Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA started medical school with three kids under five, a husband commuting 100 miles each way, and no real plan for how she’d absorb the sheer volume of information being thrown at her. So she drew cartoons. Not as a hobby. As a survival strategy. It worked well enough that her classmates started asking for copies, and she ended up publishing six textbooks before she graduated. That instinct to translate complexity into something a real person can actually use has followed her ever since. It’s in the way she practiced medicine. It’s in the patient eBooks she made long before “content creation” was a thing. And it’s in The Habit Healers, her Substack publication that crossed 50,000 Facebook followers in just two months and keeps growing because it does something most health writing doesn’t: it starts from where people actually are, not from where we assume they should be. This conversation with Laurie was honest in the best way. She didn’t pretend her path wasn’t messy. She talked about the soul-crushing side of military medicine, about the fear that lives inside every pivot, and about how a patient who started with two push-ups on a kitchen counter now does 60 in a row. That last one I loved. Because that’s exactly what this show is about. Show Notes [00:00] — Welcome & Who Is Dr. Laurie Marbas Laurie is a board-certified physician with an MD and MBA who has been writing and creating content online for over a decade. She founded The Habit Healers to bring metabolic health science into everyday language, paired with small, actionable protocols people can actually follow. She started on Substack in January 2025 and has grown quickly by applying the same thinking she used to survive medical school: break it down, explain it clearly, and make it fun. [00:02] — Growing Up Without a Map Laurie grew up in a home without health insurance, with parents who didn’t finish high school. When her four-year-old sister got sick and had a surgery that changed her life, Laurie decided at age ten that she wanted to be part of that. Nobody handed her a roadmap. Her stepdad hadn’t finished school. Her mom had her at 19. What she had instead was the decision that those facts weren’t reasons to stop. * She learned early that when people said “you can’t be a doctor,” she didn’t compute it. She moved on. * Her grandmother was one of the adults who reflected a different possibility back to her * The gap between what people around her had done and what she wanted to do became fuel. She just kept going. [00:04] — Drawing Cartoons Through Medical School Starting medical school with children aged five, three, and ten months old, Laurie had to find a faster way to learn. Rote memorization wasn’t going to work. So she started sketching out complex medical concepts in cartoon form, as a memory tool. Friends noticed. She started making them for others. By the time she graduated, she and her co-authors had published six books in a series called Visual Mnemonics. The skill she developed to survive school, breaking down complicated ideas into something simple enough to draw, became the skill that runs her entire practice and publication today. * She later created patient eBooks to replace the confusion people left appointments with * The cartoon logic carried forward: clear, visual, honest * “I made my way through medical school drawing cartoons. Take it for what it’s worth.” [00:08] — Joy When Carolina asked Laurie about the relationship between joy and healing, this conversation opened up. Laurie described joy as what happens when you’re deeply in your work, when flow comes easily and curiosity pulls you forward. The true joy, she said, is watching someone understand something they didn’t understand before. Seeing a comment where someone changed something because of what she wrote. * “It’s the doctoring through words, in a sense, but it’s more than that because you’re touching lives you can’t see in a clinic” * She described ripple effects from her writing, one reader teaching something to another, who then came back to tell her months later * She’s not trying to reach 50,000 people at once. She’s trying to reach one person well, and trusting that the ripple goes somewhere she can’t track [00:12] — Identity Shift Laurie was active duty Air Force after medical school. She found herself in a system where she had little control, doing work that was hollowing her out. She called it soul-crushing. She made the decision to leave. The military is stable, predictable, and safe. She watched colleagues stay because the alternative was terrifying. She chose the terror instead. * That pivot required accepting uncertainty, something she keeps returning to as a pattern * Her husband’s question has followed her through every transition: “Are you still enjoying what you’re doing?” * She described creative identity as something you keep choosing. When the old path stops fitting, you choose again. [00:20] — Tinkering, Testing, and Growing 50,000 Facebook Followers in Two Months Laurie sees every platform as a variable worth testing. She grew a dormant Facebook page from around 9,000 followers to over 50,000 in roughly two months by treating it as a funnel into Substack. The entry point is a free seven-day mini course. From there, readers move into her paid School community where she shows up live weekly. The structure is clear: free content, Substack list, paid community. Three layers. No guessing where someone is supposed to go. * “Facebook has 2.8 billion users. Substack has 35 to 40 million. If you can figure out how to funnel from there, you open something up.” * She resurrected a stale page she’d largely ignored; it had been sitting at the same number for ten years * The move was building qualified traffic. Content that attracts the wrong reader is just noise with more followers attached. [00:26] — Radical Acceptance and the Nervous System This was the section of the conversation that Carolina connected to most directly. Laurie described how she learned to stop letting her past dictate her present, and how that shift changed things. She wasn’t dismissive about hard things. She said clearly: her home growing up was not ideal. She had people in her life who balanced that out. But she made a decision at some point to stop holding her story as an identity she lived inside. * “I honor your past, but you cannot let it continue to dictate your future” * She wears a ring inscribed with “this too shall pass.” The good times. The bad times. All of it moves through. * Real regulation, she said, is being present enough to notice the story you’re telling yourself before it runs away with you [00:28] — How Tiny Habits Build the Confidence to Change One of the most grounded moments in the conversation was a real patient story. Someone who had never exercised in her life. Laurie gave her one instruction: two push-ups on the kitchen counter. Two months later, that patient was doing 60. She showed Laurie her arms on a video call. “I challenge anyone to go do 60 push-ups and not find that challenging,” Laurie said. Starting small is the actual path to the bigger thing. * Small wins create the proof of capability that people who have never had it genuinely need * The CAN framework she uses: is the habit Clear, is it Actionable today without extra gear, is it Nourishing for you right now? * What was nourishing at 35 may not be nourishing at 55. The habit has to fit the actual life. [00:41] — Reps, Detachment, and Why Content Succeeds Laurie published something on Substack every day for the first six months. Not because it was perfect. Because 180 reps in six months is what weekly publishing takes three years to match. She was very direct: you can’t be emotionally devastated every time something doesn’t land. You put everything into it, publish it, and then let it go. She had a useful image for this: stand outside, look up at the sky, and register how small the post actually is in the context of the universe. Then keep going. * The articles that convert, she’s found, are the ones written for a specific reader with a specific problem. Not the ones optimized for conversion. * “That energy follows through with your words.” Writing to help and writing to sell feel different to the reader. * She pulls reader feedback into new posts. Testimonials, outcome stories, successes they’ve shared with her all become content, with permission. Key Quotes “It’s the doctoring through words, in a sense. But you’re touching lives I can’t see 50,000 people in a day, but I can send out a post.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas “You can’t let your past continue to dictate your future. When we choose to do that, that’s where we continue to struggle.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas “The moment you believe you deserve it and you start taking action, you shift. You start seeing opportunities. And you enjoy it, but you don’t hold on to it either.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas “You have to decide: is this a business or is this a hobby? Because that will dictate how you approach it.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas “Those are the ones that convert. Those are the ones that people share. You’re walking in with a different intention and you get a different outcome.” — Dr. Laurie Marbas Resources Mentioned * Atomic Habits by James Clear (Laurie interviewed James Clear approximately seven to eight years ago) * Visual Mnemonics series — six textbooks co-authored by Dr. Marbas during medical school, designed to help medical students retain complex information through visual learning * Zen Habits (blog by Leo Babauta) — referenced in context of early blogging strategy and the value of volume and consistency in building an audience * Russell Brunson’s funnel frameworks — mentioned as an influence on Laurie’s multi-platform approach to moving audiences toward Sub
