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William Bird is a GP from Reading and is the CEO and founder of Intelligent Health (“…dedicated to increasing physical activity and improving the health of communities around the world”). In this podcast he explains to Ben how his career has been focussed on encouraging physical activity as a means of improving health and happiness. He talks Ben through a number of schemes including Health Walks, the Green Gym and Beat the Street. He finishes by eloquently summarising how he believes we could, as a race of hunter-gatherers, shift the focus from illness to wellbeing.

Show Notes

William has his own Wikipedia entry (54secs)

William becomes a GP as the result of a tragedy (1min 15secs)

The beginning of his interest in wellness (1min 57secs)

Health walks (2mins 36secs)

The origin and development of health walks (2mins 59secs)

Volunteers lead the walks (4mins 37secs)

The walks go national (5mins 10secs)

The ideal community size (5mins 48secs)

Setting up the Green Gym (6mins 58secs)

Combining conservation work with wellbeing (8mins 18secs)

The roll of Intelligent Health (9mins 26secs)

Beat the Street (10mins 03secs)

Points mean prizes (and wellbeing) (11mins 03secs)

Successful increases in activity (11mins 58secs)

Coverage of Beat the Street (12mins 56secs)

The process of establishing a Beat the Street game (13mins 54secs)

Funding the games (15mins 06secs)

Making the shift to wellness – wrong to solely focus on the frequent flyers (16mins 21secs)

Early diagnosis is more important (18mins)

William plugs his book! The Oxford Textbook of Nature and Public Health (18mins 23secs)

A summary of where we should be going… avoiding stress becoming ill health (18mins 50secs)

Impulsive behaviour of hunter-gatherers (19mins 58secs)

The social determinants (20mins 38secs)

The big three causes of disease (21mins 35secs)

Focussing much earlier on wellbeing (22mins 28secs)

Finding out more (23mins 02secs)

The Intelligent Health website is www.intelligenthealth.co.uk

Contact William: William.bird@intelligenthealth.co.uk

William’s Book is available on Amazon here