Doctor publishes first book on improving health and wellness

Joe Nikic

Dr. Brian Morris said treating patients with health and wellness issues helped him achieve his “bucket list goal” of publishing his first book: “The Wellness Code: The Evidence-Based Prescription for Weight Loss, Longevity, Health and Happiness.”

“There was one patient who was really struggling my first year of practice. He weighed over 500 pounds,” said Morris, a former Great Neck resident. “What I basically did was try to come up with a program that would help his lifestyle that was beyond pills and surgery. I wanted to put that program into book form.”

While he said he has been writing the book in his mind for 20 years, Morris’ eye-opening experiences at his first job at a Boston medical practice sparked his search to find treatment plans that worked for patients.

“You get there and you start seeing patients and think everything I just learned in my training will help these people,” he said. “You think you know everything and people start coming to your door and you do all these things and then people start to come back and you still see a lot of problems. For me, I got frustrated because I thought ‘I’m doing all the right things but there are still a lot of issues.’”

Originally born in Mount Clemens, Mich., where his father, Stephen, was stationed at an Air Force base, Morris moved to Great Neck at the age of 2.

He attended John F. Kennedy Elementary School, and later Great Neck North Middle and High School.

After graduating high school in 1984, Morris began the road to his extensive career in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Following graduation from Pennsylvania in 1988, he attended Johns Hopkins University for medical school, and later completed a three-year Internal Medicine Residency Program at Yale.

Morris got his first job in 1995 when he became a physician and clinical director at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an academic center at Harvard University.

While in Boston, Morris said he learned that people could not successfully improve their health by following big programs with popular books like the “South Beach Diet.”

“People need to change habits one at a time really slowly. But you have to do it so it sticks and becomes more of a routine,” he said. “I don’t want people thinking about their habits. I want them to figure out how to make it part of your routine, like when you brush your teeth.”

Morris left Boston in 2001 to join a private medical practice in Dallas, where he worked for eight years.

In Dallas, he met people who ran the Comprehensive Health Program at University of California at Los Angeles, where he now serves as the associate director of the program, as well as the Associate Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Morris said he loves his work in Los Angeles because their program makes big differences in patients’ lives.

“People come in and they spend the entire day with us,” he said. “They do a year’s worth of doctor’s appointments in one day.”

Morris said the goal of their program is to always find what works best for their different patients, similar to what he hopes “The Wellness Code” would achieve.

The book, Morris said, is split into two parts: what he calls the “nuts and bolts” of how to change habits and the 50 most important habits needed to be happy.

The first half of the book has patients go through a “four-column process” to change a couple of habits over a long period of time, Morris said.

He added that the second half of the book helps patients identify what their most important needs are and which should be changed first.

“Some are relationship issues, some are spirituality. For example, people that have damaged relationships with friends and family are much more likely to have a heart attack,” Morris said. “It’s important to eat the right food, but also relax and be on good terms with other people.”

Rather than going through a big-name publisher, Morris said, he decided to create his own team to put the book together because in 2015 “you can do so much yourself.”

He also said his brother, Kevin’s, work as manager for the Alabama Shakes rock band showed him that it was possible to create your own opportunities without the help of a big-name company.

“My brother does everything that big record labels used to do and now he can do it himself,” Morris said. “It’s the way book publishing has been it seems like.”

He also hired a cover designer, a formatter, an editor, and allowed his 13-year-old daughter to design the book’s logo.

Morris’ wife, Rebecca, who he married shortly before moving to Dallas, served as his agent as well as another source of motivation, he said.

Rebecca was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer in 2013, which Morris said pushed him forward to have the book published rather than continue talking about publishing it.

“It motivated me to do the things that I was sort of putting off. It made me realize none of us know how long we’ve got,” he said. “I had been talking about the book for so long and I finally got to do it. It was definitely a motivation.”

Morris said Rebecca no longer has breast cancer after successful treatment.

In addition to their eldest daughter, the Morris’ have two daughters, aged 11 and 10, and an 8-year-old son.

While he and his family live in Los Angeles, Morris said bringing his family to the area where he grew up was important to him.

Every August, he said, they go on family trips and in 2014 he brought them to Great Neck.

“We spent a whole day driving around Great Neck. We went to Gino’s Pizza and all the places we lived.,” Morris said. “My kids hated it but I have to say, I really enjoyed it. I hadn’t been back for a number of years. Its weird because some things are exactly the same.”

“The Wellness Code” is out now and is available for purchase on Amazon.

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