Inspirational Woman March 2014: Pilar Gerasimo

“Helping people lead healthier, happier, more sustainable lives.”  That is Pilar Gerasimo’s mantra and mission in life.

As the founding editor of Experience Life , Pilar has oversee seen the growth of the magazine’s national circulation to more than 650,000 and it reaches an estimated 3.2 million health-motivated men and women.  Pilar also authored A Manifesto for Thriving in a Mixed-Up World, a richly illustrated, award-winning chapbook about the guiding truths of the emerging healthy revolution.

The manifesto yielded itself to RevolutionaryAct.com , a health advocacy site serving as a grassroots movement created to inspire and motivate people to live healthy, happy, satisfying lives.  And if reaching out by the written word or internet wasn’t enough, Pilar is also the creative force behind the 5-star free mobile app, “101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy”.

Most recently, she accepted the the top post at the Huffington Post’s Healthy Living vertical, and now has given up her day job to consult and write a book on the art and science of healthy living.

Pilar Gerasimo is an innovator, advocate and leader and she will do what it takes to help everyone lead a healthy and happy life.  Her passion, commitment and drive to fulfill her mission inspires all of us here at the SkinLess Project. We are honored to introduce you to this brilliant mind up close and personal.

It is our honor to introduce our March Inspirational Woman:

Pilar Gerasimo

You are described as a pioneering healthy living advocate and innovator. How do you define healthy living?

To me, healthy living is living in a way that leaves you feeling empowered, energized and enthusiastic about your life. It’s making daily choices that endow you with plenty of vitality, confidence and resilience to show up for the people and projects that matter to you. Basically, it’s treating your body with respect, living in integrity with your priorities and values, and understanding the way your health is essential to them.

How did you learn about healthy living; were there role models in your home?

My mother and father were both great role models — they ate well, were active and kept a balance of work and play in their lives. My dad took vitamins, did sledgehammer workouts and ate yogurt before that was considered normal. My mom did yoga, used nontoxic cleaners and was interested in natural medicine.

I also spent a lot of my childhood on an organic farm in Wisconsin where we raised a lot of our own food, cooked from scratch, worked and played outdoors rather than watching TV, and so on. I think that experience deeply informed my sense of what creates and sustains health.

Interestingly, I rejected virtually all of that farm wisdom as a teenager and young adult. I just wanted to be “normal” and to “fit in.” So started eating junk food and watching TV. I gained weight, got depressed. Then I got into diets and low-calorie foods and reading women’s fitness magazines, which made everything worse.

It was not until I was about 30 that I got serious about changing my life. I ultimately had to find a way to relearn the essentials I’d been exposed to as a child and reintegrate them with the modern reality of my busy, urban grown-up life.

What’s clear to me now is that the formula for healthy living really is not all that complicated: Eat real food; move your body; rest, play and sleep; spend time in nature; don’t let yourself get too stressed out; deal with the root causes of health problems, and so on. But making all of that work in the society we’re living in now can be incredibly challenging. You’re dealing with a wacky food supply, sedentary norms, crazy media messages, a messed up healthcare system, unremitting stress, and worse.

I feel like I got a huge head start growing up the way I did, but even that did not inoculate me against the unhealthy madness most of us are facing now. I still have to deal with those challenges every day  just like everybody else.  I know how tough it is.

The United States is in crisis, with rising health concerns and childhood obesity. With access to so many resources, how did a country like ours get here?

I think it’s a convergence of social, economic, political and environmental factors. Industrial greed and political manipulation certainly play a role, as do manipulative advertising and a misguided public trust in “authoritative sources”— sources that have been doling out questionable advice for decades.

Take the USDA’s nutrition guidelines, for example. What we have been led to believe is healthy (eating a lot of grains and dairy and avoiding natural saturated fats) is not. And the focus on quantity (obsessing about calories and grams) vs. quality (the nutrition and satisfaction of whole, natural foods) has been totally counterproductive. All the conventional USDA guidance has done is drive people to eat more processed foods, which is the exact opposite of what they need to be doing.

Meanwhile, we have had this huge shift in how we spend our time — mostly indoors, not moving, glued to our television, computer or smartphone screens. And we have been looking to pharmaceuticals to manage the resulting symptoms. It’s a vicious circle.

The first of the 10 points in my manifesto reads: “The Way We Are Living Is Crazy.” And I think that is true. The obesity and chronic disease crisis is really just a symptom of that.

You are so dedicated to your mission that you founded the nationally acclaimed health magazine, Experience Life – why did you create it?

I was frustrated with the health magazines I was reading. I did not feel they were respecting my intelligence or my real priorities. I did not feel like they were telling the whole truth. And they really were not helping me get healthier.

A lot of times I’d put down a fitness magazine feeling worse about myself than when I’d picked it up — anxious, frustrated, hopeless or self-loathing. I was confronted by the perfected-model pictures, I was miserable following the diets, and the workout programs all seemed purely focused on thin thighs, ideal abs or some other objectified body part. I was not really learning anything new.

I wanted to create something better — a magazine that addressed the real challenges of being healthy in an unhealthy world, and of trying to make healthy choices in the face of real-life demands and obstacles.

I felt health-seekers like me deserved something better. I started by just imagining what such a whole-person, whole-life health and fitness magazine would be like. And little by little, it came together.

Not many women sit at the table in creating a magazine from scratch – how did you make it happen?

Truth be told, I think it’s an idea that really wanted to happen, and once I had the idea, it just sort of unfolded.

I have read the story of how Gloria Steinem and her colleagues created Ms. Magazine back in the early 1970s, and I totally relate to that experience — both the exhilaration and the anxiety of making something that deserved to exist, but did not yet, and that a lot of people said would never work.

Here are a few of the factors I see as most important in Experience Life being born anyway: 1) I was helped by a lot of helpful people; 2) I got incredibly lucky; 3) I took a risk and did the resulting work.

The helpful people were numerous, including early mentors and friends who encouraged me to follow my dreams, helped me get the experience and confidence I needed to move forward, and people who helped me connect with other people who then made the possibility real.

Hugely helpful was Life Time ’s CEO, Bahram Akradi, who saw the potential of Experience Life and green-lighted the project even in the face of some skepticism. And then there’s the whole Experience Life team who ultimately helped put the whole magazine together and kept it going.  A lot of those people have been with the project from day one, or very shortly thereafter.  There were just a handful of us at first, mostly working as contract talent. Today it’s a team of 17 or 18 full-time staff, plus freelancers.

The good luck involved being at the right place in my career at the right time, and having already established the key skills I needed. I’d already reshaped and edited one magazine — ICON , for the American Society of Interior Designers — so I had some idea of how to do that. I had space in my work schedule at the precise time the opportunity to work with Life Time came up.  And I already knew or quickly met all of the people I needed to know to make it happen. I don’t know if that’s luck or fate, but the whole experience certainly seemed guided.

The risk involved pitching an idea that at the time seemed pretty wild and crazy (and expensive), and staking my reputation on the fact that we could make it work. And the work – oh my goodness, the work. There was a lot of it.

Starting anything takes insane amounts of effort. But when you want to create something as much as I did, you’re willing to do it, eager to do it, inspired to do it.

Still, I worked myself to exhaustion on more than one occasion in those early years, and wound up really depleted. I had to learn the art of balancing my inputs and outputs, of curbing my perfectionism, of being gentle with myself and  of course walking my own healthy talk — nourishing and moving my body, getting enough sleep, taking breaks.

It’s still a practice for me to do all of this and also do the work I love, but I think living those challenges every day is part of how we keep the magazine real and relevant. It’s how I keep my finger on the challenges we’re all facing, and the solutions that hold the most promise.

What makes Experience Life different from the other health and lifestyle magazines on the market?

So many things! I wrote up a whole series of differentiating points a long time ago (you can find a few of them here: http://experiencelife.com/about-us/why-experience-life-is-different and in my essay, “Six Packs and Sex Lives”). But I think two biggest things are:

1) We put our readers’ best interests and needs first, always , and;

2) We put the goal of being healthy and fit in a deeper, broader, more realistic whole–life context.

Rather than getting mono-focused on flat abs and bikini-body diets, we re frame health to consider the mind and emotions, our deeper motivations, the culture around us, the social norms and environment — this huge set of influences that powerfully drive our behavior, attitudes and choices without our even realizing it.

I think the other big thing is, we have fiercely defended our editorial independence and credibility. We are committed to writing what we see as the essential truths of health — the things our readers really need to know and understand.

A lot of magazines in our category have made advertisers their primary customer, and they wrap a lot of light and fluffy editorial around their advertising in ways that often undercuts the depth and credibility of the content.

Sometimes they shift the editorial to please advertisers, or to avoid pissing them off. I don’t think any editor wants to see his or her pages sold out, but the reality is, it happens all the time. The pressure is unrelenting.

It’s a risk for a magazine to say something negative about an unhealthy ingredient or product (or whole class of products — think diet aids, pharmaceuticals, sodas) when you have got an advertiser pushing that product three pages later.

Advertisers may very well threaten to pull ALL of their ads — not just that one ad — out of your book. Of course, all those mixed messages also really confuse and annoy readers. For that reason, we have never accepted ads for diet aids, plastic surgery, pharmaceuticals or soda.

Interestingly, having our focus intently on the reader and his or her real needs (rather than hustling to please advertisers or drive up newsstand sales) has actually created a more appealing, coveted advertising environment for healthy, high-quality brands. It’s made our subscribers more faithful.

It has also meant that we have been way ahead on a lot of important health and fitness issues (from cholesterol to interval training to sleep). That has given our readers a head start — in some cases a decade-long head start — in changing their lifestyles in ways that helped them get healthier faster, and helped them avoid disease risks, injuries and obstacles they might otherwise have faced.

To me, that’s what a good magazine should do: Relate to you like a super-smart, well-informed, loving friend and mentor — someone who has your best interests in mind, who shares your goals and values, and generously shares everything she is learning with you as she learns it.

A “trusted friend” does this because she wants you to have the best life experience possible, and to see you reach the goals that matter to you without suffering unnecessary setbacks, frustrations and indignities. You know she is never going to hold back information or mislead you in order to make a buck. She is never going to bombard you with messages that you’re not okay the way you are, or that you are just a set of so-so body parts waiting to be perfected. She is not going to shame or boss you into doing things you are not yet ready or willing to do.

I think that’s how Experience Life has always related to our readers, and it’s how I intend for us to fulfill our editorial mission for as long as we exist.

You are considered a revolutionary in your field, and you have often said that  “Being Healthy Is a Revolutionary Act”  – please elaborate.

That phrase, “being healthy is a revolutionary act” originally came out of a passage I wrote in my journal about 10 years ago.

I wrote: “The opiates: stuff, fear, food, TV, trivia. To have a fast-firing mind and a limber body is an act of dissent, a revolutionary act.”

This struck me as I was coming to grips, for the first time, with just how challenging it was to maintain my healthy motivation and determination in the face of almost constant temptation, distraction and resistance from the culture around me.

I knew how I wanted to live, to be, to feel in my body and mind — strong, clear, powerful, conscious, happy — and I had committed myself to that path. But it felt like the world I was living in kept fighting me and undermining my intentions every step of the way.

The least healthy and empowering choices were the easiest and most convenient. The lowest-common-denominator ideas and role models were the ones made most accessible and visible. There was so much superficiality, hype, nonsense and junk bombarding me everywhere I went, everywhere I looked.

That was the norm. And I knew that if I let myself go along with the norm, I’d become it. I’d become sick, heavy, depressed, hopeless, polluted, a part of the polluting machine.

Choosing to find a path through that insanity, moving against that tide, required revolutionary choices and serious grit. It required awareness and acceptance that choosing the health path was going to take me down a road-less-traveled, and I just had to get right with that.

But I did not want to be lonely or feel like an outcast. I wanted to connect with other people who were making those same revolutionary choices. And I wanted to help more people wake up and discover how rewarding it really was, so that together, a whole bunch of us could begin shifting the norms in healthier directions.

In many ways, everything I’ve created over the past 15 years — including Experience Life — has been an attempt to fulfill that goal, to express what I saw as the reality of our collective situation and to change it in the ways I could.

OK, the innovator in you is genuine. You also created a spin-off website, RevolutionaryAct.com , as well as a mobile app — “101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy” — that went viral. How did they come about?

After working on Experience Life for more than a decade, I knew that the magazine was reaching a huge audience of health-motivated people, and that it was changing a lot of lives for the better. I also knew there were millions more people, both within and outside the magazine’s core demographic, who both needed and wanted all that life-changing information but did not have easy access to it.

I felt like we needed a movement that was bigger and more inclusive than the magazine, one that would reach out to more people with a really galvanizing message about how health works, and why it matters.

I wanted to get people as riled up and excited about healthy change as I was, and to make sure that anybody who wanted this information could get it.

We created RevolutionaryAct.com as a way of making the essentials of healthy living free and accessible to a larger and more diverse group of people, regardless of whether or not they ever subscribed to our magazine.

I wrote a feature called “Being Healthy Is a Revolutionary Act: Renegade Perspectives for Thriving In a Mixed-Up World,” and I penned my “Manifesto for Thriving in a Mixed-Up World” as a tear-out booklet to run with that feature.

Next, I wrote up the “101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy” and we turned that into a fun, interactive Web infographic , which quickly started accumulating fans via social media (last time I checked it had more than 500,000 likes on StumbleUpon alone).

The Experience Life editorial team started assembling a list of some of the other Revolutionary Resources we saw working for healthy change, and standing up for the same causes.

Initially, we just wanted RevolutionaryAct.com to be a permanent, evolving home for all these resources, but then we realized that what was really connecting with folks were the 101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy. We figured that if we turned them into an app , we could make them more powerful, portable and accessible, linking to articles and resources that folks would otherwise have to go looking for on their own. So that’s what we did.  It’s had more than 150,000 downloads, and I think it is really just being discovered.

How did you create the app and learn the tech world in such an interesting way? Do you have a passion for health and technology?

We partnered with two firms — Bolster (a design and branding agency), and Drivetrain (a great interactive app developer). Both are local Minnesota companies with brilliant principals whom I knew personally and whom I believed would really buy into what we were doing. They worked closely with us to understand the content and aesthetic of our Revolutionary Act stuff, and came up with brilliant design and technology solutions that helped us create the user experience and results we were looking for.

I am not a huge tech head, but I love the things technology makes possible. And I am a huge fan of technology in the service of health and fitness — as long as it does not become a distraction from the human “technology” (self-awareness, focus, peace of mind) it is supposed to be amplifying and supporting.

Mobile apps and quantified-self tools (Fitbits, heart-rate monitors, etc.) can be incredibly helpful in giving people access to the information and nudges they need to stay on track. They can provide them with content and practices that keep them engaged and committed to a healthy path.

There’s a cool app called HeadSpace, for example, that helps people establish a simple 10-minute daily meditation practice. There are many other apps that help you shift habits, track your daily patterns or master new healthy skills.

But these tools are only as good as the information and intention that’s designed into them. I worry sometimes that apps that get people obsessed with calorie counting and calorie burning, for example, can do more damage than good.

I would also hate to see people spending a lot of additional time interacting with screens and fiddling with complicated user interfaces or idling in online social networks when they could be out living their healthy lives, learning healthy skills and enjoying time with in-person communities of real healthy people.

Why is the 101 Ways app different from other fitness apps?

First, it reflects a 360-degree view of health – addressing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and environmental aspects of well-being — and it does so in a very nuggety, simple, breezy way.

Just browsing the 101 Ways gives you a decent overview of what it takes to be healthy, so you get an immediate sense of perspective. There are so many gateways to a healthy way of life, and on any particular day, or at any point in your process, one may seem more doable or appealing than another. The app gives you a lovely array of options.

Also, because some of the ways are a little mysterious (No. 35, “Move It Out,” has to do with the importance of pooping regularly, for example, while No. 42, “Love What You’ve Got,” emphasizes treating your body with respect and appreciation), the app also invites you to learn things you might not even realize you need to know.

If you mouse over any one of the 101 Ways, you get an immediate translation and explanation of it, as well as links to related helpful articles you can dig into right away, or whenever you feel motivated to return.

I love that the app automatically serves up a Revolutionary Act of the Day, but you also have the option of browsing or saying “Surprise Me” and using the app like a Magic 8 Ball or oracle to get a “Revolutionary Act” suggested just for you.

The 101 Ways app is a little like an advent calendar for health. It returns a sense of fun, discovery and exploration to what can sometimes seem like a very serious, heavy undertaking. And we’ve gotten feedback that kids and adults of all ages really enjoy playing with it. I’ve never shown it to somebody and not had them try to take my phone or iPad out of my hand to play with it themselves.

You became the first female senior vice president at Life Time Fitness ; what are your thoughts about women as leaders in the health industry ?

I think we need way more women in leadership positions everywhere, and absolutely in the realms of all things health-related.

My executive role at Life Time was self-created — I asked for the position because I felt like I was doing something (and was energized to do something) that had notpreviously been done, but that had value and importance, both to the organization and to its market audience.

At the time, there were very few female executives within the company (I’m happy to say, there are more now). And I could see we were missing opportunities to meet the needs and desires of our women customers because of a lack of understanding of what they were looking for. We weren’t relating to them the way they wanted, weren’t seeing things from their perspective, and I felt like I could help change that.

To some extent, this reflects the face of business in the world right now. Women are too often unseen, unheard, and not consulted. Their real desires and priorities are unconsidered, and the net result is bad for everyone.

I see women leading the charge for better ways of doing business, better healthcare, healthier government policies, a healthier environment, healthier mindsets, healthier communities, healthier products and production systems, better access to healthy food and clean water — you name it.

At the risk of vastly overgeneralizing, I think women are probably more neurologically inclined to see and care about the connections between all of these things. I think we more keenly observe the results of unhealthy systems than men do, and in many cases, we are more profoundly bothered by the ugliness of those results, which means we are often more motivated to try and develop creative solutions to our collective problems.

Experience Life and RevolutionaryAct were both the result of my creating something I personally wanted, and that I trusted a lot of other people — not just women — wanted and needed as much as I did.

While obviously both men and women are equally capable of innovating and creating, it seems to me that women are often the first to pick up on what is essentially a collective, universal desire for a better way. When we articulate and advocate for that desire, everybody wins.

As consumers, women have created and sustained the market demand for integrative medicine, for organic food, natural food,  yoga,  meditation,  self-help,  gluten-free,  detoxing, natural cleaners and personal care products, BPA-free packaging,  fair-trade and cruelty-free products,  sustainable energy, hybrid vehicles, socially responsible investing, and more.

I think women enjoy collaborating to create solutions that work for everyone. And increasingly, I think we are willing to stand up and ask for what we want.

The smartest men in business today totally get this. They are looking for women to co-create new systems, approaches and innovations that will transform business as we know it, and in the process, to help change the world for the better.

Women are the top consumers in the health industry. Do you think the industry recognizes this?

Eh, kind of. I think for a long time, they either didn’t get it, or they didn’t care. Increasingly, though, many industries are waking up to the fact that women make the vast majority of health-related purchasing decisions for themselves and for their families.

Unfortunately, even when industry does realize this, their response is to pander to and manipulate women in a really ugly way. They splash pink and sparkles all over everything, or they aim at our insecurities, reflecting a sort of superficial caricature of women that I think a lot of us find insulting and silly.

On the other hand, when business gets it right, and comes up with a product or innovation we can really use and appreciate, it feels great and like such a relief. And then they get rewarded for that. Again, everybody wins.

You recently finished a stint as head of “Healthy Living” at Huffington Post.  How was that experience?

It was fascinating, rewarding, and clarifying — an amazing experience. I met Arianna Huffington at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, and we had this immediate connection and meeting of the minds. From a content and strategy perspective, a lot of what she wanted to do with the Healthy Living section at the Huffington Post was very aligned with what I’d been doing and wanted to do more of.

I’ve always admired and respected Arianna. She is an incredible media innovator, a magnetic leader, and I love her commitment to shifting mainstream conversation about important topics. So when she offered me a job running the Healthy Living section at Huffington Post, it seemed like an incredible opportunity to reach an even bigger audience in a more visible, high-impact way.  I’d also edited more than 100 issues of the magazine by that time, and I was ready to shift gears.

What I discovered once I got to New York, though, is that for me, the process by which something is created is as important as the product itself. And the process that makes a 24-hour operation like the Huffington Post tick — and that drives the New York media scene in general — is just too fast-paced and frenetic for my constitution.

I think that scene is fun and exciting for some people, and I can totally dig it in small doses, but building my life around it just wasn’t for me.

Each of us has to experiment to discover our own best place, pace, rhythm. So I’m very happy I went, and very happy to have returned. I learned a ton, and made some great friends I hope to keep for the rest of my life. Arianna recently gave me a really sweet testimonial quote for my new website, and I continue to see her as a change-agent role model in many ways.

You are now working on your newest innovation –  a book on the art and science of  healthy living. What prompted the book?

A burning desire to share the best insights and skills I’ve collected over the past 15 years — both as a health journalist, and as a health seeker.

I remember how much difference it made for me, back when I was first embarking on my own healthy-life journey, to get reliable counsel on which things to do, and step-by-step guidance on how to do them.

Every time I’d learn a really valuable new skill or got a big “aha!,” part of me would go “yay!” but another little part of me always went: “Arrggh! That’s great, but why didn’t anybody explain that before ? This could all have been so much easier!”

Those are the skills and insights I want to pass along. The book is organized around the revolutionary practices and perspectives I’ve found to be most transformative in my own life, and that anybody can do and benefit from if they like.

My goal with the book is to help people find a shorter, easier, more rewarding path through to their healthy living goals and desires, and to spare them having to flail around and struggle quite as much as I did.

When should we expect its completion?

I’ll be writing for a year, I expect, and from there, who knows. I’m keeping people updated on my progress and sharing sneak peeks and tidbits along the way at my site, PilarGerasimo.com .

I’m hoping to connect with a small group of folks who want to try out my program before it goes to press, so to anybody interested: Hit my site and enter your email in the yellow box so I can keep you in the loop! I’d love to connect with folks via Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, too.

Lastly, many women are wanting to become experts in their fields but are afraid of not being good enough. You have owned the title and passion without hesitation. Can you elaborate on your journey?

Oh, I had all SORTS of doubt and hesitation along the way. And I’m still regularly a little afraid that some aspect of me or my work might not be “good enough” to satisfy someone — especially me. I’ve just learned to hear those voices and do what I want to do anyway.

Over time, I’ve come to trust who I am, what I do, and the values that drive me to show up as fully as I know how on any given day.

I think if you have a passionate desire to learn, do or create something, it’s best to move forward on that path with as much energy and courage as you can muster, accepting that you are going to learn things along the way that might change your course, or evolve your ideas of what you’re going after.

You can always shift gears, iterate and try something else. But if you don’t move forward because you are trapped by your fear of judgment and failure, you’ll be stuck thrashing around in a life that’s way too small for you.

That is not a pretty fate for you, and it’s a total loss for the world around you, because we all miss out on your gifts.

I love the Howard Thurman quote: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Trust that if you have a desire, it’s worth pursuing, or at least exploring. All you’re responsible for is heading toward the most appealing horizon you can see right now. You can never know what you’ll see once you get there.