Women In Wellness: Author Candy Marx On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Laugh and spend loads of time with loved ones. Laughing and being with loved ones triggers endorphins, decreases stress hormones, raises one’s vibration and strengthens the immune system — increasing mental, physical and spiritual health.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Candy Marx, Author, a Vegan Wellness Entrepreneur and Influencer, and a Spiritual Mentor. She has been vegan for 9 years and lives in Sydney, Australia with her healthy vegan family.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
Thanks so much for having me! My background was in fashion footwear design. I was a long-term vegetarian and I started looking into veganism. Which is when I learned how detrimental leather production and the commercial dairy and egg industries are. I switched to a wholesome vegan diet while I rebranded my footwear label, but it was during this time that I truly experienced the health benefits of plant-based wholefoods. I was battling minor health issues at the time and they reversed just by changing my diet. At the same time, I was going through a spiritual awakening, so there was a lot of shifting, shedding and growing going on <laughs>. I’ve always loved animals, love to cook, and have always had an interest in health and wellness-and since I experienced the benefits of a wholefoods vegan diet-I studied Shark Biology, Marine Science, and then Master Herbalism and Nutrition. I then went on to study Immunology, and I haven’t looked back. Now, I have an herbal wholefood supplement brand and I help people nourish and heal themselves, while advocating for holistic health, animal welfare and conservation.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
I don’t know if this fits the question exactly, but I had a dream that I had an herbal supplement brand and it was stocked at my local health shop. Fast forward two years, and I was literally packing an order for my local health shop and then I remembered having that dream. When I had the dream two years prior, I had no intention of releasing a supplement brand either. What I took away from that was that I’m on the right track.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I’ve made plenty of small, trivial mistakes but I think the biggest mistake was not believing in myself — believing that I could help heal clients that couldn’t be helped by their doctors and specialists. At the beginning, when a client came to me with severe symptoms or autoimmune issues, it was quite daunting and that responsibility definitely overwhelmed me. But that subsided with more and more experience. The lesson I learned was that I was way too hard on myself, and that I can’t help anyone if I doubt myself.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
I’m a huge believer that holistically healthy people are more likely to care about animals and the environment. So my aim is to help people to be holistically healthy and strong — while advocating for animal welfare and conservation. I’ve had many clients come to me as a last resort: they’ve been to a variety of doctors and specialists without seeing any improvement in their health. And because they’re so focused on their illness and just barely making it through the day, the last thing they care about is their environmental impact or other causes. Once they start healing and focusing holistically on their health, they start making that connection back to nature, they start seeing animals as other beings not just meat-machines, and they don’t want to go back to the food that made them sick in the first place. It’s really quite astounding seeing how much their minds open and shift once they become healthier.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
True wellbeing is holistic: physical, mental and spiritual. If one is out, then the other two are affected. So all three are super important. For me personally, I focus on spiritual health — if it increases my spiritual health, then it naturally increases my mental and physical health as well. I look at everything as energy and vibration. For example, if the food I eat is high vibrational (raw organic fruits and vegetables, sprouts etc), then it will increase my spiritual health, as well as my physical health, which also increases my mental health. But if the food I eat is low vibrational (overprocessed, pesticide-laden, dead foods), then that food decreases my spiritual health, as well as my physical and mental health. Food is energy and vibration, not just nutrition.
These are my top five tips for true wellbeing.
- If you have any ailment, no matter how big or small, do a juice or water fast! With the right regime, fasting is the most powerful way to heal the body. Moreover, intermittent fasting (I like 18 hours fasting/6 hour eating window) and doing regular cleanses also helps to keep the body healthy — especially since we’re exposed to toxins and pollutants every day. The body uses up a lot of energy digesting food, but when we fast, that energy is then used to heal the body. So giving our digestive system a decent rest and detoxing, results in healing. And while detoxing the physical body, detox your environment as well, also making sure to limit your screen time.
- Eat to fuel your immune system and lift your vibration. Eat plenty of organic plant-based wholefoods: lots of raw fruit, sprouts and vegetables particularly greens, and herbs. Even barley grass, wheat grass, alfalfa and/or chlorella are fantastic sources of greens, especially if you’re detoxing. Common household herbs and spices like ginger, turmeric and garlic are great — black garlic is a favorite. Or Irish Sea Moss is fantastic as well. All of these are staples in my home. Also, drink plenty of filtered water or live spring water.
- Meditate, do breathwork and exercise regularly. Meditation is good for the mind, body and soul, and deepens our connection to the Earth and to each other — and to Spiritual Beings, should you wish to. I find it’s also particularly powerful to practice when things feel a little bit crazy or when stress starts to arise. Breathwork is a very powerful way to not only strengthen the lungs, but it also removes physical, mental and spiritual ailments from within the body — and also helps balance the body’s pH levels. The first time that I practiced breathwork, I had an energetic attachment, which felt like a knitting needle move up through my right leg and out through the right-side of my abdomen. It’s particularly powerful when you’re feeling under the weather as well, but it’s a good habit to get in to. And exercising regularly is a no-brainer — movement is super important for overall wellbeing.
- Laugh and spend loads of time with loved ones. Laughing and being with loved ones triggers endorphins, decreases stress hormones, raises one’s vibration and strengthens the immune system — increasing mental, physical and spiritual health.
- Get plenty of Sun, get in the ocean, and get into nature as much as possible! Nature is cleansing and detoxing in itself: from earthing (walking barefooted on the grass), to Sunbasking, to swimming in the ocean and soaking up all of those healing and cleansing salts. Trees, particularly ferns, let off probiotics which we breathe in. The Sun helps the body to synthesize vitamin D, and amongst many other benefits, it also helps the body release a protein called GCMaF, which helps the body fight illnesses and cancers (ironically). But the Sun is also how lifeforce (chi, prana, Universal energy) which powers all life, reaches us on Earth. Speaking from a frequency perspective, when we are vibrating at a higher frequency, it means we are high in lifeforce. We only get sick when our lifeforce is low. The Sun streams lifeforce here on Earth, and the more lifeforce we have, the healthier we are. This in itself should highlight just how important the Sun is to our health and wellbeing. This is why foods like raw fruit are super high vibrational, because they’ve spent months growing on a tree in the Sun, and that tree has spent years growing in the Sun and in the Earth.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I’d start a Holistic Challenge, which would be a movement consisting of a dietary shift towards plant-wholefoods, meditation, breathwork, getting into nature, Sun-gazing, fasting, and detoxing the home from toxic household items. As people progress, then they can add in regular saunas and a colonic (if possible), increase their level of fasting, and detox other parts of their lives, like toxic relationships, not listening to oneself, and people pleasing etc. While it may sound like a lot, if you really think about it, adopting holistic practices is the ultimate form of self-love.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
I don’t think I can even name one. I love learning by doing, so anything that I wish I knew before I started would take away those lessons.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
I’m a huge believer that we are of the Earth, and what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. All four topics are dearest to me, but they’re interconnected as well. For example, we can’t hurt the Earth without hurting ourselves or hurting animals. When we hurt animals or the Earth, someone pays the price along the way, whether mentally, physically or energetically. We’ve seen how much our plastic pollution effects marine animals, and in turn, that plastic is now in the food chain. Everything we do, comes back to us.
Gut health is a huge component in mental health, and things like plastic and glyphosate (round up) which is now in food-as well as how much stress people experience without knowing how to channel it-also messes with gut health, which in turn effects mental health. And genuinely happy people don’t cause harm. Everything that we shouldn’t be doing to the Earth and to animals, comes back to bite us in one way or another. We can’t sacrifice one for the other — we have to align all four. From a vegan perspective, monoculture crops aren’t sustainable — permaculture needs to replace it. And here in Australia, the livestock farmers lose so much because of our droughts — farming livestock (which uses the most water from all industries) in drought-prone areas isn’t sustainable at all, yet nothing changes. Permaculture has been successful in the Middle East, it makes no sense why we haven’t followed suit. We have to change. I believe that we can meet our needs, be happy and healthy while being in a symbiotic and synergistic relationship with the Earth, as well as animals. If we do right by the Earth and right by animals, then we do right by ourselves. Or to flip that, if we truly do right by ourselves, then we do right by the Earth and by animals. You see how interconnected we are? Gosh, I could go on and on about this, but I’ll finish it up here <laughs>.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
I’m mostly active on Instagram @plantfedmama, same handle for Facebook, and at www.plantfedmana.com
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Thank you so much for having me, and for listening to my rants! <laughs>
Women In Wellness: Author Candy Marx On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.