Welcome back to the Rebel Health Coach podcast! I’m your host, Thom Underwood. Today I’m speaking with Tara Gesling, Founder of Cultivating Health, LLC and best-selling author of The 180 Degree Wellness Revolution: Simple Steps to Prevent and Reverse Illness.
Tara is a woman of many hats. Not only is she an author and an entrepreneur, she is also a Certified Functional Health Practitioner (FDN-P), Certified Integrative Nutrition Coach (CINC) and a Master Gardener in horticulture.
“When we’re healthy, we live in ease – when we’re not healthy, we’re living in dis-ease.”
Tara’s book, The 180 Degree Wellness Revolution, introduces you to Tara, the resources she found when she was first researching functional health, and translates information about health and wellness from scientific jargon into plain English.
“The reason I wrote the book is because I was very, very ill a number of years ago. It was such a difficult journey. I didn’t have information available to me to help me get better, so I had to figure a lot of things out.”
Tara started researching health and wellness more than 25 years ago, after she became ill. She developed a neuromuscular and autoimmune disease, which put her in a wheelchair before the age of 30. She had a near-death experience in which her heart stopped, and after that experience she realized her lifestyle and prescriptions were poisoning her.
“I never, ever would have thought that that could have happened to me.”
People often think of diseases as a part of them (e.g. “I have a stuffy nose”), but Tara acknowledged that her diagnoses were a compilation of symptoms given labels. If you walk around saying, “I am sick,” how can you ever hope to reverse it? One of the hardest lessons that Tara learned was not giving her power over to a doctor, or anyone else.
After learning that lesson, Tara was able to work towards wellness without sabotaging herself along the way. She focused on what she put in her body by cutting out medication and taking a better look at the food she ate.
“Stop counting calories and start counting chemicals.”
Tara is a big proponent of organic food and eating healthy, but she doesn’t deprive herself at all. She stopped counting calories and started counting chemicals. The typical American diet is full of chemicals, and those chemicals are stored in fat cells to protect your organs. Relieving your body of those chemicals can reduce the health burdens in your life.
“I may be paying a little more right now to the farmer, but I’m paying a whole lot less to the doctor or the hospital.”
One way to reduce the chemicals in your food and eat organic is to participate in Community-Supported Agriculture programs or buy directly from CSA farms. At the beginning of the season, farmers will set a price for the whole season’s crops. This helps the farmer cover costs throughout the growing season, and it provides people who participate in the program with fresh food every week. You can find a local CSA program by going to your local farmer’s market or using this resource on LocalHarvest.org.
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