Ellen Batchelor

How I transitioned from healthcare quality improvement, helping physicians and their teams keep better track of patient needs, to helping people more like myself take charge of their own physical, emotional and spiritual well-being to live life more Whole-ly.

Before WholeBlue Living existed; before I saw people improve health conditions that weren’t supposed to get better; before I saw phobias disappear in a day; even before I worked in healthcare quality improvement I began seeing the need...

I started as a secretary, helping Big Pharma relieve cancer pain and helping researchers alleviate cancer symptoms, even as these scientists grieved their inability to cure disease.

I saw it as a PR professional, spreading the messages of palliative care at a major hospital system.

I knew there was more as I helped to keep momentum strong for an emerging biotech company as they developed potential breakthroughs to cure disease.

Yet, I was an unbeliever. I didn‘t think things like diabetes could be cured.

Fiction, nonfiction, a business class and a dress shop

I never set out to form my own company, let alone one that provides education, online.

I set out to write fiction. And I did that, and more. Then, in late 2016, my sister asked me to take a class with her to write business plans.

Ivy Rose Longmont

She wanted to open a dress shop.

I took the class, but I did not write a dress shop plan. I wrote about my dream company, expecting the dream to be over when the course was.

Once the plan was on paper, however, I knew I had to make it a reality. My first students saw improvements by January 2017. WholeBlueLiving.com was born soon after.

Making my dream a reality

It breaks my heart to see so many people get sick or die prematurely from things that could be prevented. I get angry when I hear yet another false claim for a diet or treatment that makes us sicker, not stronger.

My dream is to see that change for everyone who wants something more in their lives.

I finally realized the answers have been there all along—even before I started working in healthcare in 1989—buried in a mountain of scientific evidence.

I teach what I do, not just because it worked for me, my friends and my family. I teach because there is so much important research on lifestyle medicine that needs to be seen. It's life-changing.

This can work for everyone.* I want it to work for you.

A members-only online education and collaboration website made sense as the first home for my dream.

Members-only, so everyone can share freely and learn without fear. WholeBlue is a safe place of encouragement.

Online, so I can reach beyond the community of just under 100,000 residents, where I live.

Collaborative, because we are all in this together. We were designed to get stronger together.

Getting sicker

The entire time I have worked in healthcare, I have yearned to see more people healed. I am probably not much different from the healthcare professionals with whom I have worked.

But the longer I worked in traditional healthcare settings, the more disillusioned I became.

Yet many common diseases can be prevented or cured in many cases.

Much of what the medical community offers doesn’t cure illness; it only treats symptoms. Yet many common diseases can be prevented or cured in many cases.[l] Why did I never hear that message? I worked with some of the top doctors and medical researchers in their fields.

It seems as though diseases like diabetes and heart disease are becoming more prevalent, not less.

Between 1989, when I started in healthcare, and 2016, the number of people in the United States with diabetes rose from about 2.7 percent of the population to nearly 10 percent. Another 86 million—more than 25 percent of the U.S. population—have pre-diabetes, which increases the risk of type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases.

All the great work we do in medicine and things are getting worse?

When I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes, things got personal. Simultaneously, my cholesterol and blood pressure—while still in the “normal” range—were creeping up.

At the time I thought I was as healthy as the next person. My friends and family thought so, too. I was always a normal weight. I have always been active. From a statistical perspective, I ate a lot more fruits and vegetables than the average American.

If the healthcare system I served for so many years didn’t have answers for me, then what was the whole point?

I left my job in the healthcare system in 2015. But it never really left me.

I dug deep for new answers. I didn’t take no for an answer. I put my natural-born skepticism to work. I amassed evidence. I didn’t want to believe that all I had to look forward to was what my relatives suffered from for years before dying: diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, dementia and Parkinson’s.

I didn’t want to expect to get sicker. I believed there had to be more.

I set out to find it.

[1]https://nutritionfacts.org/video/more-than-an-apple-a-day-preventing-our-most-common-diseases/

My first (few) years of change

The answers began through a physician I supported in my quality improvement work.

I first knew him as a traditional family medicine doctor. He doled out medications and followed all the guidelines and peer-reviewed best practices, just like most good doctors.

I trusted his word.

One day he told me he had significantly changed his focus from pills to plants. He’s a real skeptic, too, so his announcement shocked me.

I listened attentively to the benefits he saw first in his own life, and then in the lives of his patients. He saw health improved more than anything he had seen before with traditional treatments. Better than anything he had managed through the best healthcare quality improvement programs he and I had worked on together.

Several of his patients became healthy enough to decrease their medications. Some, including patients with heart disease and diabetes, came off their medications altogether. *

I soaked it all in. Then my husband and I decided to try his approach. That was in 2013, and our own results have been so stunning we have not looked back.

Since then, I have spent hours, really years, researching the best of the best in emotional, spiritual and physical well-being.

The research led to WholeBlue Living and my work to help more people reach more of their potential and live their dreams.

My research never stops.

Are you ready to make REAL, life-long, possibly life-proLONGing change?

I'm not going to ask if you are willing to do the work. I know you are ready. That's why you are here.

You are starting to see your body slow down, or you have been feeling it for years and you are desperately hoping that there is more life in your body yet. Not just time being alive, but life you can live fully.

You don't want to talk about your aches and pains. In fact, you don't even want to feel them. But you're a skeptic, like I was. Like you should be.

I developed the WholeBlue Living course because I want to help you.

I want you to be able to see the kinds of benefits I did, without the struggle. The WholeBlue Living community provides support and years of research time so you can get up and running (literally if you wish) quickly. (But if you want to check out all the research yourself, all the citations are available.)

Join us today for a stronger life. We've been waiting for you.

A little about me

  • Watching educational medical videos is my idea of fun
  • Love to take quiet walks with my husband (okay, maybe I'm not so quiet)
  • Ran quality improvement programs for doctors' offices in Colorado for eight years
  • Worked with the developers of one of the leading opiate pain relievers
  • Engaging my black Labrador retriever in a game of “squirrel” tug makes me laugh

5 obstacles