Driven by her passion for holistic living, Pooja Sachin Duggal started the organisation named Healthhunt, a fully integrated mind-body wellness platform. The aim of the organisation is to disrupt the understanding of daily wellbeing across Asia.

Duggal, who is a qualified health coach and an avid yogi, believes that good health, mindfulness, and self-care should begin at an early age, and not when diseases and lifestyle issues kick in.Through her organisation, she stresses the need to balance the mind, body and soul. Excerpts from an interview:

Q. What is your idea of a holistic living?

Almost 99 per cent people confuse healthy living with holistic living and use them interchangeably, even though they have distinct meanings. While healthy living could mean drinking a smoothie or going to a kickboxing class, holistic living means much more and is composed of everything that makes not just one’s body, but also one’s mind and soul happy.

Q. What made you shift from the diamond industry?

There was never a dramatic realisation. I just decided to follow my one true calling — health and wellness. I then studied at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and dived deep into subject before I created Healthhunt.

Q. How did Healthhunt happen?

After 11 years in the cut-throat diamond industry, as one of the top five women globally, it struck me one day that anyone else in my place would have started to feel the burn. I realised that my dedication to yoga and healthy eating had kept me going through the worst of situations. I was the youngest non-male member of the senior team at the Rapaport Group, an international network of companies, at the time.

Most people around me thought that being healthy was a laborious ordeal and ended up spending half their lives in healthcare bills. Thus, I decided to disrupt this understanding of daily wellbeing and help people achieve their healthiest, happiest lives.

Almost 61per cent of the total deaths in our country are due to lifestyle diseases, which means that they are preventable if people realise in time and begin making healthy choices. I went on to dig further into the concepts of nutrition, fitness, mental well-being, and organic beauty, which then brought me to that eureka moment when I decided to scale this to millions of people.

Q. What do you provide at Healthhunt?

We empower businesses with curated repository of health and wellness information. We have been experimenting with early machine learning algorithm and are gravitating towards a fully Artificial Intelligence based platform. We personalise it to suit a wide audience so that everyone can have the insight and knowledge to make the right health choices every day.

Q. What are your future plans?

We will continue to grow our health council that hosts experts from around the world, focus on more strategic partnerships and help other wellness brands reach their target audience through our organisation.

We want to make a lasting mark across Asia in the Direct Primary Care trend, which I believe to be the future of medicine. This is a popular trend in the United States, but if there is a country that can truly benefit from it, then it is India considering how rampant lifestyle diseases are in our country.

We receive several queries from 20 to 30 year olds every day who are eager to share their concerns on weight gain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, and mood swings.

Since our content takes a very holistic approach to healthcare, we want to continue positively impacting the lives of many more people, not only at home but also globally. We want to help them to begin relying more on the natural healing capacity of their bodies.

Q. Share some of the stories about how your customers have benefited.

The best case study to share here is of our team member who lost 50 kg in a little over a year and went from 133 kg to 83 kg. Unfortunately, losing weight after this point started getting tougher for him.

After joining the Healthhunt team, he has discovered a more holistic approach to weight loss. Most people forget that it’s not just about the scale.

Currently, under guidance he has been following a ketogenic diet and shedding pounds slowly, but sustainably. This is just one of the innumerable changes we have seen in the last year. The key is, when it comes to health, one must always look at the bigger picture.