180 Nutrition -The Health Sessions.

This week we catch up with Jason Wachob, founder of the health and wellness online media giants MindBodyGreen. The independent media brand is dedicated to wellness with over 10 million monthly unique visitors! He has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Goop, and Vogue.

We cover his personal journey of health transformation inspired him to start MBG, his health discoveries, meditation, stress-reduction strategies, his brand-new book 'WellTH', the power of the breathe and even Wim Hof the Iceman!

Use Snapchat? Follow me at: GuyL180

Questions we ask in this episode:

  • What was the defining moment to make you reevaluate your own work-life-health balance?
  • What do you think will be the next big thing in wellness?
  • What ‘one thing’ do you think can have the most positive impact on our health?
  • Why did you write your new book - Wellth?
  • What does true wealth look like to you?
  • What are your non-negotiables to be the best version of yourself?
  • And much much more…

Video Version & Transcript: http://goo.gl/R15oxn

Hey, this is Guy Lawrence from 180 Nutrition and welcome to today's health session, where we cut through the confusion by connecting by leading global health and wellness experts to share the best and the latest science and thinking, empowering people to turn their health and lives around. We're doing it this week with the awesome Jason Wachob. He is the founder and CEO of mindbodygreen. If you're not familiar, they are a health and wellness company, media company, that is, and they now have I think over 12 million hits a month. They're big in the industry, they've influenced my life and they've influenced many people's lives around the globe with their message. It was fantastic to have Jason on today. We get into lots of topics, we discuss his new book, Wellth: How I Learned to Build a Life, Not a Résumé. We also dive into his own personal journey, meditation, breath work, and how he actually manages as an entrepreneur with so many situations going on, keep everything and his health in check and all the rest of it. I thoroughly enjoyed today's interview. He's a top guy, and there's lots of wisdom for sure in this podcast, no doubt. If you're on Snapchat, I actually joined a couple of weeks ago, come and say hi. Just look at the user name GuyL180. That's my user name. Come and check it out, say hi. Always great to meet like-minded people. I share behind the scenes of what I'm doing, even with these podcasts, how I'm filming, what's in my day as well. I'm enjoying this so far, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, let's go over to Jason. Enjoy.

Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I'm joined with Stuart Cooke, as always, hi Stuart.

Stu: Hello, mate.

Guy: Our awesome guest today is Jason Wachob. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason: Thanks for having me, guys. Guy: I really appreciate it. Jason, just to start the conversation. If you were sitting on an airplane and a complete stranger sat next to you and said, "Hi, what do you for a living?" How would you answer that?

Jason: Wow. I would say I run a health and wellness media company called mindbodygreen.

Guy: Perfect. My next question would be to you is just to get familiar with our listeners as well, is what is mind, body, and green, and what inspired you to start it in the first place, because it's obviously a big mission. Jason: Sure. I'll start with the story. I'm 6'7". I played basketball college a long time ago, I'm 41 now. Back then, this was 1998, there were no startups, guys like me either ... if they had grades, maybe they went to law school. If they had an aptitude for science and wanted to help people, they went to med school. Or if they had none of the above, they went to Wall Street, so I became a trader. Largely because I grew up with no money and always wanted money. I saw money as freedom, I saw money as something that I could pay off my college debt ... and so I went on to Wall Street and was able to do well enough to pay off my debt, bought my mother a car, probably a little freedom.

While that was happening, at the same time, finally I reached this financial success and it was the worst month of my life because a relationship was falling apart. Very sharp contrast, here all I want is money, and I'm miserable. I saw really quickly that money did not buy happiness. 9/11 happened a little after that here in America. It really changed my perspective and it sort of led me down this entrepreneurial path. Fast forward to about 7 or 8 years ago, I was running a startup, doing a lot of flying.

I flew almost 150,000 miles domestic in a year. 6'7" me, coach seat. Do the math, not so great. It turned out that I had an old basketball that was exacerbated by all the flying and stress. I was stressed in my mind at the time. I had two extruded discs pressing on my sciatic nerve, L4, L5, S1. My right leg was like a lightning rod. I could not walk, it was terrible. I went to a doctor, he said, "You need surgery. It's not negotiable." I don't think surgery's necessarily a bad thing, but it's just something I wanted to avoid. I sought a second opinion, and he said the same thing. Then it was almost like an afterthought, he said, "You know, maybe some yoga or therapy might help." I was like, "Okay, I'll give this yoga thing a shot." I started doing some really light yoga in the morning, in the evening, like 10-15 minutes. I started to feel better over the course of a few weeks, and over the course of a few months, I completely healed, so I never got surgery.

It was like, "Holy cow!" This started to get me down this path and I started to look at things like stress and the mind and nutrition and the environment and all these things played a role in health, and I was like, "Holy cow, everyone's got health wrong." It's not about just vanity and weight loss, it's this lifestyle. Mind, body, green. That's how I got the idea for mindbodygreen quite literally, so that's how it all started.

Video Version & Transcript: http://goo.gl/R15oxn

 

Direct download: Jason_Wachob_Audio_FINISHED.m4a
Category:Health & Nutrition -- posted at: 5:16pm PDT

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