Title:
Love Your Body | Leslie Jackson’s Path to Functional Nutrition
Subtitle:
Food, Passion, and Purpose: Leslie Jackson Wellness Building an Empire
Transcript:
Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice each week. We will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.
Let’s go.
Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I am Alycia and I’m going to start this episode with a quote. Babe, you deserve to feel damn good in your body. And I love this quote from our guest. Whether you have a disability or not, we deserve to feel damn good in our bodies.
And this quote off of Leslie Jackson’s website has inspired me today to feel better in my own body. Love. Our guest today is not only a friend from my corporate work. Life way back when I guess it’s not totally way back when, but a few years back when we used to work together and sling software in the technology industry and multifamily.
We grew up and grew into our careers together. She today is a highly respected functional nutritionist speaker and founder of Leslie Jackson wellness. She is dedicated to helping others have restored their health and their ambitions along the way, I believe. I want you to dive into that. And her personalized approach in this empowers women to feel balanced, check, energized, check, strong, check, check.
And I’m excited to dive into not only your inspiring story of being a total boss. But this amazing business that you’ve started that is so successful. Welcome, Leslie.
Leslie Jackson: Thank you so much, Alycia. I’m so so excited to be here.
Alycia Anderson: It’s so good to see you. It’s been really fun to see you become an entrepreneur alongside me. I feel like it’s been really nice to have that in common and lean in on each other.
So number one, congratulations on taking the leap and starting this beautiful business that you’ve started. I’m so proud of you.
Leslie Jackson: Thank you so much. It’s literally like a dream come true.
Alycia Anderson: And that is such the beauty of being bold and taking the leap. It’s the same thing for me, which was really scary at first. And then you do, and you’re like, wow, this feels good. Can we look back? Can you share a little bit about your personal journey? Maybe your personal health journey, what led you to lean in from technology to nutrition.
Can you give us a little backstory of who you are and where this all began?
Leslie Jackson: I, really my whole life have been frustrated with not understanding how to feel my body in a way that will create the physique that I desire and give me the energy that I desire. And really early on, those are really only the only two things that I thought that my diet could influence my life. And the deeper that I got into studying nutrition and especially studying functional nutrition, which is functional nutrition is the science of creating health with diet and lifestyle. That means nutrition, exercise, sleep, hydration, your environment, your rest, and living in your purpose. The more that I got into this, The more I realized that what you put into your body is literally what you are. You are what you eat. and it’s what your cells are made of. It is the substance that we consume on average 70 tons throughout the course of our life. there’s, yeah,
Alycia Anderson: Wow.
Leslie Jackson: on average, 70 tons of food throughout the course of our life. Food can either create vibrant, radiant health, energized, high mood, a peaceful nervous system, or it can be a significant source of stress and inflammation and it can drain us of our energy and our vitality. And that was really what my experience was for a lot of my life. I want to say like more into my early twenties, because throughout my teenage years, the kids are resilient. Although the kids are not invisible to what Ultra processed and poor quality food can do. But when I reached my early twenties, I was really kicking off my professional career. I wanted to make a big life for myself. I wanted to make good money. I wanted to be secure in my career. So that meant that I wanted to be able to really perform. And Not until 2017, 2018 was really the year that I had one of the most humbling health experiences of my life.
And it wasn’t just one day. It was over the course of years where I found myself really just wrestling with anxiety and depression. A. D. H. D. Type symptoms. I was struggling to focus. I was struggling to be productive. I also had significant hormone imbalances, cystic acne, bloating, irregular periods, and the only thing that I knew to do then Was to go to my doctor and say, Hey, doctor, like I can’t focus.
I have acne all over my face and I am in a sales role and my face is part of the experience. And I have a really highly demanding job in a high velocity industry and I don’t have energy. I’m traveling all across the world. I’m traveling all, more so the country, I was traveling all across the country and I was leading boardrooms. I was pitching my product against my competitors and in the industry that we come from, your relationship and the personal experience that you have oftentimes had a significant influence on whether they wanted to do business with you. And that attractiveness, that like brightness that you bring into your work, impacts them significantly.
And so I just found myself constantly going to my doctor, trying a medicine, whether it was an antidepressant or an anti anxiety or the birth control pill, just to mute my hormones. Adderall type medications to stimulate the brain, help me with focus. And, Every single one of them came along with a much longer list of side effects and symptoms than what I walked in symptom wise with. So it was like the trade off for me didn’t end up balancing itself out. And so that really drove me to just simply researching, what can I do to get rid of my acne naturally? Like underline naturally, what can I do to naturally resolve my inability to focus and my low energy? And I don’t have time to take two naps a day because I’m so fatigued.
Like I’ve got a lot to do. And literally every single article that I read was sleep therapy. Nutrition, movement, sunshine, environment, community, rest, toxic load. All of these things that are our diet and lifestyle. And the research that we now have, now that functional nutrition and functional medicine has become more prevalent and more well resourced with research, We now can see that 80 to 90 percent of chronic symptoms or chronic illnesses are derived from the quality of our nutrition and the quality of our lifestyle. And so
Alycia Anderson: Incredible
Leslie Jackson: when I discovered this, I was like, I need to tell everybody, because everybody needs to know this because clearly nobody was telling me I had to go find those answers. And not only did I find those answers, but I applied what I was learning and it changed my fricking life. It changed my life. Like my skin cleared up. My period came back. I wasn’t getting bloated every time after I ate. I was waking up and literally able to go throughout an entire day without taking two naps. It just made me holistically more resilient, more energetic. I felt like I was attracting the things in my life that I desired because I wasn’t just surviving anymore and I was more so thriving.
Alycia Anderson: and shining. Like I remember the timeframe or the moment, and it wasn’t even something that I, I knew that I was recognizing and that, but there was a moment over the last few years where you started to, not that you didn’t before, but you really started to shine bright. I don’t know how else to articulate that, but it was very noticeable from just outside looking in.
How do you go from the corporate world? Boss babe, working the deals to high pressure, all of that to shifting into this nutritional practice. Tell me about your business.
Leslie Jackson: Absolutely.
Yeah, so I have to share that first and foremost, anything that I share on this podcast is not medical advice. I am a double certified functional nutritionist and I support women and creating health proactively. but what I have to share is that Somewhere along the lines of me applying my learnings to my life and experiencing the results and experiencing the higher quality of life. People did start coming to me and asking me questions about, Leslie, you don’t look hungover walking into this meeting. Everybody here is like craving sweets and they’re like going for the donuts and they’re reaching for the coffee and I’m walking into meetings and I’m not indulging in those things.
And what is she doing? Started turning some heads and people were getting curious because what I realized is that what was common in a corporate world setting was not normal for how human beings were designed to manage themselves and how to create health. And so I really had to start Kind of recreating my own path with how I managed myself during travel, how I created my meeting experience. Like for example, when I would come in to, to host meetings with clients, like I was bringing in true food kitchen, like something with a protein and lots of vegetables and The meeting experience that I created was very much health focused and it was really recognized and it became, I’m sharing this because it became part of my corporate brand, my wellbeing and my health focus became something that I infused and integrated into my work. And it is what started setting me apart performance wise. Over the course of six, seven years in the business, I sold over 17 million in technology, but that 17 million, majority of it was sold after I became a nutritionist.
And, so the late nights out with clients drinking and doing I cut that out. if we were going to dinner somewhere, I would meticulously find some, pick a restaurant that I would have helpful options to choose from. I was working out in the mornings before stepping into my conferences. And these were all things that were just like common. And they were not a common thing. And
Alycia Anderson: We spent a lot of time whining and dining and grabbing donuts in the morning and not feeling good. So yeah, I think that’s really powerful.
Leslie Jackson: And so I used to keep my health focus and knowledge pretty separate from my corporate, but then I started realizing how much it was helping me in my performance that I then started sharing about it on my LinkedIn and like the same LinkedIn account that I was marketing my technology on.
I was marketing the things that I was doing to wake up and walk into a big pitch with a grounded nervous system. and energy and mental clarity because I got up, I hydrated, I had a protein focused breakfast, I moved my body, I stepped outside for some fresh air and sunshine and then I stepped into my pitch grounded, ready excited because I knew that I felt good.
Like it really all comes down to that. Like I just noticed I felt good and when I wasn’t distracted with a migraine or distracted with fatigue or distracted with anxiousness. I could focus on my work. I was like, okay, I got to start telling more people about this and sharing like the things that I was actually doing. And I would have colleagues come to me like, Leslie what are you doing? And I would just find myself like being the health coach of my team. So I created an integrated health and technology, like a sales rep brand on LinkedIn. And My clients would start to ask me about things. My clients would be like, Leslie like, I saw that article you wrote.
Or I saw that story that you shared about, X, Y, and Z. And I am just personally growing apart from my career in technology and really growing in and towards my passion work for helping people feel damn good in their body so that they could focus on what they really want to do in life. And you do that through creating things like proactively creating health. I had somebody say to me online the other day, what do you mean to create health? You don’t create health. You just have the health that you’re given. No, you create your health experience every single day with the sleep that you get, the way that you nourish and what you allow in your body, the sunshine you walk outside and get the movement that makes the blood flow and the oxygen get to your brain, that’s creating health. It’s not common knowledge and I’m on a mission to make it common knowledge so that people can live a higher quality of life.
Alycia Anderson: It’s so powerful. And I feel so timely with all these ailments that you’re talking about. And I feel like most of us are struggling with at least some of them, if not all, like I’m literally taking notes. Cause there’s things that I need to eliminate out of my life. And I probably need to sign up for your services, to be honest with you.
And we’re living in this fast paced world. That’s so hard to even digest on top of all of these things that you’re talking about. And the struggle is real. And. I love this story about leaning into your passion and letting go. Maybe some of the like corporate stress, or I guess just transitioning in very organically.
There’s a lot of women and men that follow this show that asked me, like, how did you do it? Were you afraid? What was the final thing that made you like, Take the plunge, go in and be the entrepreneur and take a risk. Is there any advice that you can give? our community about how to do that. What did you do?
Leslie Jackson: Absolutely. I have advice because it was a decision that I pondered for years and years. I’ll share a personal fact about me, which is that did not grow up in a financially secure home and What I now know because I’m able to reflect back on the past decade of career experience that I committed to is that I needed a significant chapter of my life where I had certainty, where I knew I was going to get paid twice a month, at least this amount, and I needed that structure. and my nervous system was not in a position five, 10 years ago to be able to handle the variability of what entrepreneurship can give you. I needed 10 years of corporate experience. First of all, being in the corporate world, I learned so much about business. I learned so much about sales, marketing operations, but I needed to be in a position of not too much high stress because I transparently grew up in a very high stress home and I started to find my path based on the hardships that I had gone through earlier in life. And From my perspective, I didn’t go through those things for nothing, and I didn’t come out through them in a better version of myself not to share and help other people have access to resources and knowledge that would have helped me get to where I am now or even two versions of me ago much faster. So I honor that.
I honor that I wasn’t ready for entrepreneurship until now. But I even struggle to use the word ready Because I was never ready. I wasn’t even ready the day that I left the corporate world. I was simply willing to try. I was willing to get ready. I made an investment into a business coach because I knew that I didn’t have the knowledge to transition my passion and my knowledge as a nutritionist into a nutritionist that resourced business. And so when I made that investment into a business coach, that was that action that said to me, Leslie, you are worthy of pursuing creating a business. You don’t know how to do it yet, but you have to be willing to try. And this investment decision that I’m making right now is a testament to how much I believe in myself. To at least give it a try. And so I think you got to be real with yourself about, are you willing to be very uncomfortable? Are you willing to be, to not have guaranteed, income twice a month, and are you willing to sacrifice some of your lifestyle practices or some of your lifestyle luxuries while you’re figuring it out? And I just got to a point where I was like, if I don’t at least try, I will regret this for the rest of my life. And so that was really what led up to me taking the plunge.
Alycia Anderson: I love it. You have to be willing to try it. It has to be the right timing. And I like how you’re giving yourself grace in that it wasn’t the right time at a certain moment for your nervous system, for your stress levels, which I think is a really important thing to be true with yourself about. So I, that’s really powerful.
I think that’s really good advice. Can we, since this is a podcast and we talk about disability a lot, can we talk a little bit, I’m going to shift if that’s okay. A little bit about chronic illness. It seems prevalent. everywhere. And I know there’s a lot of gut health issues on this podcast for sure.
How does functional nutrition improve the quality of life for chronic illness? Can you speak to, I know there’s a long list. Maybe you can just talk about it a little bit.
Leslie Jackson: I was just sharing with my community online that I was going to have the great opportunity to be on this podcast with you. I
Alycia Anderson: Oh,
Leslie Jackson: I was like, just in case you’re wondering why a nutritionist would have. irrelevance to talk about disability in such a great setting. Let me just remind everyone that one of the number one contributors to human disability is chronic illness today. And something that we now know is that 80 to 90 percent of chronic illness stems from our diet and lifestyle, which means that it can be. in some cases prevented or reversed. And there are so many things that contribute to our systems falling into a dysfunctional state. I would say from a thousand feet up, it comes from our common diet and lifestyles today are not what our systems deem normal. And something that I really love to highlight and to remind people of is that This system, this vessel that we are living in, is hundreds of thousands of years old. And there are 80, 000 chemicals that just in the last 60 to 70 years have been approved to become part of our food system.
Our body doesn’t recognize a lot of the things that we’re consuming, like literally 70 percent specifically of a child’s diet today in America is ultra processed foods. And there are so many chemicals that our body flares up the glyphosate and, fluoride and chlorines and bleaches in our water. Mercury and lead in our water as well as in our seafood and the antibiotics that are in the animal proteins because that’s what’s in their diet and it’s causing our system to have an excess of toxic load. And I would argue that one of the number one root causes of our severe obesity epidemic in America today is that our toxic load is impairing our metabolism’s ability to actually function properly. And what we know is that there are so many ways that we can reduce. Our toxic exposure and be to detoxify our toxic load because we are living in one of the most brilliant systems to literally ever walk this earth, one of the most resilient systems to ever walk this earth and our body has so many protocols in and of itself to know how to cleanse itself and restore functioning and to protect us. Like I, I just shared a quote on my socials the other day that the more that I learn about the human body, the more I am in awe of its brilliance and the lengths that it will go to keep us safe. It
Alycia Anderson: And to may I add to serve literally to survive.
Leslie Jackson: The resilience. Yes.
Alycia Anderson: To live and survive. It is incredible.
Leslie Jackson: And my belief is that the answers are often not outside of our body, but it is more so providing our body with the resources that it needs to be able to activate its brilliant healing mechanisms because it has. A very strong ability to actually heal itself. so I usually approach this with my private clients in like a one, two, three system. And the way that I support a client that is suffering from chronic illness versus someone that is just coming in focused on losing excess body fat or balancing the hormones or trying to resolve whatever is causing a cystic acne or migraines or brain fog. It’s really the same system and it is to detoxify, activate the detoxification pathways and open the detoxification pathways that the body has. And then to restore our minerals, our vitamin and mineral reserves, which is what our systems function off of. Like our cells rely on vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients, not just our macronutrients. So many of us are so familiar with the calories and the macro, but the micro really is what we are starved of today.
Alycia Anderson: What is an example of that?
Leslie Jackson: is all of our vitamins and minerals and nutrients. So our B vitamins are A vitamins are K are like really all of the vitamins and minerals and to expand on that, since there’s some curiosity there, Our food is only as rich in nutrients as the soil that it is birthed from. And a lot of the agricultural practices that we have approved in efforts to create big food and corporate food production have destroyed the integrity of our soil and it’s impacting our climate. It’s causing climate issues, but it’s also causing a health crisis because of the chemicals that we put on to our food to kill pesticides. also kill the nutrients. It kills the nutrients of the soil. One of the major nutrients that we’re missing today is magnesium because magnesium is a delicate mineral. And when you kill the pest, with pesticides and chemicals, you’re also killing the nutrients in the soil. And then that vegetable, although it might look the same, as an organic vegetable, it doesn’t have the same contents within it. And so sourcing your food, if there’s nothing else that or tips that any of your listeners capture from me, I want you all to hear me in this.
One of the most impactful things that you can do for your health is shop local and shop in season and shop organic as much as you possibly can. Because those are going to be the most nutrient dense, chemical free, most potent sources of vitamins and minerals that you can get from your diet. Local.
Alycia Anderson: Local, seasonal, organic. Love it.
Leslie Jackson: And eat a lot of them. I’m talking about a lot of them. What I want is to stop focusing on restricting from, if we stop focusing on restricting from the ultra processed foods and restricting from the starch based foods, and we focus on all of the things that we need a lot of, which is. Healthy animal protein sources and seafood and a lot of local in season organic produce. We start focusing on the things that give us life and that make us feel an abundant relationship to our nutrition, rather than constantly trying to focus on the things that we need the least of. That’s how we recreate. Yes.
Alycia Anderson: Focus on the things that give us life. That is such a beautiful statement right there. Like really beautiful. So I feel like we could talk about this all day. I want you to tell our community how to get in touch with you, how to work with you. What do you speak on? Give us an elevator pitch of what you do so everybody knows how to, and we’ll leave all of your information in the show notes, obviously.
Leslie Jackson: I would love to. And I got off track there, in how. I support individuals with chronic illness and this will tie into what I speak about, which is my protocol is to detoxify the body, restore our vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, and then generate resilience and strength in the body. That is my approach and it does, there is uniqueness to every individual, especially people that I work with that are. battling with a chronic illness, because if you’ve gotten to the phase of chronic illness, you are very tired, you’re probably in a lot of pain and you don’t have much resilience at first.
So first we detox, then we restore our resources and our reserves and then we generate and rebuild our strength. resilience. And that’s actually exactly what I speak about. I really love to educate on how to create radiant energy. And I just recently gave a talk on how to create radiant energy.
And that exact one, two, three protocol is how we do it. Oftentimes it’s not about not having enough time in the day. It’s really more so about not having enough energy to use the time in the day. So that is one of my main focuses. And I just, I have felt what it feels like to not have your health. And as cliche as it sounds, if we don’t have our health, we really don’t have much of anything at all. It is our richness. I help ambitious and very busy women who have really big goals that they want to go after in life. make health their secret weapon and how they are able to reach those goals and to open those doors with confidence, loving how they feel energetically with radiance and vitality. And I do that through educating and guiding my clients through creating a diet and lifestyle that is life giving that really helps them open up and meet a version of themselves that they love, that they respect,
Alycia Anderson: That they’ve been waiting for…
Leslie Jackson: Yes. Yes. I don’t even love using the word like their best self. I want to help you meet your new favorite self, your new version of yourself. Cause I’m not going for you 10 years ago. I’m going for you, your favorite version of yourself today at the age that you are now in the chapter of your life that you are in now. And I’m So if anybody would like to find me, I do have a website, Leslie Jackson wellness. I am also on Instagram at Leslie Jackson wellness. I’m on LinkedIn. And I do have an online community called the radiant health collective where I support women to help identify, prevent, and reduce chronic inflammation so that they can step into their power private clients, and also speaking engagements.
Alycia Anderson: So amazing. Congratulations. Okay. You’re doing really good work. I’m really proud of you. As your friend. Okay. We end with a pushing forward moment. Do you have a little mantra? Some advice? A little nugget? A little gift? To our community. You’ve given a lot. So I don’t know.
Leslie Jackson: love to say that you just have to love yourself enough to know that you deserve more. And any, anything that you do to try to improve your relationship to nutrition or your lifestyle, it has to be done out of love. It has to be done out of respect for yourself and not out of. Not out of hate or resentment towards where you are, or just, truly anything else other than love.
You do it because and believe that you deserve more and you’re going to move in love for yourself.
Alycia Anderson: Oh, move in love, self love. I love it. Leslie, thank you so much for your time today and all of your genius. I cannot wait to see where this business goes. It’s going far, I can tell straight to the stars.
Leslie Jackson: Thanks.
Alycia Anderson: Thank you for your time. Thank you to our community for showing up for this beautiful conversation. I feel so calm in my own soul right now.
I needed this myself. This has been pushing forward with Alycia and that is how we roll on this podcast. We’ll see you next time.