 I used to spend every weekend smoking Shisha, having coffee with my friends and enjoyed it. And one fine day, I got like really, I got this chest pain in the night and I was in Bandra at that point and it was really uncomfortable. Like I never had that kind of chest pain or acidity. So I said, let me go to the hospital because something's wrong. This is not me. Today on Candid Conversations with me is Luke Coutinho. He is a health and fitness and lifestyle coach. And if you ask people from any age group, whether they are teenagers or whether in their 20s, their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, whatever, this is one common name which will keep cropping up that, you know, I saw this on a Luke Coutinho video and he said this in his YouTube or in his Instagram channel. So Luke, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. I'm going to start off right at the beginning. You know, of course, as far as the tips and all of that is concerned, there's so much of information already there. I want to get a little bit more into the back story. So people get to know more about you. Stop, they didn't know. Some interesting facts which I got to know when I was researching about you. Like, you know, when you were just starting college, one of your friends, his dad was the GM of Arj Goa, right? And because of that, you wanted to get into hotel management. So why exactly was that and how did that matter? Yeah, so I was having the best time in college, as usual, you know, the college life. And then my dad sat me down one day and said, listen, you need to be serious. What do you want to do? And I had no idea what I wanted to do. All I remember was one of my best friends, his dad was the general manager of the Taj. So since I was best friends with him the weekends, we would be at the Taj, free food, free room, use the swimming pool, attend the sports. So I just thought, oh, wow, I want to be a GM because that's the kind of life I can have if I become the general manager for the hotel. So I just want my dad, I think I want to do hotel management. And so he got me into hotel management. So I moved out of, I was in St. Xavier's College, I moved out of Xavier's and I moved into hotel management and that's how I got into that subject. Nice. I like that swimming pools, tennis and the good food. I mean, I still love that. I'm always going to love that. Also, you know, before, before, of course, you became a health and nutrition coach. You also had an input meeting. And very interestingly, you were also, you also attended some of Goa's rave parties. So tell us about that. What was that experience like really? So when I was in my hotel management, we had internship. So I used to intern as a waiter at my uncle's restaurant. My uncle's restaurant was in Anjuna. It's a place called Alco. But at that point, it was the hippie era. I mean, it was the hippie time, the proper hippie time. So there were a lot of parties that used to happen at Disco Valley and Bamboo Forest and all of that stuff. So I was very in tuned into that kind of music. Of course, I never smoked. I never did stuff at that point. But I used to sit with the DJ and I could because my uncle would be part of all of these parties. And so the DJs were all from Israel and Russia and different places. And we became good friends. They would show me their music, teach me how to use the mixer. And then one fine day, there was a party supposed to happen very close to my uncle's restaurant. And the DJ didn't turn up. He was sick. So my uncle just said, hey, listen, you need to play for two hours until the next DJ comes. And I was like, he said, just play music, man. Just do it. So I threw myself into it and with the little knowledge I had, that was my first party. I did two hours set and it went off really well. So I started playing regularly through my college days. And that's how I got into the scene. And I would play a couple of sets almost every weekend night for almost three years that I was in college. And yeah, that was it. That's how I got into the whole college. I was usually the DJ, not the person dancing, but making people dance. That's how it was. Right, right. And now moving into the fitness aspect of things, there was a time apparently when you said in one of the previous interviews that you couldn't run for more than 10 minutes. You'd run out for the jog and then you started panting. And also, how did you get into the physical and mental state from that position which you heard? Actually, I was always fit. But I got into this habit of smoking Shisha with my friends over the weekends. Okay, so I used to spend every weekend smoking Shisha, having coffee with my friends. I enjoyed it. And one fine day, I got this chest pain in the night. And I was in Bandra at that point. And it was really uncomfortable. I never had that chest pain or acidity. So I said, let me go to the hospital because something's wrong. This is not me. So I went to the hospital and I met a nurse. And the nurse, she checked me out. She said, you're fine. And at that point, she just pushed my stomach and I burped. And she said, have you been smoking Shisha? So I said, yes. I said, how do you know? She said, I can get the smell. And that next five-minute talk that she had with me changed my life. She said, Sonny, you're a young boy. Why are you filling your lungs with smoke? You know, what's wrong with you? This is detrimental. And the way she said it shifted something in me. She said, are you regular with your exercise runs? I said, yeah, I am. She said, go for a run today and tell me how you feel tomorrow. So I went for a run. I went up the Mount Mary slope down Bandstand. And I couldn't even do it for 10 minutes. I was like, and I went back to her and she said, that's because you're decreasing your lung capacity. She said, is this what you want to do? I was 22 years old. And that five-minute talk, the way she assertively spoke to me, changed my life. You know, I just never smoked a Shisha after that. And because it was self-realization that if this affects me at 21 and I can't even run for 10 minutes, I was fit. I could lift weights. I could do all of that stuff. I never went back to it. So that was my change. I don't have a story where I was sick and I got healthy and stuff. We were always brought up in a culture of great health, my family. But this 10-minute run that I struggled to do was a shift in my life where I said smoke isn't for me and it shouldn't be for most people because it has this negative impact on our lungs. And that's how it is. That's interesting because that actually shifts the focus also to Shisha. Normally, smoking is something we just talked about a lot. Shisha is not. And I think Shisha is something which people do very casually also. Also, like I mentioned in the beginning of the video, you are considered a celebrity in your own right. What do you make of that? I don't like it. I don't like the word celebrity at all. I believe it's overused. I mean, it's right for the people who should be celebrities. But I look after the health of people. My job is with patients with cancer, Alzheimer's. I don't like that word celebrity being used because I've never understood why it's being used on me number one. And number two, I just think it's the wrong term. I don't like it. People out there see me in a different light. They think I only handle celebrities. They think I only treat celebrities. So it changes the perception of the market. And I believe that everyone's equal. Everyone is equal at the end of the day. I'm excellent at what I do. I'm good. I appreciate all my fans. I appreciate all the goodwill and the blessings I get from people. But I like to stay on ground. And so I don't like that celebrity word. I don't like that celebrity treatment. I like to be on ground with what I do. So yeah, I don't like that term. Okay, okay. Now, you know, you are, you've been inspired from Tupac and Notorious Big, the two rappers who, you know, they, I mean, documentaries are still made about them. I think Netflix has a documentary on them. It's still a mystery on how they died. I mean, I mean, who really killed them, who was guided, etc. But how did they inspire you really? So I think I grew up on gangster rap when I was in college. I mean, my friends listened to it. And yeah, I think Tupac and Notorious Big, I mean, they tell a story of truth. They tell a story of being yourself. They tell a story of, you know, being who you are, not trying to be someone else. And I connect that with most health problems today. Everyone's trying to be someone else and to carry that facade of being someone else. They're so stressed out. That stress makes them eat differently, spend, live beyond their means. And because they live beyond their means, they can't sleep at night. They're stressed. They have large credit card bills, makes them sick. Diabetes, blood sugar levels. So when I go to gangster rap, what I see in them is a message. Now we can easily label them as, you know, songs filled with curse words and bad words and no meaning. But every, every, every piece of rap by Tupac and B.I.G. has a story which you can take. If you're trying to be a self-righteous individual, you'll always be judging. But if you're open to seeing what story people are trying to tell, there are lessons. There is wisdom in gangster rap today. There's also the bad part of it. But there's a bad part of everything in life. We don't take it. We only take what's good. We take what makes sense. And that's why I still look up to them for inspiration from their music. Nice, nice. Now you have literally, and you've been an empire, right? I mean, I've got the names written down over here. I have to read them all because I can't remember them. There's UK, there's UK lifestyle, there's cancer care, there's UK and so many other things and your upcoming projects. So, you know, how long did all of this take to build how many employees do you have? This is something which, I mean, tell us about that. Yeah, so I really honestly never plan to build an empire. This is the story I keep telling people. I'm not a businessman. My job is with the patient in front of me. But because I've done that with consistency over the years, multiple businesses have grown out of it. I never planned to do this. I planned from day one when I realized I had a gift to help patients that this would be my life. But as I continued to do that, you know, more business opportunities came. So I hired the right people to grow those particular businesses. Some businesses were great. Some of them we decided to close down because they were not suiting my vision or the integrity of what we want to do to promote human health in a healthy way. So everything that we have today is an ecosystem that has grown out of my consultancy. You know, you also mentioned that you're working globally. You've got a lot of people working under you all over the world. So Dubai, America, all these other markets, how do you like, are you traveling over there? How do you manage it? Yes, I travel over there because we have patients over there. So we're building small teams to manage those patients when I'm not there. But usually I travel every month, mostly to New York, Dubai, London. These are places where we have a lot of patients and it's a growing market for us, you know, with what we do. So currently we're building teams over there, but majority of our businesses manage from India. And patients have got kind of comfortable with that. The beauty is we have our largest team sitting out of India managing patients globally across the world. Right, right. And where are you headed off to right now? And where exactly are you? Right now I'm in Bombay. I just got back from Dubai and I leave in a few days for New York. So that's the plan. That is fancy, that is fancy. Well, Luke, Luke, thank you so much for talking to us. There's a bit of an internet connection, a lot of other things which I wanted to ask you, but probably we'll continue that in the discussion later. But yeah, just keep the post coming and all the best for the future. Thank you. Look forward to meeting you at some point. Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot.