it's made without any oils, refined sugars, or excessive sodium. Introducing PLANTSTRONG. Cornbread. That's right. We have pulled out all of the stops with these two all new time saving baking mixes. We have a traditional old fashioned cornbread. And for all of you screaming for gluten free products, we have a gluten free cornbread mix as well. Now, to prepare either one, all you have to do is add one and a half cups of water, plant based milk, or our amazing unsalted sweet corn broth along with half a cup of applesauce. You mix them together and then you bake into muffins. Or you can make a full pan of these delicious warm and wholesome cornbread mixes. If you've been enjoying our collection of ready to eat chilies and stews, this mix is your new best friend. Popular cornbread mixes like Jiffy are loaded to the gills with sugar and lard. I'm not kidding. Lard. And they're an artificial yellow color. And who in the world wants to eat that? Our mixes are made from ingredients that you can pronounce without artificial flavors or colors, and they bake up beautifully. My favorite pairing is Cornbread muffins, and I stir in a few jalapenos for some extra Texas kick along with our chipotle chili. It's like a barbecue picnic in my bowl. You have to try them together to believe it. Pick up a mix or two today and check out our awesome bundles, including our sweet corn broth@plantstrong.com. I'm Rip Esselstyn and welcome to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. The mission at PLANTSTRONG is to further the advancement of all things within the plant based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your PLANTSTRONG journey, and I hope that you enjoy the show. I love meeting people who have had the ability to marry their career with their personal passion. And my guest today, Anthony Maciello, has done just that. And I really look forward to you hearing Anthony's story. At the age of nine or ten, Anthony came back from summer vacation, and a friend of his, as young kids do, very bluntly, said, wow, Anthony, you got fat over the summer. And this was the first time that Anthony became aware of any kind of excessive weight. And then what happened is eventually, in high school and beyond, anthony would tip the scales at well over 360 pounds. And there were, of course, the associated issues that became part of his daily life. Things like trying to fit in chairs at work, airplanes, sleep apnea, migraine, headaches, psoriasis, and a host of other issues. But there were two pivotal moments that Anthony shares with us today that changed everything, and that is when he was forced to ask himself, is this truly the husband and father that I want to be? And it was that question that became his motivation. And today, not only is Anthony a much healthier person inside and outside, but he is also the co founder and CEO of the new plant based telehealth practice, love life telehealth. And he and his team of plant based physicians are now changing the way that healthcare is practiced through the lens of whole food, plant based nutrition, making it accessible and easy for patients to get the care and attention that they need and deserve. And I can tell you, if I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me, hey, rip, do you know a lifestyle practitioner in fill in the blank, cleveland, Ohio. Hudson, New York. Boise, Idaho. I would have a lot of money. But with that, let's get into Anthony's personal inspiration story and hear exactly how he transformed his own health and is now paving the way to help you transform yours. All right, anthony rip, welcome.
Anthony Masiello [00:05:20]:
Thank you. It's awesome to be here.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:22]:
It's great to have you. Now, you've been in these digs before, haven't you?
Anthony Masiello [00:05:27]:
I have.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:28]:
Was that like a year and a half ago?
Anthony Masiello [00:05:31]:
It was a year and a month. It was probably last April. But you weren't here.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:36]:
No, I think I was, wasn't I? Oh, I wasn't here.
Anthony Masiello [00:05:39]:
You weren't here in the house.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:40]:
I was in Austin, and you were here for the annual sports weekend event at John Mackie's ranch, and you were.
Anthony Masiello [00:05:47]:
Kind enough to put me up for.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:48]:
A night, and you were looking for a place to stay, and so I think you maybe slept on a mattress on the floor somewhere.
Anthony Masiello [00:05:53]:
I did, but I got to take a warm shower. That was a bonus.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:57]:
Awesome. So I'd love to talk about your transformational story, and you've got quite an impressive story, and where that's taken you all over in life. But before, I want to dive into your childhood, your family, where you grew up, all that stuff. So, for starters, masiello is a pretty unusual last name. What's the origin of that?
Anthony Masiello [00:06:30]:
There are a couple. It's Italian. Both of my father's parents came over from Italy. My father's first generation American in our family, and they came over to queens, New York. My mother's family came over, maybe she's second generation, but they immigrated from different areas, I think combination of Sweden and Germany on her side. And my parents met in queens. They went to the same high school, although they were on different ends of the same high four year age difference. They my father was the first person in the family to leave the neighborhood in queens, and he moved out to New Jersey for a job, and everyone else? Well, until maybe two or three years ago, everyone else still lived in the same neighborhood in Queens, New York, and my father was the only one who was out of the city.
Rip Esselstyn [00:07:34]:
Is your father still alive?
Anthony Masiello [00:07:36]:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn [00:07:36]:
So what was it about your father, do you think, that gave him the gumption to go outside the confines of the neighborhood?
Anthony Masiello [00:07:45]:
Yeah. I don't know if he was pulled out because of work, but he was always into a lot of stuff, so I think he was just a little less traditional, probably, than everyone else. My grandparents very much wanted my father and his sister, their two children, to be American to the point where my father or his sister, they don't speak Italian, but my grandparents, that's their native language. Some of that, looking back, it's a little bit unfortunate, but in that era, in the 1940s, 50s, they were excited about being in America, and they wanted their children to grow up American. And then he went for the job, but I think he was just a little bit more outgoing. He traveled more. I think he was the first person to take my grandparents on an airplane, and that probably wasn't even until they were both retired from work.
Rip Esselstyn [00:08:46]:
And what was your father's working?
Anthony Masiello [00:08:50]:
He was working at a warehouse for Feders, the air conditioning company. And Feders was on a mission to basically roll out home air conditioning before anyone else. And it was these window units at the time. And he did some kind of operations work in the warehouse there. And it started off in New York, but then the company moved their headquarters and their plant out to New Jersey, I guess, where they could probably get more space and a little bit cheaper, and he went with the company.
Rip Esselstyn [00:09:17]:
What about your mother?
Anthony Masiello [00:09:20]:
So my mother went with my father, but my father didn't work. We lived in New Jersey I forget how long. So he's in the same house that they moved into in New Jersey, the house that I was born and came home from the hospital into that house 50 years ago. So he's in that house, and he worked for Fetters for a period of time, and then they had changes or they moved again and he didn't want to move. So then he shifted and he opened a bagel shop in Delhi. And that's mostly what I remember of him, because that's where I worked from about age twelve on, was in the bagel shop and deli.
Rip Esselstyn [00:09:57]:
Wow. And so does he still have that?
Anthony Masiello [00:10:00]:
No, he closed it down in about 2005, 2006, after, I think, 28 years, something like that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:10:08]:
So I want to come back to the bagel shop. And if you think that was at all responsible for some of your weight gain growing up, it wasn't a great.
Anthony Masiello [00:10:18]:
Environment for me to be in all day long. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:10:22]:
Wow. Okay.
Anthony Masiello [00:10:24]:
Yeah, I can share a little bit about that now. So I would go pick up the bagels with him in the morning at 05:00 A.m.. He's a true kind of roll up your sleeves, entrepreneur type. When he opened this bagel shop, it was a franchise, but we had to go pick up the bagels in the morning, and it was open from 05:00 A.m. To 09:00 P.m.. Gosh. And then afterwards we cleaned up afterwards, so he was there all the time. And my parents split up when I was younger, so my mom and brother and I moved to North Carolina. She took us to North Carolina. So we spent our summers and our holiday, Christmas holidays in New Jersey with my dad. But now he just had this business, like I said, when we were about twelve years old. And so he was there from 05:00 A.m. To 09:00 P.m., and as a twelve year old, where am I going to be? I was there with him from 05:00 A.m. To 09:00 P.m., and we sold the Hostess Cakes and the Twinkies, and obviously we had the Bagels, and it was a deli, so we would make like cold cut sandwiches. And not only that, but right next door to us was a pizzeria in the same strip mall. So everything that I ever could have wanted was right there at my fingertips. And the problem for me, or the issue for me, was that I wanted that stuff. My brother didn't, because my brother and I were only 13 months apart, and we traveled back and forth. Everything was together. I mean, my mom used to take us to the airport, and the flight attendant would walk us onto the plane, and then the flight attendant would walk us off and hand us over to my dad. They had to sign us in and out back then, so we were together all the time. But I guess he didn't care for that stuff as much as I did, or he didn't have something in him.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:13]:
That made him so he wasn't drawn to the highly processed, calorie rich, fiberless waterless foods like you were.
Anthony Masiello [00:12:24]:
Let's call it what it is, a chocodile, which is a chocolate covered Twinkie. Like those. He wasn't drawn to those in the same way that I was.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:34]:
What was the name of your father's deli?
Anthony Masiello [00:12:36]:
It was called the Bagelsmith.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:38]:
Okay, bagelsmith. And so that's a franchise.
Anthony Masiello [00:12:41]:
It was a small franchise started locally in that area, rural New Jersey, clinton, New Jersey. And there were only, I think at Max there were only about ten or twelve of the stores, but he owned his location on that franchise.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:53]:
Did you have a favorite bagel?
Anthony Masiello [00:12:55]:
Yeah, I mean, the cinnamon raisin bagel was always my favorite. The green bagels on St. Patrick's Day, they literally were just green. There was no flavor in them. There was food coloring in them. That's all there was. But there was a lot of fun stuff like that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:13:13]:
I got introduced to really good bagels. When I came here to Austin and I can't remember the name of the bagel place, but I had my first jalapeno bagel and at first I was like, oh, this is just a weird, sick combination. Right. Is this a joke? It's one of my favorite now.
Anthony Masiello [00:13:30]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:13:30]:
Jalapeno bagels also, like the sesame sesame seed, right?
Anthony Masiello [00:13:34]:
I like this also. Yeah. But yeah, the creative ones, we used to have some of those once in a while, but I don't think we ever had jalapenos. But I've had jalapeno bagels other place. And back when I was eating cream cheese, like a jalapeno bagel with cream cheese on it was good because you had that spice and then you had that cool cream cheese. Yeah. You can tell I probably enjoy food.
Rip Esselstyn [00:13:58]:
What's the secret to making a really good bagel? Do you know?
Anthony Masiello [00:14:03]:
Well, what the bagelsmith? Bagels what they were prided on is that they were real water bagels, they're called. So what happens is you shape the dough into the bagel and you let it sit so that it kind of holds its shape. And then you boil it and you boil it for a period of time so that it develops. It cooks the outside, and then after you boil it, then you can put the seeds or whatever on top of it, or plain. Obviously, the cinnamon raisin bagel is already incorporated before it gets boiled. And then when you bake it, the outside gets a little bit the dough on the inside cooks, but then it maintains the skin. Like, you can almost peel our bagels, like you could peel the skin off.
Rip Esselstyn [00:14:46]:
And then you would kind of still have fluffy inside.
Anthony Masiello [00:14:48]:
Yeah, you just have the inside part left because of the boiling process.
Rip Esselstyn [00:14:53]:
I'm always amazed when I go to New York City. I always have to have a New York City bagel and how those bagels taste like no other bagel.
Anthony Masiello [00:15:03]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:15:03]:
And I don't know if it's the water or what.
Anthony Masiello [00:15:05]:
I'm not sure what it is, but they're bigger. They're a little bit fluffier than ours are. They were bigger and a little more almost like they didn't boil them as long or something like that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:15:14]:
Yeah.
Anthony Masiello [00:15:16]:
Bagels are a little bit like pizza to me. There's so many different types, and I like them all.
Rip Esselstyn [00:15:23]:
Never met a bagel I didn't like exactly, growing up. It was you and your brother who's 13 months, you said, younger than you.
Anthony Masiello [00:15:33]:
Yeah, 13 months.
Rip Esselstyn [00:15:34]:
What's his first name?
Anthony Masiello [00:15:35]:
Mike. Mike, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:15:37]:
Got it. And are you and Mike close?
Anthony Masiello [00:15:39]:
Yeah, we're very close. He lives now in Bethesda, Maryland. We were all living there. Him and his wife and me and my wife were living in Bethesda for a few years. We overlapped there. And then Kathy, my wife and I moved back to New Jersey, to the same town. Her family's in the area, too. And when we were starting a family we wanted to be back there. My brother stayed in Bethesda, but we still see him on holidays, and it's only a three hour drive, so we go back and forth a few times a year.
Rip Esselstyn [00:16:07]:
Yeah. So you like New Jersey?
Anthony Masiello [00:16:10]:
Yeah. Where we are in New Jersey is really nice.
Rip Esselstyn [00:16:13]:
Wow.
Anthony Masiello [00:16:13]:
We've got hiking trails. My wife and I just went out and did a gravel bicycle ride, and we went like, 26 miles or something without seeing a car or going on any pavement. So we have a lot of that kind of outdoorsy stuff. We have canoes. There's a little river in town that we can go point to point on the canoes to the next town, or we can just stay above these waterfalls and treat it like a lake. It's a really nice kind of outdoorsy area. It's Huntington County, New Jersey.
Rip Esselstyn [00:16:45]:
Sounds charming.
Anthony Masiello [00:16:46]:
Yeah, it is. Thank you. That's a good way to describe let.
Rip Esselstyn [00:16:53]:
Me I want to get back to kind of your weight gain growing up. So at what age did you start to notice or somebody comment that, hey, Anthony, you're getting a little heavy?
Anthony Masiello [00:17:07]:
Yeah, it was between the fourth and fifth grades, so I guess that's probably between nine and ten years old. What happened was I left North Carolina right after school ended in the fourth grade, and I got on the airplane and I went and spent the summer in New Jersey with my dad, my brother and I, and I came back to North Carolina. And my friend, his name is Woody.
Rip Esselstyn [00:17:32]:
His name's not Harrelson.
Anthony Masiello [00:17:33]:
No. Woody Odell. And the first time I saw Woody after I came back, he's like, wow, Anthony. He's like, you got fat over the summer. He just said it like that. And it wasn't like he wasn't even making fun of me. He was just observing. That's what happened. And I didn't realize it probably because it came on gradually over those three months that I was away. But people who hadn't seen me in a three month period of time when you don't see something, the change is a little bit more apparent. So that's what happened. And the tricky part for me, I mean, this is going back now. This is early 80s. This is probably 82, 83, or 84. And there weren't a lot of overweight people in my school. Right. In fact, there were two in my grade. It was me and one other kid. And what that did was it kind of enabled me to identify as being overweight or as being the fat kid. And that caused other kind of challenges where I would kind of even hold myself back or I would want to be reserved. And that lasted all the way till adulthood, where I didn't want to put myself front and center because I wasn't very confident with myself.
Rip Esselstyn [00:18:47]:
And so that was from the age of, did you say, like, roughly probably.
Anthony Masiello [00:18:50]:
Ten years old, fifth grade, fifth grade until adulthood.
Rip Esselstyn [00:18:53]:
Adulthood being like 33 is when I.
Anthony Masiello [00:18:56]:
Decided and I tried everything and anything that I could between ages ten and 33. But ages 33 is when I was finally able to actually start some change.
Rip Esselstyn [00:19:08]:
We're going to get to 33.
Anthony Masiello [00:19:10]:
We got a little way to go.
Rip Esselstyn [00:19:13]:
So when you say you tried everything, can you remember how old you were when you first decided to try something?
Anthony Masiello [00:19:19]:
Well, I remember because of what houses we were in, so I was probably this had to be fifth grade. This was fifth grade. I remember at some point giving up all fats like butter, like butter and cheese and just trying to avoid that stuff. The problem is I never really knew what to eat. It was always about what to give up. So there was a phase of giving up butter and it helped me a little bit, but then I would still and at this time I'm in North Carolina during the school year, so I would still get a biscuit, but I would get a biscuit with jelly on it instead of a biscuit with butter on it. But now, meanwhile, I don't know how much butter is inside the baked into the a biscuit already anyway, so I didn't know what I was doing and really no one knew how to help me. I mean, I did have overweight doctors at different points throughout my life telling me I needed to lose weight, but they couldn't really help me, they couldn't help themselves. My mother was a very active person, and she was not overweight, so she didn't really have experience that she could.
Rip Esselstyn [00:20:25]:
Really how concerned was she with you gaining weight and Mike kind know, staying the same?
Anthony Masiello [00:20:34]:
I don't think very it was I don't think it was as kind of front and like I don't think we understood really that it felt just like I looked different from him. It wasn't really about my health at the time. It was just assumed we were both healthy back then. It wasn't like she had reason to be concerned other than the way I looked. And of course she loved me no matter how I looked. So it was the kind of thing where she was supportive. But again, she wasn't pushing me or motivating me or trying to do research to help to figure it out either. It's like, this is how Anthony is, this is how Mike is, and they're both my kids. Right.
Rip Esselstyn [00:21:14]:
So it wasn't like she took you to a doctor to do an analysis on your gut microbiome and identified different.
Anthony Masiello [00:21:22]:
Species that I needed to build up or reduce. Yeah, no, it was like my regular physicals, my regular checkups. And the doctor would say, by the way, you should lose some weight. And it's like, okay, it's not very helpful information.
Rip Esselstyn [00:21:34]:
What about your dad? Did he observe it? Did he notice it?
Anthony Masiello [00:21:38]:
He did, and he would say the same thing. But you know what's interesting? Rip and I've been really paying attention to this more recently. I look back, and my dad probably always carried an extra ten to 20 pounds. And then I look back, my grandfather probably always carried an extra ten to 20 pounds. And my grandfather was a produce man. He had the produce section of the supermarket in New York, so it wasn't like a stand on the street, but it was his store within a store, and produce and growing at the time that he did as an immigrant to the US. They didn't let anything spoil. So I know for sure that that man ate more than his share of fruits and vegetables, because if anything was turning or anything wasn't selling, that's what they were eating. Right. How much of it I have the potential to hold. Yeah, I have the potential. Now. What I do in my lifestyle will help to see whether that turns on or turns off. Whereas at least growing up, I don't think that my brother had that potential. Right. We're just a little bit different.
Rip Esselstyn [00:22:57]:
Well, if you both had maybe a little bit of that different let's just call it a heavy gene. Right. And then you also are drawn to.
Anthony Masiello [00:23:07]:
These foods, and then I'm around them, and then you're for 18 hours a.
Rip Esselstyn [00:23:11]:
Day or 20 hours a day.
Anthony Masiello [00:23:13]:
Yeah, it's a recipe, for sure. I believe this. We all are products of our situations, our environment, and then the decisions that we choose to make within that environment. And that's what I grew up, so.
Rip Esselstyn [00:23:30]:
Can you remember how old you were when you broke 200 pounds?
Anthony Masiello [00:23:33]:
I remember I graduated high school at 290 pounds. 200 and 9290 pounds. I graduated high school, and I'm almost 64 now. I used to be a solid six.
Rip Esselstyn [00:23:45]:
And you weren't playing, like, offensive line, were you?
Anthony Masiello [00:23:47]:
I wasn't doing any sports at all. I mean, I was skateboarding after school, and I was roller skating through 6th and 7th grade. That was a lot of fun back then. So I was active, but I was never on a team, I never had a coach, I never had a trainer, or someone that was kind of advising me on athletic performance, know, even playing games or anything. Like, someone the only reason I remember this is because someone asked, said they said, wow, Anthony, what are you weighing these days? And it wasn't even like I was also tall. How tall are you right now? I'm just under six four.
Rip Esselstyn [00:24:26]:
Okay.
Anthony Masiello [00:24:26]:
At the time graduating high school, I was probably 62 or so, which was still enough to be taller than most of the kids that I was around. But I remember someone asked me, and I said about 290. And that was, I think, at high school graduation. So I don't know when I broke 200, but clearly before high school.
Rip Esselstyn [00:24:48]:
Well, it's incredible to me, like, all these guys that I swam with at University of Texas, and we all weighed really within ten pounds of each other. We were all between 165 to maybe 185. 20 pounds.
Anthony Masiello [00:25:08]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:25:09]:
And that was back when we were 19, 2021. And today, a lot of these guys are 270 to 300.
Anthony Masiello [00:25:21]:
Wow.
Rip Esselstyn [00:25:22]:
Right.
Anthony Masiello [00:25:22]:
Wow.
Rip Esselstyn [00:25:22]:
And one of the things is, when you're training that hard, you're also consuming a lot of calories. So you're burning a lot of those calories, but you build up this appetite that it's hard to moderate.
Anthony Masiello [00:25:38]:
Yeah. It works in balance when you've got the activity level to match it.
Rip Esselstyn [00:25:41]:
Exactly.
Anthony Masiello [00:25:41]:
And as soon as you turn one up or down, then it's not balanced anymore. Right.
Rip Esselstyn [00:25:46]:
Yeah. But I say that because there's probably a lot of people that are listening to the podcast right now that have since high school. They've probably put on a good 50 to 100 pounds, and they're probably sitting here wondering, how in the world did that happen? It's 20 years later now, and I'm 80 pounds heavier than I was when I graduated from high school.
Anthony Masiello [00:26:11]:
Right. And even probably non athletes, I mean, back 20 years ago, we were probably much more active. Maybe we didn't have sit down jobs at the time, or maybe we were playing with our friends after school, or maybe we had to ride our bike a half hour to get to someone's house, or all of those things count as activity. And as soon as you take that away again, it still messes with that balance a little bit.
Rip Esselstyn [00:26:35]:
So you say 290 when you graduated from high school. Yes. Do you remember at all, like, 9th, 10th, 11th? twelveTH grade. Did you have a scale? Were you ever measuring yourself or was that something you stayed away from?
Anthony Masiello [00:26:50]:
No, I think there was probably one on the floor in my mom's bathroom that I would step on occasionally, but it was mostly when we went for an annual physical, like an annual checkup at the doctor is when I would get on the scale.
Rip Esselstyn [00:27:03]:
Yeah. And so are you getting more and more concerned? Because obviously, as a high schooler, that's 290, you're not playing football, so you're not supposed to be big and intimidating. You're just big, it sounds like, because obviously you got the gene and you're surrounded and you love all of the Pleasure Trap foods. Right.
Anthony Masiello [00:27:29]:
Yeah. So I think what was happening to me more, again, I wasn't concerned about health, I was concerned about cosmetics. Right. Like, how I looked and how I felt like I presented myself. By this time, I'm not shopping for clothes where my friends are shopping for clothes. And even when I was into stuff, I couldn't go buy, if there was a cool T shirt, like Ocean Pacific T shirts or stuff like, you know, like I outsized that stuff. They didn't make that stuff in extra double extra large or triple extra large or any of those sizes back then, so I would wear the extra large. But it wasn't ever not, you know, being overweight and then wearing clothes that are uncomfortable and probably even more unflattering really zapped my confidence. That's where I say it affected how I presented myself.
Rip Esselstyn [00:28:28]:
Can you give me some examples of how it affected your confidence?
Anthony Masiello [00:28:31]:
Yeah, well, we mentioned roller skating. Roller skating was a big deal for me in probably early high school, maybe freshman year, but definitely in in middle school. 6th, let's say 7th, 8th, maybe 9th grade. Roller skating. Friday night and Saturday night. Right. And then they had different things. Like they had the roll, the dice, they had the speed skate, and then they had couple skates. I would never ask someone to couple skate.
Rip Esselstyn [00:28:58]:
Were you a good skater?
Anthony Masiello [00:28:59]:
I was a good skater, so I wasn't going to fall down.
Rip Esselstyn [00:29:02]:
Right, so you had some skating chops?
Anthony Masiello [00:29:04]:
Yeah, I had a little bit of roll. I still have some. We still go once in a while.
Rip Esselstyn [00:29:07]:
Nice.
Anthony Masiello [00:29:11]:
But I remember once a girl asked me to couple skate, and I kind of looked around like I thought it was a joke. Like if it was today, I would think that someone's videoing in the background and that here I am, I'm going to get out on the floor, she's going to let go of my hand, skate away, and I'm going to be out there all by myself. So you know what happened? So I said no. And looking back on that, I don't feel good about that rip, because here someone else got up the confidence to ask me to skate with them. And she was a very pretty girl, and I said no. And how might that have made her even feel? Right? And I don't know if she just was doing it to be friendly, but there was no scenario in the world that I would feel proud for saying no right to that request. I think that's a perfect example of how it was just always in the front of my mind, whatever was going on.
Rip Esselstyn [00:30:11]:
Do you remember what her name was?
Anthony Masiello [00:30:13]:
I do.
Rip Esselstyn [00:30:14]:
And have you ever reached back out to her? I haven't to say. I really wish I would have said yes.
Anthony Masiello [00:30:19]:
You think I should? Do you think she even remembers? Maybe.
Rip Esselstyn [00:30:24]:
You know what? I think it's worth it. Yeah, it's worth it to find follow.
Anthony Masiello [00:30:27]:
Up with you on that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:30:29]:
Yeah, please do. Okay. That's a great example. Any other example?
Anthony Masiello [00:30:37]:
Well, fast forward now. This is a little bit later. My wife and I are living in New Jersey. We have a house with a lot of property, and my friend's getting wait.
Rip Esselstyn [00:30:46]:
Yeah, that's a big step here because.
Anthony Masiello [00:30:48]:
It'S the same context. We're not going too far. Okay. So he was getting married in my yard. So we set up a tent and mowed the yard and everything. We had it all set up. It was beautiful. His. Fiance. The bride's parents wanted to set off fireworks, so they came over and they brought us a case of champagne and a note, a really nice note. And they said, will you please bring this around to all of your neighbors and give everyone a bottle of champagne and give them this note. Really? So they didn't call the cops, but the note said, celebrate with us. So we wanted to bring around this champagne and this note to all of our neighbors to let them know, hey, we were having a big party. We were kind of new to the neighborhood. We didn't already know the neighbors, really, and we didn't want anyone to call the police or we didn't want to ruin anyone else's night because we wanted to celebrate. But they really wanted to set off these fireworks at their wedding. And here I am now, six foot four, probably 300 and 5360 pounds. I didn't want to go knock on a stranger's door, right? So I bring my wife, who you've met, and she's all of about five two, maybe five one and a half. She's in good shape. And I wouldn't go to the neighbor's houses without her because I wanted her to stand in front of me, because I didn't want just this big, kind of whatever giant person who I didn't feel very presentable to be knocking on people's doors to try to explain that we were having this wedding, I mean, together. It was just easy. We moved in next door. That's a little more recent example, but that's just kind of how my mind was working.
Rip Esselstyn [00:32:34]:
So help me move through you're 300 and 5360 pounds. What's it like moving through your day? Whether it's going grocery shopping, getting in elevators, your coworkers? Is it something that you're constantly thinking about, or is it something that after a certain period of time, you're able to just, like, shed?
Anthony Masiello [00:33:02]:
I mean, it's it wasn't always painful, right? But it's always there. For example, right now, I'm sitting in an armchair, and you're sitting in an open chair with no arms. Right. Whenever I went into a meeting at work, I would always have to get there early, and I would scan the rooms to see which chairs don't have arms in them, because I literally did not fit in an armchair. Oh, because you yeah, I was too wide. And if there were only armchairs, I would try to find a chair in another room and bring it in there. Sometimes they had stacks of chairs in the corner for, like, overflow. Right? They had the regular these things were automatic to me. Rip. I had to make sure because I couldn't go sit in a room for 2 hours in pain because I could fit in an armchair, but I had to basically hover above the arms and push to squeeze myself in between them. My legs were smashed together, like, sideways, and I sat there. I don't want to say painful. It was painful, probably at times, but uncomfortable for the entire time. Same thing happened on an airplane. I would travel for work, and I would be flying by myself, and I'm walking down the aisle, and I just feel all eyes on me with everyone who has an empty seat next to them. And as soon as I pass, I almost sense, like, a sigh of relief. Right. So there are those kind of little things. I would have to order all of my clothes. I couldn't just go into a store and try things on. They probably didn't really fit properly anyway because it's a different shape body than what they're really designing clothes for.
Rip Esselstyn [00:34:41]:
Where would you order your clothes from?
Anthony Masiello [00:34:42]:
Well, big and tall. It was casual male big and Tall back then. Now I think it's called, like, casual male XL. I'm very grateful I'm not shopping there anymore, but that's the reason I was able to have clothes in those late teens through my 20s. So there were all of those kind of little reminders that were just always around.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:12]:
So you went to college?
Anthony Masiello [00:35:13]:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:14]:
Where did you go to school?
Anthony Masiello [00:35:15]:
I went to a community college in New Jersey. I live with my dad, and I did that for a few years, and then I finished up at the University of Baltimore in Baltimore City in Maryland.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:25]:
And what did you get your degree in?
Anthony Masiello [00:35:26]:
It was a combination of computer science and nice. Yeah, it was fun. I love the computer stuff. I was fascinated by the business, and I went to that school specifically because they had a very tech enabled business center that the state of Maryland just gave them a big grant to put in place, and it was a fascinating place to finish my education.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:46]:
The entrepreneurial gene runs through your family a little. Yeah, yeah. What's it called? Bagel. Barn?
Anthony Masiello [00:35:52]:
No, bagelsmith.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:53]:
Bagelsmith?
Anthony Masiello [00:35:54]:
Bagelsmith.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:55]:
Here in Austin, we have a that might be worldwide.
Anthony Masiello [00:35:59]:
It's called oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen those. Yep. Same idea.
Rip Esselstyn [00:36:03]:
All right, so what was your first job out of at the I worked.
Anthony Masiello [00:36:09]:
At the Bagelsmith until it shut down. I mean, I could never get away from that. My first job out of college, though, I got really lucky looking back, was at the National Institutes of Health working on the Human Genome Project.
Rip Esselstyn [00:36:23]:
Wow. What year was that?
Anthony Masiello [00:36:26]:
That was in 1996 or 1997. 96. 97. Right in there. And what happened was I was graduating college, but at the University of Baltimore. So they had this incredible infrastructure in this building that I was serious when I said the State of Maryland, they got a huge grant to build this most tech enabled building that you can imagine, which probably would just feel normal today, but that's, what, 30 years later or so. Right. But what happened was the courses were all still the same. So my friends and I, my school friends and I would just spend all our time in the computer labs. And we taught ourselves how to do Internet programming and not building websites, but building websites that could talk to databases and web applications and web tools. And we knew how to do that. We had learned how to do that in 96, 97, where it wasn't really a thing. There were no programs you could go to for school for that. In fact, we put together, I guess it's like a petition or something to bring in an instructor to teach us the Java programming language. And that instructor had to come from Sun Microsystems, a company that invented Were. We were just into it. We had no idea what the web was going to become or the Internet, but we learned how to do programming. And one of my friends went and got a job at NIH, and they were just thrilled that someone knew how to do what they wanted to do. Didn't matter that he didn't know anything about biology or genetics or genomics or any of that, because he could do this and they needed people. So we went to lunch one day, and he's like, hey, we need people. Does anybody else want to come work with me? And I was like, I'll go and went down there. And that was a fascinating place to work. That's where I learned that people are passionate about their careers. I mean, my father enjoyed his business, but he was selling bagels to make a or, you know, selling bagels and sandwich and convenience items. My mother was selling Mary Kay cosmetics, but she was doing the same thing. She was doing it to make a living. And here I am at NIH working with these scientists who are really dedicating their careers to advancing the body of knowledge related to genetics by this much on a relative scale their whole career. They might only figure out one iteration of how this is going to help humanity over time, and maybe the next generation of scientists is going to take it one or two iterations further, and then maybe generation two or three generations later, these guys, this is now going to solve big world issues. That was fascinating to me to be around people like that. I mean, I felt like the luckiest person in the world.
Rip Esselstyn [00:39:16]:
So they're just passionate and happy to be contributing to what in the long term will be some pretty monumental gains in understanding whatever it is.
Anthony Masiello [00:39:28]:
And we didn't know. I mean, I stayed there through the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, and we had celebrations like, oh, we've sequenced a billion base pairs. Now we sequence 2 billion base pairs. Like, we would go into DC. And we would have these big parties at the Smithsonian Institute to celebrate these milestones. And it was fascinating. Yeah, it was.
Rip Esselstyn [00:39:53]:
Like, so what was your first job?
Anthony Masiello [00:39:55]:
After my wife said so, I was married now.
Rip Esselstyn [00:40:01]:
We need to rewind a little bit because I want to understand when you met your wife, if you're being heavy and overweight was an obstacle or if it didn't play in at all. And how did you guys meet all this stuff?
Anthony Masiello [00:40:14]:
So we met just through mutual friends in New Jersey. She's from the town that my dad lived in, and I had mutual friends from being back and forth every summer. And I didn't meet her until she was graduating high school, but just happened to be around mutual friends and met her. And then we just were in the same friends group and that was probably for about four or five years. We weren't dating.
Rip Esselstyn [00:40:35]:
And had you dated much before this?
Anthony Masiello [00:40:37]:
No, I had one girlfriend for maybe a year or so and then one kind of short term girlfriend. Dating wasn't a big part of my life because, again, as I've shared, I wasn't sure I had to have a girl who had the courage to come up to me almost. It was a little different with Kathy. I ended up chasing her for about I don't know, if it took me a year. I had to be very persistent.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:08]:
You mean to get her to go out on a date?
Anthony Masiello [00:41:10]:
Because we were already friends and that wasn't good enough for me. I got to a point where that wasn't good enough for me and involved some letter writing. I had to be ready to almost kind of jeopardize the friendship, but by trying to pursue romantic relationship, which sounds.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:29]:
Like it worked out.
Anthony Masiello [00:41:29]:
Yeah. Because I wouldn't stop. And I was as big as ever at the time. I got back down to about 290, I think, when I was living in Baltimore. But then as soon as I started working full time, it all just came right back.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:45]:
So when you say with Kathy, you knew what you wanted, there was something about her.
Anthony Masiello [00:41:55]:
And we were like, best friends at this point. She went to school at Temple in Philadelphia, and at the time, the Amtrak train was $20 to go back and forth between Philadelphia and Baltimore, and neither of us had a ton going on on the weekends. And other friends were in different areas or back in New Jersey, which was hard to get to because neither of us had a car. So we ended up hanging out a lot, either in Philadelphia or in Baltimore because it was like a 1 hour, maybe an hour and a half train ride and $20. You literally just jumped on the train. Eventually the conductor came and took your money and you get off in Philadelphia. That was before we were even dating. We were still hanging out like that, so it just made sense.
Rip Esselstyn [00:42:34]:
Yeah. Do you think that she intuitively sensed that you wanted more than a friendship?
Anthony Masiello [00:42:43]:
Maybe. But by the time I sensed it, really, I felt it at one time, I was like, Wait, we should be because she had a boyfriend or two at the time, and we were all friends, so it wasn't like it was just the two of us, and I was kind of creeping on her or something like that. It just made sense for us to be friends, and then at one point, I was like, Wait, it makes sense for us to be more than friends. And I had to convince her a.
Rip Esselstyn [00:43:15]:
Little bit, but that's good. So you made it clear to her that you wanted more, and she didn't run away. She basically just was patient, and you.
Anthony Masiello [00:43:25]:
Had to convince well, it was like we had to evaluate this and figure it out, and she wasn't sure at first, and then eventually she caved. We'll call it caved, and we started dating. It's been a lot of fun ever since.
Rip Esselstyn [00:43:38]:
Yeah. So when you said, like, you just would not stop, is that indicative of your personality in other areas?
Anthony Masiello [00:43:45]:
Yes, I can be persistent.
Rip Esselstyn [00:43:51]:
I'm a big fan of that quality, that characteristic.
Anthony Masiello [00:43:54]:
Yeah. I do get kind of focused, and I figure out how to make things work right, and that's what it was. And make things work not in a forceful way, but how can we really make things kind of fall into place? Because that's what it felt like. It felt like things finally just fell into place.
Rip Esselstyn [00:44:11]:
All right, so let's go back to you in the very beginning of this conversation, said that when you were, like, nine or ten, you basically started gaining the weight up until 33. So how old were you when you got married to Kathy? Can you remember?
Anthony Masiello [00:44:31]:
I was 28.
Rip Esselstyn [00:44:34]:
Okay.
Anthony Masiello [00:44:34]:
Yeah, 28. It was in 2000.
Rip Esselstyn [00:44:36]:
So what happened at the age of 33 that all of a sudden allowed something to click in your brain?
Anthony Masiello [00:44:44]:
Yeah, we had a child. My first son, Evan. He was born. She was pregnant with our second son, Henry, and I went for a life insurance policy, a 20 year term life insurance policy, and I went for another policy. I had had life insurance, like a smaller policy when we were just married, before we had kids, and it was enough insurance. But now I was being advised that now that I have two kids, I have a mortgage I want to be able to take care of if something happens to me, I need to be able to take care of them. So I applied for an additional 20 year term life insurance policy, and I was denied. And I was concerned about being in a high risk category. The idea of being denied never crossed my mind. But when I read that letter, I knew what that meant. And what that meant was they plugged in all my medical records, they plugged in my current state of health, and their algorithm didn't expect me to live for 20 years, and it scared me.
Rip Esselstyn [00:45:57]:
But up until this point, are you on any medications. Have you been in and out of the hospital much like, did your medical records? Was there something in there?
Anthony Masiello [00:46:10]:
It was a combination of everything. So I had not been in and out of the hospital at all, and I think that would have scared me also. I was on medication for high blood pressure. It was roughly controlled. I think my doctor was okay that we had it down to, like, 140 over 90 on two medications. So that was high. Even through college, I always donated blood, and I would say half the time, maybe a little bit more. I would get a letter from them saying they weren't able to use my blood.
Rip Esselstyn [00:46:44]:
Why?
Anthony Masiello [00:46:45]:
Because something in the chemistry was out of whack, and they didn't give me detail, but they suggested I go see a doctor. But I didn't go see the doctor. I would just wait till the next time I could donate blood and see if it got any different. Right. I wasn't shocked. But anyway, they always told me my blood pressure was a little bit high. I was always told my cholesterol was a little bit high. So by this time now, before the life insurance policy, I was on two medications for blood pressure. My cholesterol was about 220 or so, which was just enough where I could kind of convince them that I was going to do something about it. I didn't really have to go on medications, because when they talk about these medications, they said, once you start, that's it. You're on it forever. And that scared me. I didn't want to do that. I had eczema on my fingers where the fronts of my fingers would crack and peel and bleed. I had psoriasis behind my neck where the skin would get flaky and it would be almost like an open sore sometimes. I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea.
Rip Esselstyn [00:47:46]:
Were you having to wear the CPAT?
Anthony Masiello [00:47:48]:
See everything I did. Rip. I'm like, I don't want to wear that machine at night. They sent me for a sleep study, and it was easy for me to dismiss the sleep study because I'm sleeping in this room in the hospital with cameras on me, with wires connected all over my body and my head, all these things taped to me. I'm like, you can't judge my night's sleep on this one night. So I dismissed it. So I didn't want the CPAP machine, all those things. And I would get migraine headaches, and I had a prescription for a medication that would help with migraine headaches that I think I was supposed to take all the time to prevent them, but I would just try to take it when I got them. But it didn't really help. And then by this time, I weighed 360 pounds. I had a 54 inch waist, and I have all these health complications now. Any one of these things I could talk to one friend about, because I had other friends with high cholesterol. I had other friends with high blood pressure. I had other friends who were overweight. But I guess my understanding is this whole package didn't give me a good outcome. My liver enzymes were always high. My triglycerides were always off the chart. All this stuff, I wasn't healthy.
Rip Esselstyn [00:49:06]:
I just want to ask you before we continue, so you're 360 pounds, 33. You've got a child, you got one on the way. You've been married for about four years at that .4 years. What does a typical day of eating look like for you? I'd love to understand what that looks like. Yeah.
Anthony Masiello [00:49:29]:
And this is hard because it doesn't look that bad. Well, I don't think. Right. So I wouldn't have anything for breakfast, or if I did, I would have coffee, sometimes black coffee, sometimes coffee with cream and sugar. Right. And I wouldn't eat breakfast. And then for lunch, it would be like two slices of pizza. This is where it gets a little bit obvious, more obvious. Like on my way home from work, if I was hungry, sometimes I would pull in, get a cold slice of pizza, and eat it in the car on the way home, but it would literally be one slice of New York style pizza. Where I got into complications was when there was a birthday celebration at work and they were serving cake, or if someone brought in cookies and put them into the break room, that kind of stuff. When there's food around that's out, I'll eat it, and I won't even really be paying attention. I'll just keep eating it. Then dinner at home was not too bad. I mean, there were times where we would get the equivalent of like a Papa John's pizza with the garlic butter sauce, and I would put that on it and eat it. But I wasn't eating fast food. Like, I wasn't driving through McDonald's or Burger King, things like that. We were members of a CSA farm, and we were committed to eating all of the vegetables, so we ended up cooking that stuff. I mean, I was 360 pounds. Oh, I was a vegetarian, so I wasn't eating meat, but I was eating cheese and eggs and dairy.
Rip Esselstyn [00:51:05]:
For how long have you been a vegetarian?
Anthony Masiello [00:51:07]:
1994. When I went vegetarian in 1994, it was one of my attempts to get healthy. I gave up alcohol and meat on the same day. It was January 24, 1994, and I haven't had meat or alcohol since. And I got healthy rip because in 1994, to be vegetarian, all I knew was to go to the produce aisle and get rice. And I bought a wok, and I would just cook vegetables and rice, and I would use oil, different kind of oils to get them really hot in the wok, whatever, peanut oil. But it wasn't in comparison. But then slowly, vegetarian to me became cheese pizza or vegetable stuffed pizza, which had top and the bottom or pizza with the garlic butter sauce on it, like that was vegetarian or cheese omelets or my go to no matter where I was if I needed to eat, was a grilled cheese sandwich, which is white bread butter. And know, sometimes I'd get a slice of tomato on, you know, big deal. Usually with an order of French fries. So there was that kind of stuff. But then in the evening, it could be a whole pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:19]:
Or a half gallon.
Anthony Masiello [00:52:20]:
No, a pint, because the Ben and Jerry's came in the pint. Right. I think.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:25]:
What was your flavor of choice?
Anthony Masiello [00:52:26]:
Well, chubby hubby. I didn't have to share that one rip because I told Kathy she already had a chubby hubby. She didn't need any of this ice cream.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:34]:
Well, it was your signature ice cream chubby hubby.
Anthony Masiello [00:52:38]:
I mean, it's chocolate covered peanut butter filled pretzels in a mixture of peanut butter ice cream with chocolate. Like that's, like, made for me.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:48]:
Yeah. That's making my mouth water right now.
Anthony Masiello [00:52:50]:
Sorry. Probably with disgust.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:55]:
Well, it's actually not, because everything about that sounds so good.
Anthony Masiello [00:52:59]:
Right. I mean, they had the salt in there. Obviously, I remember it, but that was a challenging part. And when I was traveling a lot back and forth, I used to travel to Boston for work at the time. At this time now, I was working at Novartis pharmaceuticals, and the hotel was connected to a grocery store, so I didn't even have to go out to eat. I could just go to the grocery or even if we went out to eat, if I didn't get dessert and I wanted to, when I came back to the hotel, I could literally go over there to the freezer section, and I can't save half a pint of ice cream when I get it there. I had to eat the whole container because I didn't have a freezer.
Rip Esselstyn [00:53:33]:
Yeah, and you're not going to waste any ice cream.
Anthony Masiello [00:53:36]:
So when I say it wasn't too bad there was too much dessert stuff, I would overeat. When I was in an environment where there was food around, but I was also eating vegetables, and I wasn't eating meat, and I wasn't drinking alcohol.
Rip Esselstyn [00:53:48]:
What's interesting know, I've had other guests on the show, like Sudd, Chuck Carroll, Ken Lander, and I mean, these guys.
Anthony Masiello [00:54:01]:
Like fast food junkies, like, multiple times a day.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:05]:
Multiple times a day.
Anthony Masiello [00:54:06]:
Cars covered, adam's apartment covered with right.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:09]:
Yeah, it's egregious how much time they spent how much money they spent at fast food restaurants. And that doesn't sound like it was the case.
Anthony Masiello [00:54:18]:
It wasn't me because I was 360 pounds, and I could not wait for fresh asparagus season to come into spring. And I would make egg white or asparagus omelets with either egg whites or with whole eggs, but that fresh asparagus. I look forward to that every single year. Rip still.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:36]:
And does the asparagus make your urine smell?
Anthony Masiello [00:54:39]:
Yes, it does.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:40]:
Okay, so you've got that I've got.
Anthony Masiello [00:54:42]:
That gene, too, with all the good ones.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:45]:
I've heard it affects 50% of people. All right, let's come back to 33. You got denied with your 20 year term life insurance, and your jaw kind of hit the ground.
Anthony Masiello [00:54:59]:
Yeah, that was a 20 year death sentence. To me, that means you're not going to make it 20 years, but they don't tell you if that means five years or 15 years or whatever. Right. It's just not 20. So to me, that means I'm not going to see my kids graduate high school. Henry wasn't born yet, and I wasn't going to see these kids grow then. So I thought about that, and it scared me. But the best thing that happened from that denial letter is it forced me to take a really objective look at what my life was really like. And when I did that, I wasn't happy with it, because not only was I not going to be there, but I started to imagine, what is life going to be like in this state leading up to whatever might or might not happen? Right. Like, am I going to be having any fun? Am I going to be an active part of these kids lives? Am I going to be someone who's just on the sidelines all the time?
Rip Esselstyn [00:55:58]:
How concerned was your wife Kathy, with you at 360? You've got one child, you got one child on the way, and you're denied. Are you sharing your feelings with her or not?
Anthony Masiello [00:56:16]:
Yeah, but she's an incredibly supportive person, and she's not as long sighted as I am, so she wanted me to always feel okay in the moment. So she was always very comforting. She was always very supportive in those ways, but not like, we have to do something about this. It was more like, whatever you feel, it's okay. Whatever you want to do, I'll support you, things like that, but not like, hey, we should use this as a wake up call to do something differently. That all came from that was kind of brewing inside of me.
Rip Esselstyn [00:56:52]:
And you think that Kathy, looking back, just was doing the best that she accepting?
Anthony Masiello [00:57:00]:
She's a very accepting person. I really believe in a very sincere place that she didn't feel like she needed to change me, and she probably didn't think long enough ahead to think of how it might have affected her. She's like, we're going to be fine. It was that kind of tone.
Rip Esselstyn [00:57:16]:
Well, this is fascinating. All right.
Anthony Masiello [00:57:25]:
There's one instance that kind of sums it up for me, and it's the moment that I still go to when I need to. And me and Kathy, she's pregnant now with Henry, and we have 18 month old Henry, I mean, 18 month old Evan, and we go to the local church. Carnival comes to town right and already we talked about, I don't fit on an airplane, so there's no way I don't fit on the rides at the carnival. But my kids 18 months old, and at 18 months old, you can kind of tell that there's a person in there, and they have things that excite them and things that make them upset. So we were thrilled as new parents. Like, I always wanted to be a dad. Like, I couldn't wait for this, right? So we're at the church carnival, and I'm holding Evan and walking with Kathy, and there's lights and bells and noises and all this exciting stuff going on. And he's just kind of fascinated with all of it. And we turn a corner, and there was a train, like a kitty train ride that went around just in a small oval. And he starts squirming and pointing, and he was probably saying, like, Thomas or something, because he had Thomas the Train toys at home and all this stuff, realizing now that this is probably the first time he ever saw a train that he could actually fit on. We didn't have trains around where I lived in New Jersey that he would see. Maybe he thought trains were toys, but now he saw one that he could ride, right? So we were excited that he was excited. So we walk over to take him on the train ride, and just as naturally as could be rip, I hook my thumbs under his armpits to take him from my chest to hint him to Kathy so they can go on the ride. And he wouldn't let go of my shirt. And I thought, oh, he wants me to take him on the train. But there's no way that's happening. This isn't an adult size ride. This is made for kids. Even though Kathy was very pregnant at the time, she was his best chance of getting on the train. They weren't letting him go on at 18 months by himself. So we go to the attendant. We give the tickets. I'm just grinning ear to ear. He's with Kathy now. He probably doesn't even remember I exist because they're walking towards this train. The two of them get on, and I'm just sitting there smiling. And the attendant kind of wakes me up a little bit and says, excuse me, sir. You just have to stand over here. Because I was probably blocking whoever was trying to get on the train next, right? So I move over and I stand, and I'm literally standing behind a metal gate. And while I'm standing there, I'm watching them as they're going just around in circles, and they're laughing and they're having a great time. And maybe they wave at me sometimes when they see me, but they're doing their thing, right? And two questions popped into my mind. Number one, is this the kind of father I'm going to be? And number two, is this the kind of husband that I'm. Going to be for Kathy? What else am I not going to be able to participate in? What else is she going to have to do, as uncomfortable as she may feel? Because I'm just physically unable. And I didn't like the answer to either of those questions because the answer was yes, that is the kind of husband I was going to be, and that is the kind of father I was going to be. That was unacceptable. That was a problem that had to be solved.
Rip Esselstyn [01:00:41]:
Okay, so that was a defining moment.
Anthony Masiello [01:00:46]:
Yeah. And I didn't realize it as much in the moment, but then I get the life insurance policy and all these things kind of come afterwards, and it all just kind of came crashing down to me, and that was it. I had to do something very different. I had to make a big change, and I had to figure this out. This was no longer optional.
Rip Esselstyn [01:01:03]:
All right, so what did you do?
Anthony Masiello [01:01:04]:
So I set a New Year's resolution. We were in October or so or November. This is at 2005. And I said in 2006, I'm giving up sweets, I'm giving up soda, and I'm going to figure out how to lose 50 pounds in the year of 2006. Those were my goals. That was it. And I didn't know what to do other than to keep myself hungry and not eat sweets and soda. So still, I haven't had sweets or soda to this day since. Now I have delicious date sweetened desserts and stuff like that, but I draw a dotted line in maple syrup, even if there's maple syrup. Sometimes I will, sometimes I won't. But that one I'm even cautious of things that are that sweet. Right. But I did that for three months and I didn't lose a single pound. I was hungry all the time, and I wasn't losing weight. And everything that was out there when I was looking for how to lose weight was all Atkins. Again, this is 2005, 2006. And I didn't want to start eating meat. I was already vegetarian. I was proud of the fact that I was vegetarian. I felt so much better when I first went vegetarian. I started googling vegetarian weight loss. And Dr. Furman's book Eat to Live pops up on Amazon.com. And on the COVID of that book, it says, Fast and sustained weight loss. I was like, that sounds pretty good. I was almost ready to sign up right there. Right? But then I read the comments on Amazon and the reviews, what people were saying about it, and almost no one was talking about losing weight. Everyone was talking about getting healthy, and everyone was talking about getting off medications, and everyone's talking about feeling better, and everyone's talking about how much energy. And that was another moment that hit me. I didn't want to lose weight. I wanted to be healthy. I never really associated the two. I always thought of my weight as something that was visual, right, or physical. But now I said, oh, I can change the way I eat and I can become was that was new kind of thought to me. So I bought the book. I started doing exactly what it said as I was reading it. I started making changes, and Kathy did not. She continued doing what she you know, this was very much my problem to solve. So I was reading this book, I was doing it. She was, again, incredibly supportive.
Rip Esselstyn [01:03:40]:
Would you consider yourself a bit of a chef? Were you?
Anthony Masiello [01:03:43]:
I always loved to cook.
Rip Esselstyn [01:03:44]:
Okay.
Anthony Masiello [01:03:44]:
Yeah. Okay, so that wasn't hard. And also the first thing I did was I started eating breakfast, but I would have fruit. That's it, literally just fruit. Because I knew my take home message from when I started reading that book was eat more vegetables, eat more fruits. Eat plenty of beans, some nuts and seeds and almost nothing else.
Rip Esselstyn [01:04:09]:
And lots of greens, green leafies.
Anthony Masiello [01:04:11]:
Yeah. So I just lumped all of that into the vegetable, and I said, every day I'm going to try to eat more vegetables and more fruit than I did the day before. So here I am, having nothing for breakfast. And I remember walking to the cafeteria at work. The cafeteria had fruit cut up every day. All you had to do was put it in a container and weigh it. How much easier does it get than that? I was walking with my friend Mike to the cafeteria, and I said, I read this book that basically said, the more fruits and vegetables you eat, the healthier you'll be. And you know what he said to me? He said duh. And I'm like, well, why is this new to me? I didn't know that. Yeah, it was funny. He really did. I was like, okay. So I would get a pound or more of fruit for breakfast every day. And then at lunch, I wouldn't eat anything else until I had a huge salad. And we also had a beautiful salad bar in the cafeteria at work. So I could just load it up and make my salad with chickpeas on top of it or black beans on top of it, whatever they had there. Salsa. Just load up a big salad.
Rip Esselstyn [01:05:14]:
Are you having to pay for this or employee no, I had to pay for it. Okay.
Anthony Masiello [01:05:17]:
Yeah, no, I had to pay for it. It was probably subsidized, but it wasn't much more than I would be spending to eat anywhere else. So Cost didn't really play into it, and I just started eating tons of fruits and vegetables. Three months after I bought the book, we brought Henry home. Henry was born. We came home from the hospital I'm sorry, two months. And in those two months, I lost 30 pounds. And pretty much that put me on autopilot. I was like, wow, you were just following this works that's it. I don't need to learn another thing. I just need to do it.
Rip Esselstyn [01:05:52]:
And have you ever met Joel?
Anthony Masiello [01:05:55]:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn [01:05:55]:
Furman.
Anthony Masiello [01:05:55]:
Yeah. So it turns out after I read the whole book and started losing weight, I read the back cover.
Rip Esselstyn [01:06:00]:
He's, New Jersey.
Anthony Masiello [01:06:01]:
He practiced family medicine about less than 10 miles from my house.
Rip Esselstyn [01:06:05]:
Wow.
Anthony Masiello [01:06:05]:
That's about 15 minutes drive from where we were. But I'm kind of a cautious person with things. I never reached out to him, and I did it. I did it. I completed it. The short version of the story is, I got off all my medications in about two or three months. I lost 160 pounds in 20 months, and it felt like nothing, right? But it was almost eight pounds a month every month for 20 months. Then I waited a year after, I kept to make sure I was going to maintain the weight loss. And I wrote up my success story, and I emailed it to their office. They put me on the website. Then they would write to me, and they would say, hey, can we use your story in this appearance or this presentation? Or can we put your story in the next version of Eat to Live, the next edition that came out? I was very proud of that one. I said yes. I signed all these things to send them right back. Then I was picking my son up from the gym from gymnastics one day, and I was walking up the stairs, and Joel Furman was right next to me on the stairs. And I looked over at him. Had never met him in person. My story is already in the book. By this point, I think he was working out at the gym. It was one of those huge, mega gyms. And I said, are you Dr. Furman? And he goes, yeah. Who are you? I said, my name is Anthony. I'm one of the success stories in your book, because this is, like, years later. And his jaw dropped. And then he said, do you work out here? And I did sometimes, but I didn't know what to say. I said, no, I'm just taking my son up at gymnastics. And I said, well, it's nice to meet you. And I walked away, and that was it, right? Anyway, he must have registered that I was local, because then the emails I would get would say, hey, can you come share your story at this event I'm doing? And then we became friends over years after that.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:04]:
Got it.
Anthony Masiello [01:08:05]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:06]:
Nice. Well, he's definitely got a pretty tried and trued method there with really pushing the fruits and the vegetables. He's not so much a fan of some of the more starches like McDougall.
Anthony Masiello [01:08:24]:
Right.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:26]:
But man, huge congrats.
Anthony Masiello [01:08:28]:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:29]:
It's huge.
Anthony Masiello [01:08:29]:
Yeah. So my life completely changed in that 20 months. I became more physically active than I ever had before. I started running for fun. That's something I never even crossed my mind.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:43]:
Huge.
Anthony Masiello [01:08:43]:
Yeah. I was now proud of myself again. For the first time in my life, I didn't have to go find the armless chairs in the room anymore. I could sit anywhere and be comfortable. I could stroll right down the aisle of the plane and sit down in the seat with extra room on either side, and I could use my seatbelt. I could play with going on a little bit later. I could play with my kids the way that they would want me to play with them. When we shoot basketball in the driveway and the ball goes rolling off the driveway, I don't sit there and huff and puff and wait for them to go get it. I was racing them for it, and then they're trying to push me down in the grass. Basically, it's just the most beautiful kind of life that I could have ever imagined.
Rip Esselstyn [01:09:26]:
Train rides ever go on that train?
Anthony Masiello [01:09:28]:
I have pictures of me back on the train rides with both kids probably about two years later on the exact same train.
Rip Esselstyn [01:09:34]:
Will you do me a favor? You need to send me those photos and we can put it in the show notes of the episode.
Anthony Masiello [01:09:39]:
For sure.
Rip Esselstyn [01:09:40]:
That'd be awesome.
Anthony Masiello [01:09:40]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:09:41]:
What about life insurance?
Anthony Masiello [01:09:45]:
Yeah. So I applied immediately. I applied less than two years after being denied, and I just wanted to get it on record that now I was healthy and I never expected to get insured. But they actually issued me the policy in the premier preferred category or whatever, which means I almost don't even have to pay for it. I was in a less expensive category or their least expensive category ever, which probably means now I don't need it anymore. But I was surprised that they gave it to me right away. But again, I think that by following this whole food plant based diet and a healthy lifestyle, everything was working. So anything that was ever a risk factor went from being in the danger zone to being not just okay, but it went to being ideal. And I guess that was enough to convince at least the algorithm it was the exact same insurance company. I'm sure they had their history, but yeah, that was great confirmation because that's not how I look. That's not how I feel. That's how the data represented me.
Rip Esselstyn [01:10:52]:
So how did people that you know that you love coworkers, family, friends respond to your really dramatic weight loss and health reversal in 20 months?
Anthony Masiello [01:11:10]:
Yeah, it's funny. My friends at work, they were, like, cheering me on. They're like, wow, Anthony, you look great. And I really would hesitate to tell anyone something like that because not like I didn't think you looked great before. It was a very professional environment, but I got plenty of that, which felt good. I got everything from my I have friends who thought I was sick, and really, I think they just wanted to tease me and tell me that I looked like I was sick because it was pretty quick, that's rapid weight loss and going from always having been obese. And then I shaved my beard at the time, so it was a big change. But aside from the joking and the kidding around, which I would fully expect from my friends, everyone was really genuinely, sincerely happy for me. And that was awesome, right?
Rip Esselstyn [01:12:05]:
So was anybody not.
Anthony Masiello [01:12:08]:
You know, what happened is some of my friends who I used to talk about health conditions with, who had not done the same thing right, who still hadn't figured out their part, I would just sense the conversations would be a little bit kind of defensive or like, justifying why they are still doing what they're doing versus me doing what I'm doing. I didn't feel an ounce of that. I wouldn't come with that. But I understand it from their perspective.
Rip Esselstyn [01:12:39]:
So you didn't become like preachy or pushy?
Anthony Masiello [01:12:42]:
No, I like to help people do what they want to do. I'm not a big kind of tell other people what to do kind of person, right? Try not to be. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:12:54]:
Well, yeah. It must be hard, though, when you're such a poster boy for what whole food plant based nutrition can do. When you do it and you do it right, how can people not say yeah?
Anthony Masiello [01:13:11]:
So anyone who asked, they got the full thing, right? I mean, they would get the daily phone calls. They would get the text messages in the morning. Later, when we were using text and stuff, I would offer to take them to lunch every single day. Anybody who extended a little bit of interest, I was there for them 100%. And that's why I've always been so happy to have the opportunity to share my story with the hope that it helped somebody else or that it would even cause someone to ask me or ask someone else some questions on how they could do it for themselves.
Rip Esselstyn [01:13:48]:
It sounds like your wife's just incredible, but how did she react to this weight loss?
Anthony Masiello [01:13:54]:
So she was very happy. It's one of the moms at the preschool that we were taking, the kids who thought that she remarried.
Rip Esselstyn [01:14:01]:
Oh, gosh.
Anthony Masiello [01:14:04]:
It gave her like a you go girl kind of thing like that, not even realizing that I was the same person. So there was some of that she was happy, but again, just in a supportive way, she was more happy that I was happy. She wasn't so happy where she was dissatisfied before, but where she got a little bit changed because I mentioned I started running. She ran all through a high school and she didn't run in college, but she ran while she was going to college, recreationally, for fun. And she started to change her diet after I started beating her at five KS and local races. I was pushing both kids in the stroller, and she still couldn't beat me. And I'd never ran in my life before, like, ever. And she was like, wow, maybe there's something to this. And we would go to the diner in New Jersey. She would order the Yankee pot roast dinner. I would order the Greek salad with no cheese, no dressing, and no anchovies, and they would come, and they would put the salad in front of her. They would put the Yankee pot rose dinner in front of me, and we would have to trade plates. But she knew that the food I was eating was delicious because she was eating it, too. Just that when we would go out, she would still go for sushi, or she would still get like I said, she would get meat dishes. But then she fully switched, and she felt just as great, too. She didn't change much in her size. I mean, she was never overweight, and now she's still not overweight. She didn't go underweight at all. But her running improved quite a bit. She qualified for Boston six years in a row. She ran two marathons a year during that period, and she would qualify for Boston every year, and then every other year, she would run it, and she would run a different marathon other years, just by know. So she leveled up quite a bit with her own athletic performance. And again, I just can't say enough about how when you get the inside right, that you can just do everything that you want to do, you can just do a little bit better.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:06]:
So she's all in now.
Anthony Masiello [01:16:07]:
Yes. And the kids, too. We raised the kids the same way.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:10]:
Henry and Evan. Yes. Wow. How old are they now?
Anthony Masiello [01:16:14]:
Now they're 17 and 19 years old. Wow. Yeah. So Evan just finished his freshman year of college. He just came home last week. And Henry's finishing up his junior year of high school right now. They both ran cross country all through cross country and track all through high school. Wow. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:31]:
And so they're plant strong.
Anthony Masiello [01:16:32]:
Yes, for sure.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:33]:
Young stud athletes.
Anthony Masiello [01:16:34]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:35]:
That's awesome.
Anthony Masiello [01:16:36]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:38]:
It's interesting you said something a second ago about how I think some of your friends or somebody didn't recognize you. It reminds me, I was doing an event in Sarasota, Florida, and this guy came up to me after the event, and he goes, man, you got to meet this firefighter at Fire Station Two at Sarasota because this cat follows you so hardcore, you would not believe it. He's down over 100 pounds in one year wow. Following the engine two program. And so you got to reach out to somebody that's had that kind of success, and I did, and he went on to tell me about how he would go to these all you could eat buffets, and his goal was to basically show them how much he could eat. Right. And these guys I'm going to show them. And that was just the attitude that he had.
Anthony Masiello [01:17:34]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:17:34]:
And he said at some point, he just had an awakening. He bought a size I think he was a size 50 waist. Right.
Anthony Masiello [01:17:43]:
Wow.
Rip Esselstyn [01:17:44]:
But he went to the store, he bought a size 32 inch waist, and he said he put it on the chair next to his bed.
Anthony Masiello [01:17:50]:
Oh, my God.
Rip Esselstyn [01:17:51]:
And so it was the last thing that he saw every night before he went to bed. And the first thing he saw when he woke up and he said, what happened is he hurt his knee in a fire. And so they put him on injured reserve. So he had to work, like, a desk job for a year in one year. And he said, I couldn't exercise. I was just following whole food plant based. I lost 102 pounds, got into those 32 inch pants, went back to work at my station, and the guys had no idea who I was. They thought I was a rookie, a new rookie.
Anthony Masiello [01:18:26]:
That's amazing.
Rip Esselstyn [01:18:27]:
But it is incredible sometimes what can.
Anthony Masiello [01:18:31]:
Happen now, sometimes that's fun because you can walk right past people you don't want to talk to.
Rip Esselstyn [01:18:40]:
Do you always have the beard or.
Anthony Masiello [01:18:42]:
What'S the no, it comes and goes. My wife really likes it. I like it a little bit less, but it seems like every time she says, oh, I really like your beard, then it kind of goes away for a little while.
Rip Esselstyn [01:18:53]:
Nice.
Anthony Masiello [01:18:53]:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [01:18:54]:
All right, so how did this journey of yours and finding whole food plant based, having this incredible success, how has it affected your profession, your career, and what you're now doing with your life?
Anthony Masiello [01:19:12]:
Yeah. So I mentioned I was working at Novartis Pharmaceuticals. So when I left Maryland, moved to New Jersey, pharmaceutical industry, started caring about genetics and genomics, and they also didn't have anyone who knew how to work with the data, so it was a really nice fit. I felt great about that because I'm like, wow. Now instead of contributing towards basic research, now I can contribute towards real medications and therapies that are going to help people to get well. Meanwhile, I'm working there, sick as I've ever been, right. And I learned how to recover. I got off medications that I was told I was going to be on forever. And I'm on this campus in New Jersey. That's 500 acres, and almost 10,000 people just work in this one location. We're 120,000 people worldwide at Novartis. Right. And I would walk around, I would say about 80% of what we're doing here is just to enable people just enables people not to take care of themselves. If we didn't have the medications for prediabetes and type two diabetes, people will be forced to deal with in a different way. Same thing with high cholesterol, same thing with obesity, the heart disease, right. Like blood pressure medications, all these things. And I'm not saying that necessarily from a scientific perspective, but at least that's how I was thinking about it.
Rip Esselstyn [01:20:34]:
It's the path of least resistance, right?
Anthony Masiello [01:20:37]:
And the medications helped me. If I wasn't on that medication, I probably wouldn't have felt well enough to make this change, right? But I was now wanting to kind of evolve my passion. One more step now, instead of helping to develop drugs now, I would like to help people not to need drugs or hopefully to get off of drugs.
Rip Esselstyn [01:20:55]:
So what year are we in now?
Anthony Masiello [01:20:58]:
That was probably from about the time so I finished losing the weight, September 2007. So I probably really started thinking about this all around, like 2009, 2010. But I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where I was going to fit in. The whole food plant based community didn't start caring about genetics data, genomics data, so I wasn't going to plug directly in. I was trying to figure out what to do. I was helping a lot of people. I did go for a health coaching certification. I thought maybe I could do something with coaching. And then my wife watched the documentary The Minimalists, right? And here we are living in New Jersey. I mentioned we had this big piece of property. We had a big house. We had a barn, a garden, skateboard ramp in the yard. We had all this stuff, and then we had all this stuff that you need to take care of all that stuff. And I had almost jokingly said to her before that if we didn't have all this stuff, then we wouldn't need to make a lot of money to be able to live the exact same kind of quality of life. She came to the idea I didn't try to push that one on anyone rip. That might have been a game changer for my marital situation, but in 2018, I left Novartis with a loose plan to figure out somewhere I was going to fit into this. But by that time, I felt like I could do that as a responsible parent, because we had gotten rid of all of our everything that created expense for us. We bought a tiny condo so that we were not to have a mortgage on or anything. She was still working part time for NIH. She still does today, but that was enough to keep us happy and comfortable while I figured out what to do. And in 2018, I would go around to conferences, and I just noticed a pattern. And what happened is when you would see a physicians or a doctor or a scientist who would go on stage that would talk about everything that we've learned, about how whole food, plant based nutrition and how now lifestyle medicine can help to prevent disease or even reverse disease, then they present some case studies. Stories like mine, stories like other people. Dr. Stansik will talk about her and her multiple sclerosis, right? And then they go to Q A, and someone raises their hand and they say, hello, my name is so and so, and I also suffer from whatever medical condition. Where can I find a doctors who can help me? And there's almost like there's rare situations. Your father's an incredible resource for people with heart disease, and they can have consultations with mean. I have personal friends who have had that with him for free, but as far as I know, he's not going to take over their medical care and be their know. And Dr. Furman had this office in New Jersey. Now he has a retreat center. Dr. McDougall has his space set up here, and there are people scattered around, but there's not easy access. So I just kind of put one and one together, and I said, well, with telemedicine, this is back in January 2019.
Rip Esselstyn [01:24:15]:
Your timing could not have been better.
Anthony Masiello [01:24:17]:
Yeah, with telemedicine, we can have a doctor who has multiple licenses, and they can see patients in three or four states back to back. Right. And maybe I knew a lot of doctors who wanted to practice lifestyle medicine, and I knew a lot of people who wish that their doctor practiced lifestyle medicine. The two groups didn't have a place to meet, and that's what we created. It started off as it was called plant based telehealth, and now it's called love Life telehealth.
Rip Esselstyn [01:24:47]:
And so how did that transition take?
Anthony Masiello [01:24:53]:
You know, I started it with my partner at the time, Lori Marbus and Dr. Christina Miller and Dr. Michael Clapper. And slowly they accumulated more states. We became national, and we brought on more doctors. Right now we have ten doctors. They can see patients in all 50 states, and they can do international consultations. And we were doing that as plant based telehealth. And then we got a lot of know, people wanted to invest in us. I honestly didn't know exactly what that we I knew we needed to grow, but, you know, I was learning as I was going, you know, how to how to build and grow, grow this company. And then we were approached by Betsy Foster. And John Mackey wants to do the same thing.
Rip Esselstyn [01:25:42]:
For those that don't know, john is the former now CEO of Whole Food Market stores who stepped down in September of 2022. And quite an entrepreneur.
Anthony Masiello [01:25:52]:
Yes, and an incredible person and incredible collaborator. So we had been in conversations on and off for about a year on can we work together, because it turns out that they were on the same mission. Like, the mission is to change the way health care is practiced. We were a little bit further along, but their vision was much more grand than what we were doing. And at some point, it just made sense to partner and to do it together. So we jumped in with them, and they acquired plant based telehealth. We've just rebranded it as love Life Telehealth. And we still have the same ten doctors who are seeing patients in all 50 states and international consultations. So anyone can go right now and have an appointment. And what we're working on now is how can we design other programs and offerings, including a monthly model, like a year long program that patients can pay monthly over time to be part of a longer term experience where we can really help to provide the full set of support. Not just the doctor, the medical care, but also coaching and education and community. How can we really provide that to help, just to give everyone a better chance of being successful?
Rip Esselstyn [01:27:21]:
Those are the three legs of that stool right there. The coaching, the community, and the education. Yeah, absolutely. So what's the website? If people are interested and they want.
Anthony Masiello [01:27:32]:
To learn more, it's love lifetelehealth. I'm sure we can love life. It's like, instead of it's life, so it's love life. And the whole idea behind that is we want to help people not just to live life, but to love life, to be passionate about enjoying it, the way I'm so excited about how I was able to live and enjoy my life while I was raising my family. And still to this day, we want people to really feel and experience that. So it's love life telehealth. Or if you just go to love life, then there's a button there to get to telehealth, and the doctors are available to see patients everywhere. And they're some of the most incredible people that I've had the opportunity to work with, just like I shared earlier, working with those scientists at NIH, just like working with these drug investigators at Novartis, trying to figure out how to target these illnesses with medications, these guys are just as passionate. But what they're doing is helping people to really thrive and to figure out the nuances around any kind of medical conditions that they're dealing with, and using a lifestyle first approach and relying on medicine when it's absolutely necessary in some cases.
Rip Esselstyn [01:28:56]:
Well, I think that you have to be extraordinary to be able to move outside the box that you're kind of painted into as a medical student and realize at some point that the traditional medical bag that I've been given isn't the best method of delivering results to these patients that I've sworn an oath to. The Hippocratic oath. And so it takes somebody big to be able to go, you know what? I'm going to look at the data. I'm going to see what works. And by God, this is the answer. More and more, I think physicians are practicing lifestyle medicine, but you've got the.
Anthony Masiello [01:29:48]:
Early wave, we've got the early wave, and we've got environment that's set up to support them. The shortest appointment is 30 minutes, and that's 30 minutes of time with the doctor, and they get to know the patient before the appointment, because we've got a complete intake. Questionnaire, which doesn't just ask about what your parents, what conditions they've had and what conditions you've had in the past, but now it asks you, what does a typical day of eating look like? What's your physical activity? Where do you have strong social connections? Where do you find joy in your life? What do you do for physical activity? And they take all of that and they put that into a complete package for people. So now they really get to know you before the appointment. Now you can start working together, and they can ask clarifying questions to understand. And then it's the patient's goal. Like, what do you want to achieve? Like, oh, I would love to lower my cholesterol without medication, or I just was diagnosed pre diabetic. I'd love to not become type two diabetic. And they can work with the patients to do all these things.
Rip Esselstyn [01:30:51]:
Yeah, I had a swimming buddy that he had his complete blood work done, like, from A to Z, and he's whole food plant based. He had about six or seven markers that he had some questions on. So I sent them to Christina Miller.
Anthony Masiello [01:31:07]:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn [01:31:07]:
To basically with a 30 minutes appointment, so we could just go over those and they could all be addressed. Like, for example, a low white blood cell count, which, when you're whole food plant based right, sometimes is very, very natural and absolutely fine. But he was able to have all these concerns addressed, and he feels so much better for it. Yeah, see, and here's a physician that specializes in whole food plant based and can understand the nuances of the numbers.
Anthony Masiello [01:31:37]:
Right? Because if he went to another doctor, just a regular family practitioner or something, they might start asking him questions like, where are you going to get your protein? Or how are you going to get enough calcium? You're going to develop osteo? Like, they can just confuse the situation. And still, to your point, never answer the real question that he wants to know the answers to is, like, is this because the way I'm eating in my lifestyle? And is it actually a risk factor for me?
Rip Esselstyn [01:32:02]:
Totally or not.
Anthony Masiello [01:32:03]:
Right. So it sounds like he got the it's not because of probably because of this whole suite of everything else. She's able to make that determination?
Rip Esselstyn [01:32:12]:
Very much so, it sounds to me. I love that you're loving what you're doing. You're loving life. Loving life.
Anthony Masiello [01:32:25]:
Love life. Yeah. It just feels like everything is doing what is where it's supposed to be. To have my personal career aligned, I almost felt like I lived dual lives before. I would be working on pharmaceutical research during the day, and then the evening, I would be going to speak at one of Dr. Furman's events in New Jersey to help people to understand the power of lifestyle. And they were never really conflicting. I wasn't hiding one from the other ever, but they weren't aligned, and now it just feels like everything is aligned and it's a wonderful place to be.
Rip Esselstyn [01:33:01]:
Wow.
Anthony Masiello [01:33:02]:
And I get to help people in a way that I really, really, truly believe in.
Rip Esselstyn [01:33:07]:
Yeah. Well, you and I go back you.
Anthony Masiello [01:33:09]:
Came to PLANTSTRONG in 2017. I think it was the last one.
Rip Esselstyn [01:33:13]:
Up in and there was a bunch of you guys, bunch of former big boys yes. That got up and talked. And there was also, like, a little mini-documentary that was made starring you guys.
Anthony Masiello [01:33:27]:
That was big. Change the film. That was our friend Jason, and that was Tim Kaufman and Josh Lajani. I mean, Josh Lejani, I give him a lot of credit for getting a lot of us together. We all kind of started to know each other at different phases of our journey, and he created what was called the missing chins running club. And we got to get together in Colorado a few times to do some runs. I mean, it was always so nice. And I'm sure you experienced this, but somebody who has made this kind of change for themselves and somebody who like the passion that you develop for life and the appreciation for being able to go for a run do something that simple. The appreciation for being able to sit in an armchair right now, to be around ten or twelve or 15 people or maybe over 100 of us when we're just online in our Facebook group, not having to explain these things to people was amazing. Yeah. But we had a blast up at plant stock, and that was an incredible experience.
Rip Esselstyn [01:34:30]:
It really was. Well, I've got to go pick up my daughter.
Anthony Masiello [01:34:35]:
Oh, yeah. I've got to go back to work.
Rip Esselstyn [01:34:37]:
And you've got to go back to work. But this has been spectacular.
Anthony Masiello [01:34:41]:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn [01:34:42]:
Thank you so much for coming on the show, being so open and sharing this incredible life journey and transformation with us.
Anthony Masiello [01:34:52]:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn [01:34:53]:
And I wish you all the best with Love Life telehealth. Like, knock it out of the park. You guys got an amazing service, and I hope people take advantage of it.
Anthony Masiello [01:35:02]:
Thank you. I appreciate rip. Thanks so much for having me. It's been so much fun talking with you, and I hope it helps.
Rip Esselstyn [01:35:09]:
Oh, yeah. Can't, but all right. Give me a little plant strong love in there. All right.
Anthony Masiello [01:35:16]:
See you. Thanks.
Rip Esselstyn [01:35:17]:
I want to thank Anthony for answering the call and connecting the dots on a huge need, which is access to plant based physicians. Doctors are now available to see patients in all 50 US. States and Washington, DC. And for lifestyle medicine consultations internationally, you simply visit love.Life to learn more. And that's it. Love.life. No, no, anything like that. It's just love.life. All right, thanks, as always for listening. I'll see you next week. In the meantime, keep it plantbased strong. Thank you for listening to the PlantStrong podcast. You can support the show by taking a quick minute to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Leaving us a positive review and sharing the show with your network is another great way to help us reach as many people as possible with the exciting news about Plants, thank you in advance for your support. It means everything. The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous true seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth, most notably my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
