Lulu Ge is the founder of Elix, an herbal nutritional supplement company that helps women balance their hormonal cycle. When she stopped taking hormonal birth control, she found herself unable to move her body for 2-3 days a month around the time of her cycle—and her doctor’s only suggestion was to start taking birth control again.  Her grandfather connected her to a renowned Chinese medical expert who examined her, gave her a list of herbs, and instructed her on how to take them. Cut to: after a single course of drinking the elixirs, she experienced zero symptoms any longer! The secret to these medicines is in how personalized they are, so she looked into how she should scale that personalization in a way that would be accessible to more people.  Cycle-related symptoms continue to affect up to 90% of women in the US, leading to over a billion hours of lost productivity annually; yet in today’s health care system, only 4% of research and development addresses women’s health issues.  Sad trombone.  Lulu shares her process of getting her business off the ground, and what herbal medicine can do for your life.  Special offer for listeners:  use the code  HTW15 for 15% off at www.elixhealing.com

 

Lulu talks about...

• Why so many women are on birth control “off label”
• How Chinese herbal medicine changed her life
• Bringing personalized herbal medicine to the masses
• Broadening beyond hormone health
• Meeting the magical mushrooms

 

Resources:

• elixhealing.com
• instagram.com/elixhealing/

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

Victoria Albina does a LOT. She’s had a holistic medicine practice, worked as a nurse practitioner, a certified breathwork meditation facilitator, a life coach, and… a good witch?  She’s practically collecting modalities right now, and that’s GREAT, because we all need some of this in 2020. We all understand what stress does to us on an experiential level, but with her expertise, she explains how it affects us biologically and physiologically. She has a passion for helping women realize they are their own best healers, and helps them recover from codependency and perfectionism--we're listening!  Victoria is the kind of person we need to hear from right now.

 

Victoria talks about...

• How trauma gets stuck in our bodies and manifests physically, to let us know we need to pay attention 
• The current level of cultural stress and how we can deal with it
• The importance of resilience 
• Navigating the experience of letting out our anger
• Going nose to nose with someone to diffuse anger
• Changing the channel

 

Resources:

• victoriaalbina.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/victoriaalbinawellness
• Feminist Wellness Podcast: victoriaalbina.com/podcast/

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

We want Megan Bruneau to be our new therapist — or at least our friend who we invite out for drinks and free advice. She’s a therapist, executive coach, and speaker who takes a no-bullshit approach to coaching. We talk a lot about sitting in discomfort and how to navigate it, as well as the dangers of using “spiritual bypassing” to avoid stress. Right now is a time of incredible discomfort for all of us, and we’re all trying to navigate it as best we can by staying informed and having conversations — like this one.

 

Megan talks about...

• Changing our relationship with discomfort
• Weighing the risks of involvement or silence
• The danger of forced positivity
• The importance of feeling our feelings
• Spiritual Bypassing--this concept blew our minds-- and how it can be damaging
• Being compassionate to yourself

 

Resources:

• meganbruneau.com
• Instagram: @meganjbruneau
• FB: Megan Bruneau, M.A. RCC

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala Yoga. It would have been lovely if all we wanted to talk about was yoga, but in light of the twin crises of Covid and racial injustice,we wanted to dig a little deeper.  We wellness folk do tend to feel things a bit more, so it’s great to talk with another feeler. She talks about how we can continue to have difficult conversations, having an open mind for yoga, how listening and learning is better than silently not participating, and the problems the wellness industry has created for itself. We hope this conversation brings a new perspective to anyone listening.

 

Tara talks about...

• The two pandemics we’re facing
• What Tara’s community is looking like now
• Using your platform to use your voice
• Making yoga unique and your own
• Evolving as a yoga teacher
• The gatekeeping of yoga purists
• The problems with the wellness industry

 

Resources:

• https://stralayoga.com/
• Instagram: instagram.com/tarastiles
• Facebook: facebook.com/TaraStilesOfficial
• Twitter: twitter.com/TaraStiles

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

A special encore for some extra self-care during challenging times.  Emily Fletcher is the founder of Ziva Meditation, a unique practice incorporating mindfulness, meditation and manifestation that she created after years of study.  Ziva is not an app.  It’s an online course that gives you the tools to be free of your devices for good.   Emily is a former Broadway performer who found meditation through a fellow castmate after realizing that despite living her dreams, she was feeling stressed and miserable.  After her initial skepticism, Emily took a meditation class and slept through the night for the first time in 18 months. She fell in love, left Broadway, and trained in India as an apprentice before embarking on her journey to bring meditation to the masses through Ziva.  And she’s clearly doing something right: her bestselling book, Stress Less, Accomplish More, debuted at #7 out of all books on Amazon and is now available in paperback.

 

Emily Fletcher talks about...

• Why she created Ziva, which she refers to as meditation for busy people
• Understanding the vernacular--the difference between mindfulness and meditation is YUGE.   
• How meditation can impact your system on a cellular level--this is not about woowoo chanting, she’s got the science on how your nervous system responds and changes.  
• How stress creates a backlog- and it goes farther back than your crappy morning meeting.  Think GENERATIONS back.  But in better news, meditation can help unpack all those traumas, maybe even faster than Zoe’s beloved Nebbiolo.  

Resources:

• www.ZivaMeditation.com
• @ZivaMeditation

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

This episode is a special encore, while we are spending a little more time with our partners than we usually would, we thought you might appreciate some perspective!   Dr. Sonya Rhodes is a psychotherapist, relationship therapist, and the author of four books, including “Cold Feet” and “The Alpha Woman Meets Her Match.” (Ahem... attention Santa!) She spills the beans on what makes a marriage work or not, gets honest about the struggles in her own marriage (her husband originally thought she would be putting his clothes away and arranging the flowers), and shares what kind of marital problems couples are bringing to her couch. We love her for getting super candid and vulnerable and helping us to better navigate what relationship wellness means today. 

 

Dr. Sonya Rhodes talks about...

• Slow love and pre-marriage
• Who’s getting divorced--spoiler alert: it’s not the young-uns
• Resentment in a relationship--spoiler alert: it’s actually a GOOD thing--do we have your attention yet??
• Couples who haven’t had sex in years--heads up: the prognosis is not good
• How many positive to negative interactions there should be in a marriage--yep, there’s an actual number

 

Resources:

 

• "Cold Feet"
• "The Alpha Woman Meets Her Match"

 

 

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

So, real talk: Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is our legit hometown hero.  Before holding the title of our ACTUAL favorite sitting president, he served three terms in the New York State Senate and 22 years in the New York City Police Department. He is crazy smart, super compassionate, and his dedication and goodwill toward his community is endless. He was diagnosed just three years ago with diabetes, which felt more like a sentence than a diagnosis, but in a matter of three short weeks he changed his entire diet and lifestyle and got the disease under control.  A true role model and a leader for his community, he’s a great steward of the impact that lifestyle change can have on chronic illness.  It's been a minute since we've had a president we can crush on!

 

Eric Adams talks about...

• Reversing diabetes purely through food medicine
• Eating the wrong foods, or how you can actually eat the "right" foods incorrectly
• What’s antithetical about the traditional diabetic diet
• The importance of empowering doctors to educate their community on nutritional healing
  
• Introducing our children to mind, body, and soul wellness
• How healing our bodies can impact healing the planet
  

 

Resources:

• brooklyn-usa.org/eric-adams-bio
• Read "Healthy at Last"

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

We’re here to talk about fiber! And no, it’s not that powder you’ve seen grandma put into her water. We’re joined by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, the author of Fiber Fueled and a board-certified, award-winning gastroenterologist.  So, he knows his stuff when it comes to gut health. He talks about how fiber interplays with your gut health — something we’ve always been super into — and how this can be especially important in a world of COVID-19.

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz talks about...

• Preparing your body to handle a disease
• Why coronavirus is targeting people differently
• How we can support our immune system
• The relation between the gut and immunity
• The importance of diet diversity
• How we should think about eating meat
• Good and bad inflammation

Resources:

• theplantfedgut.com
• Read: Fiber Fueled
• Instagram: @theguthealthmd

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

We are ready to show you our fruiting bodies! We’ve spent a lot of time chatting with guests about the world of adaptogens, specifically mushrooms, because it’s a category that fascinates us. Their incredible immune-boosting properties are just the tip of the iceberg.  We've been a couple of fun gals into the fungis for quite some time, as we've been hard at work creating our new business. Earth & Star is a grab-and-go plant-based latte supercharged with the benefits of functional mushrooms. Here we'll share a bit more about the product as well as the process that got us here. And it was pretty gnarly. 

SPECIAL CODE FOR LISTENERS: Use HTW10 for your first order at www.earthandstar.com

 

We talk about...

• Our new product, Earth & Star!
• Launching a business in the midst of a pandemic
• Why we love mushrooms and how they play a key role in preventative health care
• The painstaking process of creating a product that meets our standards-cracking the oat milk game isn't easy, hats off to Oatly!

 

Resources:

• earthandstar.com

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media

By now, you’ve probably seen the growing trend of functional mushrooms and understand that we ourselves are down with fungi in a big way. But what are we really getting from these mushrooms and mushroom supplements? To better understand what’s real and what’s just advertising, we sat down with one of the world’s foremost mushroom experts: Jeff Chilton, founder of Real Mushrooms and Nammex.

Jeff was one of the pioneers to bring proper food and functional (or medicinal) mushrooms extracts from their places of origin to the Western world. He is a wealth of knowledge in the field of fungi. When you start rattling off the benefits of mushrooms, it can sound like a joke — immune-boosting, cognitive function, athletic performance, calm — but it’s legit.  Mushrooms are the world’s most studied superfood, and Jeff helps us sort out the value from the fluff and misinformation when it comes to these fascinating fungi.

 

Jeff talks about...

• What Nammex is doing and his motivation behind creating it
  
• The new frontier of mushroom extracts
• What medicinal mushrooms do for us and the myths around what they don't do
  
• The difference between mycelium and fruiting bodies and how to find wellness products that actually work--hint: we are all team fruiting bodies!
• The pharmaceutical industry and its roots in fungi.  Get it? Roots? Listen up and you'll understand

 

Resources:

• www.realmushrooms.com
• www.nammex.com

 

Highway To Well is a production of Crate Media