Ep. 60 Trust Your Gut with Ali Essig of PlantWhys

I'm Lacey Jones with Elevate the Individual episode 60 trust Your Gut with Ali Essig, creator of PlantWhys. We are here today with Allie from Plantwise, and I am so excited for her to join us and share her story of how she has started her social platform on Instagram and her business. And I'm going to have her just jump in and tell us kind of the nitty gritty before this platform came to be and how you got there. So why don't you introduce yourself, Allie, and your family and maybe some fun facts that others might not know about you.

Sounds great. Awesome. So, my name is Alicia Essig. I go by Ali, and I was born and raised in Utah, then moved out to DC. Went to graduate school out here at George Washington University, met my husband out in DC. He was going to law school, and we started our life and our family to I got my master's in public administration. So I worked on Capitol Hill as a communications director for congressman for years. Loved that. It was awesome. I also was a legislative assistant and worked with Healthcare matters, and that's where I first kind of dipped my toes into learning all about all these different diseases and how it affects people's lives.

And they would come in and meet with me and ask for more funding for more research for these specific diseases from ones I'd never heard of before to ones like Alzheimer's and heart disease. And I did that for years. Then I had a baby, went back to work, and then I got an opportunity to work on a campaign from home and it was just more flexible.

So I then worked on a campaign for three years, had three kids later and had the opportunity to go back to the Hill and just decided, I think that chapter is closed. I have a lot of children that I would like to spend some time with them while they're younger, and then we ended up having even more kids. But through this process, I would teach Pilates. So I certified to teach Pilates when I was getting my master's degree, actually. And it has been kind of a great backbone throughout all the childbearing years and just gaining core strength after babies and helped me have a little something on the side while the chaos of little kids continues to it was nice to have.

So when I would teach Pilates classes, everyone would ask me, what should I be eating? Because weight loss is always on people's mind. And so I would look into nutrition things and was always interested in like, well, researchers doing this, but it was just like the typical what everyone else was saying. And I wasn't certified in it, and I never claimed to be certified in it, but I always was curious in the back of my mind.

In our religion, we follow a word of wisdom, which is just basically no alcohol, no coffee. And they also suggest in there that we eat meat Sparingly and eat more whole plant foods, but everyone kind of ignores that part. But it was always a question I had in my mind for years and just kind of was in the back of my head.

Fast forward a year or two, and my father ended up passing away from a heart attack, and it was his only heart attack. He was 55 years old. There was no warning at all. And I remember just praying over and over like, I wish why couldn't he have just gotten a warning? Why couldn't he have had the chance to change his diet, to do something so that he could have lived longer? But there was no second chance.

Nothing. He was gone. And so my husband and I continued to live our life, and we had four kids and then end up getting pregnant again and had twin boys, which was super fun and exciting. And the twin boys, I gained the twin baby weight, and so did my husband right along with me. And as we were losing the weight, we did the typical high protein, macro based diet that was kind of the fad, and it helped us both lose weight at the time.

But on October 1, 2019, I got that dreaded phone call and found myself rushing to the Er to find my 37 year old husband slumped over in a wheelchair, looking like he'd aged 50 years. He was suffering a stroke. And so that's kind of where our past everything changed after that moment. His vision was affected. He couldn't see clearly, and it didn't just go away overnight. This took a long time to rehabilitate.

He couldn't drive. He couldn't work for a while. And so I'm now the primary driver, taking care of everyone. And I think sometimes when these things happen in our lives that you really don't have much control over as women, it's like, what can I control? What can I do? And in the hospital, they ran a ton of tests. It's like, does he have a hole in his heart? It was negative. Does he have a family history? Negative. Does he have all of the things? And everything came back negative. And they gave us a piece of paper that said, look, we don't know exactly why this happened, but because it happened, he's more likely to have another stroke in the future.

And so you need to follow a heart healthy diet from here on out, okay? But the problem is, they give you this piece of paper that said, avoid saturated fat, avoid trans fat. Avoid cholesterol. Eat more fiber. Don't drink alcohol. The alcohol thing, we already had down, but the rest of it was like a foreign language. I'm like, what is saturated fat? What is trans fat? Where is that found? What foods? Like, just tell me what I need to make for dinner and what I need to not make for dinner. That's all I wanted to know. So they don't give you that information, and it's really vague and for many political reasons, which is for another podcast one day. But at the time I just was like, okay, I took it to prayer, and I really took the time to try and find out what this meant and did my own research and my own studying and learned a lot.

But what I did learn was interesting because it rang so true to me. It felt so right in my heart because this is what I was taught spiritually in our dietary guidelines that were given in our church with the word of wisdom, even though we don't all follow it, that eating less meat is going to help you keep your saturated fat down, keep your trans fat down, especially dairy. Actually, dairy is the number one cause of number one source of saturated fat in the American diet. Cheese especially. In fact, don't say cheese.

Please don't say cheese.

Okay. In fact, if you were to open up someone's arteries and look at the plaque, it looks a lot like cheese.

Okay, cheese continue.

I know, right? But in general, fiber only comes from plants. And plants aren't just fruits and vegetables. They're whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes. And that if we just made the simple shift of just a meatless Monday once a week, changing 3% of our animal protein and swapping it to plant protein. So not just taking out the protein, but adding in the beans so you're still getting that protein source. If you just change 3% of your animal protein to plant protein, it could decrease all risk of any type of mortality by 10%. Like 3% change can decrease your risk of mortality, all causes by 10%.

That's awesome.

It's just amazing. A lot of us, it's like you have to be an omnivore or completely vegan. And I found that there's a lot of benefits that can come shifting more towards the less meat, but you don't have to be completely 100% vegan to get the benefits. So that's where everything started.

Okay, so what's interesting is you're like, well, I had no idea. I had no clue. But now as you're talking, I'm like, on the edge of my seat. I'm like, okay, tell me more, tell me more about this and this and this. And you seem to be an expert in this area. And so was that like a four year range of when you had the stroke to now?

Yeah. So what happened is I started with my family. It took a month to even think about it because you're just like survival shock, going to the doctor's appointments, driving everyone around, getting babysitters so I could go with them. And then when I was ready, I was like, okay. I read How Not to Die, the book How Not to Die, where he talks a lot about a lot about brain diseases too. He goes into detail of what foods you should be eating and should be avoiding. And I read the book Eat to Live and just kind of learn on my own. And I was sharing publicly to my personal Instagram page, like, this is what I'm learning. This is what we're trying. And I just was a little more public about it because a lot of people were asking, okay, so I started doing that learning on my own, sharing what I was learning. And this is where a fire was literally just ignited in my soul, where it was like, I love this, and I love pointing out that we have this knowledge, but yet we're not using it. Especially considering if we would have eaten this way growing up, my dad wouldn't have died early. My husband probably wouldn't have had a stroke. This is so important for everyone to know, but it's not common knowledge that just avoiding these animal based products and eating more fiber, more plants, even if you're not perfect at it, can really prevent a lot of the mainstream diseases that we see now.

Okay, so you're gathering all this knowledge, and you say, like, this fire and this passion, like, burning to share it. How did you decide to you said you were on your personal page, so how did you decide, hey, this is something that I want to make bigger than just me personally sharing? How did you shift into those gears? Right?

I think that's where I wasn't ready for it. I feel like you're never ready. Okay. I had twin babies. My husband had a stroke. They were nine months old. I was like, this is not the time to be starting a business. But after the babies were about one years old, I had found E. Cornell plant based nutrition certification course. And I told my husband, I want to do this when my twins are in school in four years. I said it out loud like, I would love to do this one day. And then a couple of months later, one of the famous plant based doctors that I followed was doing a scholarship to that same course that you could apply for. And I applied, and they were only giving away two, and there was hundreds of people that applied. But I shared my story, which kind of helped with six kids, but I applied for it, and I won, and that's what kind of started everything. And once I did that, I was sharing what I was learning. I still wasn't certified to actually teach it, but it was just more the deeper knowledge. And so after I did that, then I just felt like, okay, I need to do the next step, which was to become a nutritionist. And that was just another certification that took six months after that, so it wasn't as terrible. I already have my master's degree, so it was just another certification on top.

On top of raising a family and your husband recover and changing your lifestyle. So just on top, right? So all of that, there's some mindset management for you. You have a lot on your plate, but yet you're like, oh, just another six months here. And I just want so how do you decide? I can take this on, right?

So a large part of it is that it lit me up. Even my husband will be like, you are so happy when you do this. This is what brings you joy. This is what excited me. But there was just this. I mean, it's totally over. Don't get me wrong. I had my very bad days when it was overwhelming and starting an instagram and all the like, someone unfollowed me because I put all of that that comes along with it, which is terrible. But when I would do the research and as I was learning, I just really was energized by it. And so I used to teach Pilates for like 15, 20 hours a week, and that cut down because of COVID around the same time. So my husband, he lost his vision for five months. We switched our diet, and then it slowly started to come back. And after five months, it was the week the world shut down, but his vision was back. I was like, Life, can I go back to normal? And then everything shut down. Also, I feel like the timing was a godsend in the fact that I did have things taken off my plate, even though I had more added on, that was more stressful and so hard for me. But that was my happy place, was being able to study and learn. And so it was the most difficult time of my life, I'm not going to lie, as everyone was during that time, dealing with the unknown and the changes and the hard. But that's what kind of gave me fire. And I did have to let other things go. So I wasn't teaching anymore. I wasn't teaching spin classes or bar classes or all that I was doing before. And that made it possible to kind.

Of fill it up with that, to make those adjustments. And there are adjustments that maybe you wouldn't have seen a year previous, like no one saw 2020 coming. You didn't see things happening with your husband. And so you are able to make those adjustments and see what energizes you, which I love, because what do you think the benefit of having a mom, a wife who is energized by something? What's the benefit to your family when you choose to follow that path?

Right? I'm not as frustrated or mad or angry with them because in my mind and Jody Moore talks about this a lot, where our mind just needs to solve a problem. If we don't focus that problem on something is positive in the sense of, for me, it's starting this business, it's like, okay, what's the next problem? What's the next step? What's the next thing I need to do? How do I get clients? What do I want in my program? That's always in the back of my mind, always thinking about that. Before I started the business, when I was even just learning, the problem would be my children. How do I get this? Why can't they do this? And what's wrong with this? And it just was really hard because I can control so much more in a business than I can in my children. And while I'm thinking about them still, it's more like, okay, I want to make sure you're okay, but it's not this constant frustration. I would spiral. I'd go down, like, why can't you just put your clothes away? Or why can't you Legos or whatever? Now it's like, you know what? My mind's here solving all these problems, and we'll get to those things later. It just is less dramatic. So in that sense, and they're proud of me. I have a YouTube channel where I share all my recipes, and my daughter shares it with her teachers at school, and they put it up, and the whole class has seen where she's in it a couple of times, and she's proud of me.

And it's fun to see that too. Okay, so with this, when we look at problems, we can be like, oh, we got problems, or we can be like, hey, this is a problem that I want to solve. And I was working with my coach. I do a lot of coaching, similar to what Jodi Moore does. And I was working with my personal coach, just, like, going through some business stuff, and she all of a sudden pointed out, and it's this new thought that these are actually problems I want to solve, right? Like, business wise, I want to figure out how to get more clients. I want to figure out how to provide a program and resources and material and content that is 100% beneficial to people out there, because I've seen the benefit in my life. And so it's interesting how the word problem can have a negative connotation or a positive connotation. And as we focus or we choose which connotation we want to use, it can either drive us or sink us in our life. And so I love that you have created this world where you want the problems. I don't know if that's fair to say, but where you're okay with these problems and wanting to solve these problems and how that creeps over, because I think we want to protect our families a little bit, and we don't want problems in our family. But as we learn the skill set over here in our little business or other world, we can translate that into our family and those skills that we're learning over there. So I don't want to totally geek out on that connection, but it echoes a lot of thoughts that I've been thinking about this past week, and so I'm glad that you went that direction. And as you work on your business ventures and you're raising six kids and going through all of this, how do you find the balance? Do you find the balance? How does that play in?

Right? Well, I think as you continue forward, at first, I could kind of manage it all. It's like having a baby. When you have a new baby, your kids don't get all of everything they need all the time, because you have to spend more attention and time with this baby, and you hope eventually they grow up. You don't have to spend as much time on it. I think in the beginning, there's a lot of time. I would work until from ten till 02:00 A.m. For months and months. It was 10:00 p.m. At night till 02:00 A.m.. I would take a nap when my kids are in school, or when I would try and squeeze that in to get enough sleep. It was just ironic. Like, I'm in this health world and I'm really not sleeping in order to do it.

But minor detail.

I know. Minor detail. It's all worked out now. It's better now. But then we did get to a point where I just remember thinking, how am I going to do this? And even just praying about it, and just being like, I feel called to do this. I feel like this is something I need to be doing, but I don't know how I'm going to manage all of it. And that's where we did seek out help. At first it was some babysitters here and there. Then we even had especially with COVID and trying to teach my older kids. Plus I had my three in diapers at the time. Let's talk about that.

Three in diapers.

And so we ended up choosing a daycare that could take my younger kids, and then I could just focus on my older kids and I could squeeze in more time on my think. And that was just for a few months. And then we had babysitters here. And now we ended up doing that. It was so expensive to have babysitters that we ended up using getting an pair for about the same price. So I think every woman has to find what works for them. I love having someone from Bolivia or Ecuador or other countries come in. My kids are in Spanish immersion, so they get to be tutored by these women. They get to be loved by more people. I think recognizing that you don't have to do it all, you can get help. And even though it financially doesn't make sense right now, it's investing in myself and realizing I'm in this for the long haul. I'm not quitting. So let's invest in this if we need help. And then eventually again, it will pay off later like you would with any new baby, right?

Very much so. And those are big decisions. And I think that as mothers, sometimes we have a hard time saying, I need help, I want to do everything. I want to be there for my kids. I want to build this business. Yada, yada, yada. But there is this struggle sometimes to ask for help. And so do you remember getting to that point and what finally clicked and made it okay to ask for help? Right?

Yeah. The sleep. The fact that I want my time spent with my kids to be having fun with them. I don't want my free time. I'm drowning on laundry. I'm drowning in other things. I want to be able to really enjoy when I'm with them. And so realizing I'm not trading, I'm just getting help with the things I don't want to do. So that when I'm with my kids, I can do the things I want to do. I want memories, and it's flexible. I'm not working completely full time. I'm making sure that I get my work done the beginning of the week, and then we go and have fun. Especially during the summer, we go and have fun later on, do fun little day trips or weekend trips and create memories. And it's actually created more quality time with my kids because I can take because I have a babysitter, I can take one kid out at a time and spend that time with them. So asking for help actually increases the quality time spending with my children.

I love it. Okay, so what other wins have you noticed or successes by following this path? I mean, you've got to trust your gut. You've got to seek inspiration. You've got to kind of trust that personal revelation for you and your family. And I would imagine you have to kind of work with your husband on that, right? It's not just the alley show. This is a family decision because it's going to impact everyone. So what other wins have you felt along the way of learning this whole process?

I was not in a great place, like after my husband's stroke, and then while this lit me up, COVID was really hard on me. We also renovated our house at the same time, which was insane. So I was living with my moms, then we were living in airbnbs, then we were all over. I feel like it just ripped every part of me apart, and I was spiraling in negative ways and not okay. And the light at the end of the tunnel was again, my business. But I realized that in order for me to help my clients, that I had to be in a better place myself. And in order for me to teach them the principles I wanted them to learn, I needed to work on myself. So I was in it, like I say, a dark, dark place. And my husband will say that too. Never felt like that kind of depression or anxiety or everything that I experienced. And when I really realized and recognized that I needed to get the help for me, and I did life coaching, and I took so many programs and paid for other courses, and honestly, my drive behind it was because I wanted to learn how they do it and how do they coach their clients so that I can do that with mine. The biggest drive was my business. That was my purpose. But in doing so, I was transformed. And over a period of six months, my thoughts were completely transformed over everything. My relationship with my kids, my relationship with my husband, with my mom, just recognizing where I had kind of chosen other things, like other thought patterns that had really kept me stuck. And in doing so, then my client successes were better too. My husband was like, look, I know we've invested a lot into your business. And he's like, it has been worth every penny, if anything, just for the transformation in you. And so that, to me, is like, while I still because starting a business is a lot. Paying for ads, doing all these things, and trying to figure out how to make this profitable. And at the beginning, you're spending a lot in my nutrition certification in this, you're spending a lot. And so getting to that point, it's scary and managing your mind over that. But you think any business, any building that is built, they're spending money before they're making money, a hotel, whatever it is, that's just part of life. But through that, it transformed me. And I'm grateful every day I'm in such a better place, honestly, because of my business.

Yes. And so one of the driving messages behind my podcast is it's called Elevate the Individual for a Reason. So when you take a mother and you help her clean up her mindset, her thoughts about herself, she then takes that influence to her family, and her family is lifted. Right? We elevate the family. When a mother is elevated, then that family goes out into the community and their social influence, their community influence. And we can then elevate a community. But we've started with the mother. We've started with her mindset, her thoughts about herself. And really, you talk about your business. Your business is the vehicle for change in your life. And you've got a wonderful husband who says, hey, I don't care. We get it. Finances are always they can be a friction point. They don't always have to be, but they can be a friction point in marriage. But to have his support in that and saying it was worth it just to see this development of you personally, because look at your influence. Your influence goes from self, relationship, family, community, and now you've created this social platform, and it spreads. And then you're now influencing other mothers to become elevated. They'll elevate their families and their community. So it's this beautiful ripple effect. And so I love what you're saying there. Just talk to us about what your business offers at this point. What programs have you created? If you want to dive into that, that'd be awesome. Yeah.

And I think it goes along with the story, right? You can see where I've adjusted and how our programs we offer has adjusted. But I started with a course where I taught everything that I've learned about the benefits of plant based eating. And it's from if you're an athlete, if you have kids, if you struggle with heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and how eating more plants and eating less animal products will help minimize your risk in a lot of these diseases. And you can do it even if you're an athlete, and you can do it even if you have young children and how to adopt your diet to that way. But over time, as I was working with people who had issues like cancer and diabetes and gout and fatty liver disease and Lyme disease, all these things, they all had a common thread. And that was that at the end of the day, they just wanted to lose weight.

Yeah.

And the thing is, you can eat plant based. Here's the crazy thing. You can eat plant based. You can have diabetes with A one C levels that are, like, through the roof, crazy high. Not a good thing, right? You can switch their diet to be plant based. Their A one C levels can go down, can be beautiful, like, their body is healing on the inside, but they're not even losing any weight. And so there's a lot going on, on the inside. So in order to really actually shift the weight loss, there's a couple of Tweaks you need to make. And so then I saw, okay, this is actually what they want. They need this information, but what they want is really weight loss. So then I shifted to losing weight in a plant focused diet. So I'm teaching these women to lose weight. And as I'm working with them, I'm like, oh, my gosh, they're all emotional eaters. They all need to work on the emotions and what's going through that. And so then it was like, soon after, I start an emotional eating course, because at the end of the day, we all know what to eat, or you can pick any diet. And while I have lots of feelings on how you can lose weight with any diet, but anything you do, you pick one. If you follow it to a T, it will work. But there really is only one diet that you'll also be able to lower your cholesterol, minimize your risk of cancer, minimize your risk of Alzheimer's disease, of diabetes, of all of these things. Now, I love to teach that, but when you actually put it into practice, there's a lot of emotional roadblocks to it. Like, I know I. Should be eating vegetables, but there's ice cream or there's this. And so it's like, well, let's talk about why is it that you're eating when you're bored, when you're not hungry. What are all these emotional reasons that you're turning to food instead of actually giving your body what you really need?

Yeah. So what do you tell your clients?

I put them through an intense two week course. Honestly, it's like not just one thing, but a lot of it is focusing on your higher desires, over your lower desires. And I put them on a specific meal plan, which is just mostly vegetables and potatoes, and they never have to go hungry, so I don't want them to feel hungry at all. So when they're reaching for other foods, then they have to stop and think, why do I want this? I'm not hungry.

I'm safe.

I have everything I need. And becoming curious about why is it that I'm reaching for these other foods and what is it that I'm trying to satisfy through food and how else can I satisfy that need? And it's two weeks. They have all these videos, these quizzes. It's intense, but it's also part of my membership, which is my lowest tier. It's $37 a month. So it's the easiest thing for people to start and do to actually be able to see some wins.

You mentioned curiosity. Curiosity is such a driving emotion. And if I can get a client out of judgment and into curiosity about what choices they're making, why they're making, why they're seeking all those sort of things, it's so beneficial. You can do a lot of work with curiosity. And then you mentioned why are they seeking this, why are they seeking that? They're buffering, right? They're trying to escape something that they don't want to feel. I have a child who is crying. I'm just going to turn off my microphone really quick so you can't hear my mom voice and then we'll be right back.

I love it.

Sorry about that. Maybe we should have woken him up and got them settled before I thought, oh, they could just manage themselves in the summertime.

You have a lot of editing to do. I'm sorry.

Don't worry. This is like part of the fun, right? Because here we are, we're moms. We're trying to run these businesses. We have amazing resources that allow us to do it right. And I imagine have done some mindset management about, hey, we're also managing families while trying to do a recording and an interview. And you mentioned videos and quizzes. I'm like, Wait, you probably didn't know how to do videos and quizzes before, and those are talents that you had to learn too, along the way, right?

And even software, like finding the best software, doing the research, and I wasted for anyone listening. To make you feel better, I spent $7,000 on this software company that was based in Ukraine. This is before the war in Ukraine happened, and they were going to manage all of my business, my website, my email, my course, hosting, all of that. And then a month later, the war broke out, and then they went out of business, and I lost everything.

Okay.

It's okay. And for a long time, I really struggled with that until really working on, like, look, I made the best decision I could at the time with the knowledge that I had, and you just have to move on from there. And now I'm using Kajabi for everything, and I love them, and they're fantastic, and I'm never going back because I.

Learned the hard way.

But sometimes you make wrong decisions, and you just have to make the wrong decisions.

Right.

Make it right. It's okay to learn instead of everything just working smoothly.

Yes. And part of that is taking, okay, what's happening today? This happened in the past. I'm going to sit it there. I'm not going to constantly revisit. I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have. It should have gone this way. It should have gone that way. And I think that echoes in a lot of your story with different situations like, this has happened now. How are we moving forward? What are we going to do with this? And so also to go back to the point of you have this area of your life that you can focus on and learn from and then carry it into your family. And so I made this decision. It didn't turn out how I wanted it to. How am I going to learn from it? How am I going to apply these lessons? How am I going to make choices in the future? Well, how do you take all that experience and put it towards your family? Right? Has that impacted your family? And how you mother now?

Oh, yeah. And I would say, well, two things. Number one, I think it's been better with my clients, too, because when they say I've invested all this money into a program and didn't work, like, oh, I know, honey, I feel you in there, done that. And also with my kids to recognize they make decisions that aren't going to be great either. We're all human. And to recognize the common humanity and to have more compassion, have more compassion for myself, have more compassion on those around you. If you're in the gap is what they call looking at where you lack. If you're in the gap with yourself, you're most likely in the gap with all of everyone around you. You're only noticing where they lack to that ideal. Instead of measuring backwards and looking at like, wow, look how far you've come, look what you've been able to accomplish, look what you have been able to do despite these. Like, if you can do that when you do it for yourself, then you can do it for your family. You can do it for your clients. You can do it for everyone else.

Yeah, okay. This is wonderful. And what I love is hearing I didn't know beforehand that you were familiar with coaching and Jody Moore and that sort of thing. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this discovery. So this is awesome. And what is one message that you want to leave with our listeners before we sign off?

I feel like follow your gut. The gut is for lots of reasons, right? There's a lot of scientific reasons. I can tell you how your gut is your second brain and eat more fiber to help your gut, but in general, just to stick with it. If you feel like you shouldn't be starting a business right now and this is the time for family, follow that. Because when it is the right time, even though you're like, for me, I'm like, I'm going to wait till all my kids were in school. Why is it starting now? But I had to learn to surrender to life's invisible hand and surrender sometimes to these opportunities. Like, for me, winning that course for other people that you just can't deny. You're like, okay, in my mind, this is not the right time, but I'm going to go forward with it. And honestly, before COVID and before my husband had a stroke, I wanted to start something Pilates related where I was teaching other Pilates instructors how to become certified. I was kind of looking into that and it just wasn't working out. Things weren't as smooth and not that they're smooth, perfectly smooth now, but it was like, I'm interested, I love teaching. But it didn't really go. And that's okay. It wasn't the stage or the time in my life, and now it is. And I had to get help and I had to do all these things. But it feels like my gut feels like even though this is so hard, even though I've cried more about my business than I have about my babies, even though it is an emotional roller coaster sometimes, I know in my gut that this is exactly what I should be doing. And I've seen as I measure myself backwards and seen the progress in my personal journey and how it's been good, if anything else, at least for me. And I've learned spiritual principles way deeper than ever would have otherwise.

So in all of this, is it just you or have you brought in a team?

So I feel like every time I would pray to God and be like, how am I going to do this? He would send me a who. Like, someone would just reach out a previous client, a friend of a friend, and be like, hey, this may seem weird, but I want to know if I can work for you. I'll do it for free. Literally all of them. It's been amazing, and now I'm paying them. But at first they were just doing it for free. Like, they fell in love with the plant based diet and this method and really felt that fire, too, and wanted to get involved in teaching more people about it. Many of them are certified to be like, plant based health coaches. I have a dietitian on my team, which is key for a lot of meeting with doctors and just having that I'm a nutritionist, but having a dietitian is really helpful for a lot of things. Yeah, it's been great. I have a whole team now, and I could not do it without them. Most of them have come to me. There was one where I just really felt like I need to reach out and ask her to be a part. And she develops recipes. She's awesome. So every single one, I love them so much. And again, no woman is an island. You can't do this alone.

And especially as you scale and the fact that you've developed, I would imagine your faith in the process too, because, all right, Heavenly Father, I need this. And he sends someone, and it's developing that relationship and showing that he wants to care for you, too, in this way, too right.

And even as simple as getting a babysitter, it's like, how am I going to do this all? And then I literally had a friend of mine be like, hey, do you need a babysitter? Because my friend doesn't have a job. And it served her. It helped her at the time. She didn't have a job and she needs some extra income in between jobs. And it was like the perfect time of when I needed and what she needed. I feel like this road sometimes I expect it like point A to be point B to be completely straight. Like, it's going to be a straight road, but I feel like God's like, no, we're going to take a right turn. You're going to pick someone else here. You're going to pick them up, and then we're going to go back on the road. Oh, and now we're going to go over here and we're going to pick them up. You're getting to point B in a bus full of people, and you've taken all of these roads and these turns to get there. You're not going alone. In my story, I'm the hero and they're my guide. But in their story, they're the hero and I'm their guide. So it's kind of cool that we're all in this path together.

And one concept I think of is we live in a time where there's just an amazing amount of resources. And so I just laugh when I throw my laundry in the washer and walk away. I can use my time for other things. And I have the resources, like Kajabi, like building instagram and picking up these other ladies that have talents, too. And so we live in a time where we can be mothers and do other things too.

Back in the day, to advertise, to start a business, it would be like just having parties, like Tupperware parties at your house. That was kind of like if you wanted the flexibility to be with your kids, that's kind of your only option. And in order to advertise, back in the day, you had to have hundreds and thousands of dollars to advertise to a general population, where now you can get really specific in advertising or you can do it for free. On Instagram, we have these tools. It is our responsibility in a way where much is given, much is required. And if we can serve other people with these tools, if we can help someone else's life be better, why not use them? Because in turn, your life will become better, too.

It's the ripple effect, right? And it's starting with the individual. I love it. Trust your gut. To me, that is what a confident mother does. So I talk about raising confident mothers. I want to teach my clients how to trust their gut because they are the perfect person to raise their children, their families, their businesses. And when they have that confidence, they can just take it to new heights. And so, yes, trust your guts. Amen to that. So, Ali, thank you so much for joining me. I have learned so much in this conversation and I'm going to put the links to all of your material in the show notes of this episode and on Instagram and our social media accounts. So thank you for joining me. I really appreciate this conversation.

Thank you. It was great being here. Thanks for having me.