Dr. Rak ("rock") Jotwani. Board-certified Lifestyle Medicine and Internal Medicine physician. Founder of RAK Your Life. Host of The Health Feast podcast. Husband, father, and a guy who reversed his own prediabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure, and now helps others do the same.
By my early 30s I had prediabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. I was a physician writing prescriptions for the same conditions I had, and watching my patients get worse on them.
Nothing in my medical training had prepared me to actually treat these problems. Drugs managed them. Food, movement, sleep, breath, and connection were what reversed them.
I lost 75 pounds. My labs normalized. My blood pressure normalized. And I stopped pretending the textbook version of medicine was working.
RAK Your Life is what I built afterward, for the people who suspect there's a better way and want a physician who has actually walked it.
"I reversed my own disease, which in turn inspired me to help others do the same."
Dr. Rak
The labs moved first. The body followed. The mind followed that.
There is nothing soft about evidence-based medicine. The lifestyle interventions are some of the most studied and most effective treatments we have for the conditions I work with. Here is how I actually do this with patients.
Food, movement, sleep, stress, social connection, substances. I look at all six because the body doesn't care which one is broken. Sometimes the answer is sleep. Sometimes it's a relationship. Rarely is it just food.
Motivational interviewing. Habit anchoring. Stages of change. The same evidence-based tools that work in a 15-minute clinic visit, applied with the time and follow-up they actually need to stick. No willpower. No shame.
I prescribe GLP-1s, statins, BP meds, and metformin when they accelerate the work or carry someone through. I help patients come off them when lifestyle has done its job. I'm not anti-medication. I'm pro-result.
RAK is the framework I use with my patients and in my own life. It's not a program. It's an orientation.
Get clear on what actually matters to you. Health isn't an end. It's the substrate of everything else: work, family, presence, joy. We start with why.
Understand the connection between your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Notice the patterns that produce your current health, before trying to change anything.
Meet yourself with honesty and compassion, especially when things don't go as planned. Shame doesn't produce sustained change. Self-compassion does.
I went to medical school at the University of Chicago and trained in Internal Medicine at UCSF. I'm board-certified in Internal Medicine and in Lifestyle Medicine (American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, 2018). I sat for the lifestyle medicine boards after my own transformation, not before.
I served as the inaugural Director of Lifestyle Medicine at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, where I helped build the program from the ground up. RAK Your Life is what I built next, for the people who want lifestyle medicine outside the constraints of a 15-minute visit. I'm licensed to practice in 12 states.
I co-host The Health Feast, a podcast where lifestyle medicine meets actual life, now at 65+ episodes. I run Mindful Meals as a free community cook-along. I lead Men's Peak Tribe, a small weekly group of men working on awareness and self-leadership.
My approach isn't "alternative." It's the part of medicine that the rest of medicine forgot.
A short list of where the work has shown up academically, the same framework, in front of physicians and public health audiences.
Leading an interprofessional workshop at the American College of Lifestyle Medicine 2026 conference on social prescribing: turning social connection, meaning, and community participation from ideas clinicians nod at into something they can actually assess, prescribe, and operationalize in team-based care.
Where my work has shown up beyond the practice, interviews, features, and the stages where I've shared the framework.
The patient-education magazine in doctors' waiting rooms ran a feature on my story and how I help patients build a life they actually want to live.
Read the full feature (PDF) →
A fist bump is the simplest, realest thing we give the people we love. The ones we support, cheer on, and believe in. I see you. I'm with you. You've got this.
It's a mountain too, because living well is a climb. Real challenges, steep stretches, a long way up. The effort is the point, and the view is worth it.
And the most powerful bump of all is the one you give yourself. That's where it starts: deciding you're worth cheering for, too.
So here's yours. Live well, and RAK on.
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