ABOUT

Ruben Seetharamdoo · The Wellness Alchemist

In 1997, while completing a degree in chemistry, my heart stopped.

A bout of typhoid fever had left me weak for months. Severe food poisoning followed, then life-threatening cardiac complications. I was resuscitated with a defibrillator. The doctors told me I was fortunate to be alive.

I had spent fourteen years by then playing competitive football, believing that fitness and health were the same word. Lying in that hospital bed, I learned they were not. The doctors gave me my life back. What they could not give me, because it was never their job to, was a way to keep it. That part was always going to be mine to build.

From Chemist to Alchemist

During my recovery, I read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. The metaphor landed differently because I was, at the time, literally a chemist. A chemist works with what already exists. An alchemist transforms it.

I understood, in that hospital bed, that this identity, the architect of my own transformation, was available to me. Not someday. Not once I was fully recovered. Right then. And if it was available to me, it was available to everyone I would ever go on to work with. That understanding became the name of everything I have built since.

Twenty-Five Years Inside the System

The years that followed took me through oncology, stroke care, learning disability services, palliative care, and specialist substance misuse work, including dual-diagnosis work with young people in Massachusetts. I worked in Harley Street, in NHS hospitals, and at the Priory. I became a Registered Mental Health Nurse, completed a Master's degree with the Open University, trained as a certified NLP Trainer in Arizona, became a licensed HeartMath coach, and completed a postgraduate coaching qualification at Oxford Brookes University.

Somewhere in the middle of those twenty five years, a pattern became impossible to ignore. Brilliant, exhausted clinicians, doing genuinely skilled work, treating symptoms with real care, and almost never given the time, mandate, or system to ask what had actually caused them. I was, and still am, deeply proud of that work. I also came to believe it was only ever half the job.

The medical team gave me my life back. But someone still had to find out how to keep it. That has been my work ever since.

What I Actually Believe

Most of the health challenges people bring to me are symptoms, not causes. Treating a symptom without addressing what produced it is exhausting, for the clinician and for the person living it, and it rarely lasts. Lifestyle medicine is not an alternative to good clinical care. It is the missing foundation underneath it.

I no longer believe fitness and health are the same thing, and I have not since 1997. I believe well-being is not a probability we might one day achieve. It is closer to a birthright, available the moment someone is willing to look honestly at what is actually maintaining their current state, not just what they wish were true about it.

Bringing the Whole of It Forward

For a long time, alongside the clinical work and the academic career, a yogic philosophy deepened quietly. A daily sadhana. A devotion. A practice of seva, of service without attachment to how it is received. For years, I kept it separate from my professional identity, uncertain how it would land alongside the credentials.

I no longer keep it separate. The integration of clinical rigour and yogic philosophy is not a liability. It has become the most distinctive part of what I offer, and I now consider it central to the work rather than something to explain away.

Where the Work Lives Now

I am currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of West London and the founder of Unleash the Alchemist Within, Ltd. I am working toward a PhD in Global Health with a focus on lifestyle psychiatry, the emerging clinical field that treats exercise, diet, sleep, and connection as legitimate targets for preventing and treating mental illness, not lifestyle advice offered alongside the real treatment.

In 2013, I was voted UK Health Coach of the Year by the Association of Professional Coaches, Trainers and Consultants. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health. My second book, 5½ Ways to Well-Being: The Workbook, is the clearest expression yet of what twenty five years inside a reactive system taught me: that knowing what to do was never the hard part, for me or for the people I have treated and coached. Sustaining it was.

Credentials

•  Registered Mental Health Nurse

•  Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health

•  UK Health Coach of the Year, 2013 (Association of Professional Coaches, Trainers and Consultants)

•  Certified NLP Trainer (Arizona)

•  Licensed HeartMath Coach

•  Postgraduate Coaching Qualification, Oxford Brookes University

•  Master's Degree, Open University

•  Senior Lecturer, University of West London

•  Author, 5½ Ways to Well-Being and 5½ Ways to Well-Being: The Workbook

If you have read this far, you already know more about why I do this work than most people ever ask. If you are ready to see what it looks like applied to your own life, the workbook is the place to start, and coaching is here when you are ready for more than a book.