243. The Hunger Beneath the Hunger. Why This CEO's Craving Had Nothing to Do with Food feat. Jim Weiss

If you think hunger is just about food, this story will change your mind. Jim Weiss, founder of Real Chemistry, shares how his drive for success masked a deeper hunger that no amount of achievement could satisfy.

Why Listen to This Episode:

• Learn the difference between productive drive and destructive patterns
• Discover practical mind-body tools that actually work for busy executives
• See how addressing physical hunger unlocks deeper emotional work
• Understand how loss can transform leadership

Meet Jim Weiss: Jim is founder of Real Chemistry, a leading medical marketing agency. After losing his wife Audra to cancer and facing his own health struggles, Jim discovered that sustainable success requires addressing both physical and emotional hunger through practical resilience practices.

What You'll Learn:

• Why high achievers often seek validation through food, work, and substances
• How mind-body practices become accessible after physical hunger is managed
• The connection between personal resilience and professional productivity
• Why "putting the phone down" is crucial for preventing modern burnout

On the Deeper Hunger: "There's a deeper hunger that doesn't get addressed more directly. Is it hunger for acceptance or love or recognition? So where do you look for it? 'Wow, this tequila tastes really good.'" - Jim Weiss

Ready to Address Your Deeper Hunger? Resilient Minds offers 8 weeks of practical mind-body tools for high-achieving professionals ready to move beyond burnout into sustainable leadership.

Starting September 30th. Limited spots available.

Learn more: https://www.doctoradrienneyoudim.com/resilient-minds

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3. Come back next week — Every episode of Health Bite explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual hungers that drive us, and delivers the essential “nutrients” you need to thrive.

Transcript

Have you ever felt like the hunger driving your hustle leaves you exhausted and running on empty?

Today's guest, Jim Weiss, can relate. Jim is chairman and founder of Real Chemistry, one of the leading medical health marketing agencies in the world. He's a healthcare biopharma and medical tech visionary, entrepreneur, business leader, investor, advocate, and digital health pioneer.

In this episode, Jim shares a powerful journey from striving fueled by food, work, and success—something that most, if not all of us high achievers can relate to—to discovering the deeper hunger for inner peace, resilience, and authentic connection.

In this conversation, we discover:

• How to break free from burnout and toxic perfectionism
• Practical mind-body tools to shift from reactive stress states to calm, focused leadership
• How overcoming the profound loss of his wife sparked Jim's transformation towards lasting hope and balance

If you've ever felt caught in the exhausting cycle of overdoing and under fulfilling that hunger inside, this conversation is for you.

Welcome back to Health Bite, the podcast where I support people like you ready to stop chasing success from a place of depletion, to start living with vitality, purpose, and intention.

I'm your host, Dr. Adrianne. Each week, I'll share stories, science, and strategies to help you understand what you're truly hungry for, so you can make nourishing choices that lead to sustainable success.

The Interview

Dr. Adrienne Youdim: Welcome, Jim. I'm so excited to have you here on the podcast.

Jim Weiss: Hey, thanks for having me, doc. Good to see you.

Dr. Adrienne: It's good to see you. I'm really excited about this conversation because your lived experience really embodies all the things that I care about professionally and personally—metabolic health, medical weight loss, mind-body skills, resilience, entrepreneurship. You've got it all. So I think this is going to be a great conversation.

Jim: Yeah, I'm psyched. It's just a chat, not a session.

Dr. Adrienne: Yes, it is not a session indeed. You have done a lot of work on physical hunger and your own personal weight loss journey. You've had bariatric surgery, you've used GLP-1 drugs, and you've been very open and transparent about that, which I think is so helpful to people around you.

As a physician, I wholeheartedly believe that this is a physical and medical problem that we have to address. But you and I have also talked about how hunger is also spiritual and emotional. I'm curious about how that lands with you—what are your thoughts on this concept of emotional and spiritual hunger?

On Hunger as a Double-Edged Sword

Jim: Well, I go to the word hunger, right? I think hunger means a lot of things to a lot of people, but somehow there's something wrong with being hungry.

For me, as a business entrepreneur in particular, I like a hungry attitude. I want someone who wants to get up in the morning and seize the day and really go after it. The problem with that is hunger can be a double-edged sword.

If you're super hungry, how that manifests in your life day to day can be different. In my life, I was voracious around drinking and eating and all kinds of other things. For people that are Type A, OCD, really into achieving—high achievers—we've talked about this before. Hunger can be an overused strength, and that's when it turns into getting overweight or out of control.

We didn't always add on the other stuff—the mindfulness and the wonderful other bits and spirituality that came later into my life relative to my experience with my wife's cancer and her death. How spirituality has really come to the rescue on these things, even my own parents' deaths. Getting involved in my synagogue and other things has really helped broaden this. It's how do you calibrate hunger, and things like spirituality and managing emotions can really help.

The Deeper Hunger

Dr. Adrienne: I love what you say about hunger being something positive. We often view it in a negative lens, but hunger is what drives our successes. There's no shame around that.

I also know personally and professionally that drive for success can become maladaptive. You talk about the soothing aspect—soothing with food or with alcohol. We do it in so many other ways, even socially sanctioned ways like overworking and people-pleasing. This is a type of soothing and distraction that nobody has qualms about because there are beneficiaries to us overworking.

I want to delve into this idea of what's underlying that. So that hunger for drink, that hunger for food, that hunger for success—did you find there's something underneath, like a subtext, an underlying or deeper hunger?

Jim: Yes, no doubt there's a deeper hunger that doesn't get addressed more directly. Is it hunger for acceptance or love or recognition?

I did a lot of talk therapy over the years. One of the things I found was that my parents were, like a lot of parents from that generation, much older than average. My parents are no longer here, but they were born and raised during the Depression. People don't even probably know what I mean by the Depression—this was something that happened in the 1930s in America and around the world.

You could see where they were not the kind of people that were raised by people that told them "I love you" and all those typical things. I don't think I'm really that unique in that lived experience of "just keep getting your straight A's and keep performing and be a great kid," but you're kind of seen but not heard. Maybe a little bit treated like the furniture—the house is pristine, don't get the couches dirty, get outside, we'll see you at dinner.

It wasn't that nobody talked about their emotions or feelings. I think it was just a style of upbringing that's not the parenting of today. So I think that kind of hunger for recognition, attaboy recognition—I think I was always seeking that out.

Obviously, you're not going to get that most of the time. So where do you look for it? "Wow, this tequila tastes really good," or this Manhattan. We all go through it.

The Physical Solution

Jim: I had to go through some physical change in order to stop it, because I just knew that there wouldn't be enough talk therapy or even drug therapy to get me there. Now I've seen so much catch up—the field caught up to it with GLP-1s.

I worked on 10 medicines in my business before that weren't quite the deal. Fen-phen being one of them, and it actually probably did some damage. We used to think trying these things would be fine, and they weren't fine.

I think we're really in a renaissance right now. We're all lucky to have this tool that can kind of even the playing field.

Generational Patterns

Dr. Adrienne: I want to double tap on where you started, because what you describe as a child of people who went through the Depression, I can relate to as someone who's a child of immigrants.

All of us in this middle-ish age group fall into one of those categories—our parents or grandparents were here already, in which case the circumstances of the Depression touched them, or they came here with that hungry immigrant attitude. So what you're describing in terms of parenting is very common to every single person in our generation.

That drives this hunger for validation. When you're a professional, you amplify that because there's always more success to be had. You get into this situation where you reach a milestone, but you want more. Sometimes that more comes in the shape of external validation. When it's not addressed, when you're not aware of it, it drives many of the habitual behaviors that Type A personalities or high-achieving professionals tend to grapple with—just a lack of balance.

Jim: Workaholism, or the other extreme things—you're just not balancing it out. I love food. I loved eating it, going to good restaurants, and the party and social around it too.

I needed something physical to stop it because I could go long into the evening and go to the next place. People used to joke about it—I want to go have a second dinner. But having a second dinner and then going to sleep is not going to help with weight loss.

There were other extreme things that had to be put in check, usually when you have kids. I can say that was a big driver on me getting bariatric surgery. I was chasing the kids down the hill skiing, and I'm like, "I can't keep up with these guys, and I don't want to get hurt and fall while I'm doing it."

I finally realized it'll probably be better for my lower back, physical health, just wear and tear on joints and all that. You got to be in range. Otherwise, so much else goes wrong. We know all the risk factors around being obese, and then you're sedentary—it turns into this vicious cycle.

Mind-Body Tools and Resilient Minds

Dr. Adrienne: When you do dial back that physical noise—the very physical hunger that happens when people try to lose weight because of the hunger hormones, whether with bariatric surgery or GLP-1 drugs—then people can really dive into what you said, "the other stuff."

Once the physical hunger is suppressed somewhat, people can lean into the emotional or spiritual hunger without that distraction. You had done a lot of holistic work by the time you joined the Resilient Minds program. Can you share if these practices—meditation, breathwork, expressive writing, guided visualization—did these help you understand this emotional and spiritual hunger once the GLP was managing the physical piece?

Jim: Yes, I think I was ready for it. I don't know that my mind was calm enough to look at the whole picture when you call it resilient.

Look, if you go walk in the redwoods, that is a form of meditation. If people play tennis or golf, whatever your Zen is that can get you into the zone. Fly fishing on a river, the repetition of throwing the fly out to land it right, to have the flow long enough and far enough—there's a lot of intricate specifics to catching a fish on the fly.

When you remove yourself from the manic—which is what I would say is normally the mode I'm in—and I can motor toward writing or some of the things we did with telling a story, things I don't normally do. Disciplines that are not... I think anything that stops you from that OCD behavior that isn't a drug.

It was introduced that way and it wasn't psychology, which I kind of like. It was more just practical hands-on engagement outside of your regular behavior pattern.

The Power of Pause

Dr. Adrienne: What you're describing is manic, which I get. I can understand that characterization. I feel that way personally. But this is so resonant with people in our positions. We are doers, we are achievers, we are always striving. That gives this vibe of manic—it's just a lot of doing.

Anything that creates pause will allow people to let these underlying hungers—it lets your internal knowing, your inherent wisdom, that thing you know, that itch that's bugging you that you can't put your finger on—you can't figure that out if you're constantly busy doing. You have to put the pause on.

These practices allow you to do it in a way that's very much reliant on one's internal or inherent resilience. It's not talk therapy, which has its own merits, but it's cultivating somebody's inherent wisdom or inherent resilience. Do you feel like resilience is something that is cultivated, or do you think it's something we just have as people?

Jim: I think it's nature and nurture. I remember when you said the "buck up" statement—I had a second mom that took me to a sports competition. I pulled what many of us do when you lose the match and you're kind of pissy and near tears and not being a good sport.

She came up and didn't slap me across the face, but she did verbally. She's like, "Buck up. You put your best effort in, go on to the next thing. You're gonna be fine. No one's dead. No one's hurt. Everyone's good. You got to participate in the competition. Just because you didn't win doesn't mean..."

Again, it doesn't mean I'm not competitive or don't want to go for it and achieve, but I think it was a good statement. That generation of parent was more buck up style.

Dr. Adrienne: Absolutely. We swing so far to one side. We've raised a bunch of children that we're pandering to in general.

Jim: One of my talk therapy guides called it indulgence.

Creative Expression and Breaking Patterns

Dr. Adrienne: You brought up expressive writing. How was that valuable? What did you get out of that, and why was that one in particular meaningful?

Jim: I'm a business writer normally, so it was definitely not how I typically write. Telling a story that way or drawing—I never draw, I draw stick figures. So expressing ideas through art... I've been hearing lately about playing guitar or an instrument and how that has similar therapeutic benefit. It's something I really want to take up.

When you get out of the discipline and go into what's maybe not your comfort zone and think different—anytime you're thinking different and you're out of that pattern—I was being allowed, the door got opened and I was invited to be more expressive as a writer and not within certain parameters or windows. I never really allowed myself to do that over the years because you get in a lane and you go for it.

All those things about getting mindful, spiritual, and creative—those are invitations that so many of us don't take.

Dr. Adrienne: Why do you think that is?

Jim: Part of it is how we were raised in the buck up culture. Everyone has a certain lane and role and way. You get accepted in a certain box, and we tend to stay there because we're secure in that box. We know people will accept us in that box. When you go a little left or right, different, it might freak them out or freak yourself out. But if you do do it, you open up a whole new part of yourself.

Professional Applications

Dr. Adrienne: These practices help our mental health and physical health, but they also unlock so much in terms of our professional health—our focus, our creativity, our ability to build collaborative teams.

Jim: One word you're missing here is productivity. I actually think you're less productive in a situation where you're running on the engine and then that becomes fumes—there's burnout. How you become more productive is rounding that out with some of these things you're talking about.

I've gotten more productive in the last several years because I've opened myself up to a lot of different things. Some of it was forced on me in ways I didn't expect with Audra. COVID, I had A-fib, my wife got cancer, my daughter had challenges with a kid who committed suicide, I lost two parents in quick succession.

These are the things that happen from 50 on that are going to happen to everybody. It's not like we're that special. Some people have it a little better than others, but everyone gets hit by the bouncing ball. How you navigate that and remain productive depends on not just your inner metal and resilience—it's getting some help doing some things that are different, maybe perceived as different.

The Modern Burnout Crisis

Dr. Adrienne: Life twists your arm sometimes into doing things differently. We don't opt to slow down, we don't opt to engage in practices that are preventive. We wait until our arm is twisted.

I recently read that 60+ percent of Gen Zers are experiencing burnout. What do you think it would require to get people to be more preventive or proactive, knowing that burnout trickles into what they value most?

Jim: My gut—and I hate to sound like it's such a simple answer—is probably we got to put the phone down. We never talked about burnout before phones. You had to slow down because you got on a train and you weren't reachable. You could stare out the window, do a crossword puzzle.

Dr. Adrienne: I think that's a bigger piece of it. The phone has not only taken away downtime, but it has inundated us with so much information that's usually negative or makes you feel bad—either social media, which makes you feel bad, or the news, which makes you feel bad. It's this perfect storm of having our downtime stolen and being inundated beyond our wildest imagination.

Jim: Beyond, right? To check a movie time, you had to get a newspaper, and if you didn't have the newspaper, you had to go down there and might realize you missed it. There's really almost no downtime.

This is why your practices exist. This is why what you do is important. If we don't intervene with something—here's two things I always say: You get what you tolerate, and if you keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome, you're probably crazy.

Dr. Adrienne: Hope's not a strategy.

Jim: Well, hope's not a strategy. Someone asked me today, "Jim, you always talk about taking the river versus the river taking you." If you want to take the river, you're gonna have to incorporate something.

Practical Tools for Resilience

Dr. Adrienne: Let's go into some rapid-fire questions. How did engaging in practices that help build your resilient mind—breathing, expressive writing, drawing, mindfulness, self-compassion practices—how did they help you change cravings or tendency to fall back into old habits?

Jim: It's the stopping. I never really had the stop sign. That's how it acts—it redirects your thinking and your mindset and your mode. I think it ultimately leads to greater productivity. We get into our OCD pattern and think we're getting a lot done in the right direction. But you just went five miles longer than you needed to go—here's a shortcut, here's a way home that isn't as fatiguing. It actually gives you energy in ways that the other stuff drains.

Dr. Adrienne: So these practices are building your inherent resilience, your energy stream, your vitality, so that you are more productive?

Jim: And also more engaged in society in an acceptable way. You're not isolating or acting out. It's like with kids—when they get crazy and you distract them with some other thing, that tends to redirect, and that redirecting often is into flow. When a kid gets obsessing or crying, they're in a hole and stuck. This is a way to get unstuck.

Transforming Relationships

Dr. Adrienne: How did these practices shape or change the way you act in your relationships?

Jim: Massive. I remember I get reactive and scream and yell and get into my hole and make it about me. That would scare my kids and maybe paralyze them. We've talked about it now that we're talking about more stuff together without mom here as a calibrator.

I don't have the natural calibrator that lived in our house. So I have to do the calibrating. You cannot go at people—they shut down, understandably so. Taking a walk, doing drawing, or stopping and doing five minutes of breath, just sitting at your desk quietly redirects and stops a blow-up. Saying something mean and stupid versus "Okay, let's try to work through this."

These practices are only over the last few years. I didn't have to—I was spoiled. I didn't have to do them because Audra was a natural calibrator. But I've always needed that. Now I have to find it for myself. I do think it takes the temperature down.

Loss and Grief

Dr. Adrienne: You've brought up your wife Audra, who had cancer and died very recently.

Jim: Yeah, last New Year's Eve, so '24 to '25. About seven months ago.

Dr. Adrienne: I appreciate your vulnerability about this issue. You really opened up everyone in our resilient minds group by being more authentic and vulnerable. There are a lot of people experiencing loss right now—the natural piece like parents dying, but also untimely deaths of spouses, illness, and loss around what's going on in the world.

Jim: You and I have talked about the Israel situation, the hostage crisis, those people, those kids. I worked on the Nova Festival exhibit and met the parents and family members of kids that were kidnapped or still in caves. Obviously, that's happening for people on the other side experiencing loss and uncertainty.

There's something about why peace is so important. When we're in a more peaceful mind, which everyone's working toward in Ukraine and there—nobody wants these things to continue forever. It's so unsettling. You can't stop and see each other, find each other, share meals and get better with each other. It's so hard when the world is at such conflict rather than positive disagreement. Not everyone's gonna agree—why would they? When we were growing up, that seemed to be okay.

Dr. Adrienne: We've lost our ability to communicate.

Jim: That's where your mindfulness stuff comes in. That conversation we were having with all those guys—we didn't all agree on everything. We couldn't, we're not all from the same place. But everyone was very respectful of different viewpoints and experiences. That's rare. We need more of that.

Navigating Loss Through Practice

Dr. Adrienne: Do you think there's something specific about these practices that can help us deal with disagreement, and going back to that point of loss and grief—do you think these practices help navigate that feeling of loss?

Jim: I think there's something about them that helps. For me, I can speak for myself—being alone with yourself is a big deal. I'm gonna be okay, and I can self-regulate and self-control and self-soothe by myself. I don't need another to do it, but sometimes you have to be with others to get there.

Dr. Adrienne: That's so well said. It takes us back to how we initiated this conversation—around the hunger for validation that so many of us experience. The antidote to that is being able to give ourselves the validation, the soothing, the comfort, the sense of belonging, agency. All those things—all those hungers that drive us.

These are very normal human unmet needs that when they go unmet, people turn to soothe. I love that you brought that back to the ability of soothing oneself or giving ourselves what we need. These practices are how we achieve that.

Final Advice

Dr. Adrienne: Is there anything else you would tell someone like you if they were in a difficult position right now, grappling with challenges at work, uncertainty, financial uncertainty, global instability? All of these things aren't siloed—they impact our personal health and well-being, relational health, and ultimately professional health. What would you tell a fellow executive or colleague?

Jim: It's going to be okay, and find community. The power of positive thinking—I don't want to be Pollyanna about it, but I think half-glass-full thinking is more productive in the long run than the negative.

What I find when I talk to people who think the sky is falling and the world is ending and there's no solution—then there's no solution. They kind of withdraw. I saw it happen as my parents aged—there's a withdrawal that happens when you think it's easier to withdraw from it all than to engage.

I'm sort of drawn to engagement. If you just say this is it and it can't get better, if this is the worst that's ever been—everybody says they walked 20 miles in the snow and had it different. We are where we are. You can only move forward. The past is the past, it's over. You can learn from it, but there's nothing you can do about it.

I can't bring Audra back, can't make her better. I can go over and over in my mind what we could have done differently. The truth is, I have to move forward and move on. I have to find a way to do that without forgetting her, but while still honoring her.

These are the types of things I try to tell people—is there a half-glass-full way to look at that? If there's not, it's really hard to move forward and get out the door.

Dr. Adrienne: You have a remarkable ability to be with very difficult and challenging things and still have that optimism and proactive approach in doing all the things you're doing—the mentorship, the philanthropy—and doing that from a very self-regulated place. I'm honored to have been able to do that work together.

Jim: I need to keep doing more of it. It's constant—you can't let up on it. It's a daily method.

Dr. Adrienne: Thank you for all your help and support, and for doing it in a very practical, calm, positive way.

Jim: Thank you. Can't wait for you to be online by now.

Program Information

Friends, last call for Resilient Minds.

If you're interested in doing this work more deeply, the next Resilient Minds cohort starts just next week on September 30th.

This is an eight-week experiential program where a small group of dedicated professionals meet with me live online.

In this program, I will take you through the nuts and bolts of mind-body medicine and teach you how to implement these practices into your life in real time.

Together, we will learn how to:

• Regulate our nervous system
• Recognize and interrupt triggers before they lead to unhealthy patterns and self-sabotaging behaviors
• Shift from reactivity to intentionality in our work, relationships, and personal lives

This work is transformative. Our next cohort is starting just next week. We have just a couple spots available.

If you're interested, reach out to me at www.doctoradrianeyoudim.com/resilient-minds or just DM me. I'd be happy to have you and take you through this life-changing work.

Until next time, I'm Dr. Adrienne Youdim. This has been your Health Bite, and I'm wishing you an amazing week—mind, body, and soul.