MARTIN: Hello everyone, Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast podcast and today is a delight because I have found two Renegade Nutrition partners. And these two women are a delight. You will see, just give it a moment. So we have Elanie Welch, say hi Elanie.

ELANIE: Hi!

MARTIN: And we have Kay Boyer.

KAY: Hello!

MARTIN: And are partners in business. They are working on something super important and it is called Alive and Well. And we'll be finding out about that about now. Welcome.

ELANIE: Thank you, Martin. Thanks for having us.

KAY: So lovely.

MARTIN: All right, so how did we get here? What is the passion here? How did you actually decide that you're going to just devote so much of your life to this idea?

ELANIE: Wow. Okay. Well, Kay and I have a podcast together, The Renegade Nutrition Podcast. And I think the idea for the documentary, it found us. I guess I'll just put it that way. The idea came to us. I don't feel like it was my idea, per se. I think that it was given to me and Kay and I were tasked with carrying it out. But I think that's the way it is with all magic ideas, is that they come to you and they find you and they make you a partner. So they're looking for somebody who's willing to make them happen, right?

MARTIN: Yeah.

ELANIE: And so that's how I feel about it. But the inspiration behind it, and I don't know why we landed on making this documentary “Alive and Well, Healing from Within,” it seems crazy. I'm not a filmmaker by trade. Neither of us have any experience making any films. Every day, I wonder how crazy I am.

KAY: Very.

ELANIE: But the inspiration behind the idea was my own healing journey, which I was, I've been a nutritionist for closing in on six years now. And I was about a year into at the time trying to get pregnant and we were struggling with infertility, my husband and I. And so as I was making this journey, it ended up taking us three years to conceive our daughter. And I was doing all the right things. So I was eating really well. I was eating in a way that nourished and honored my body and being a nutritionist, I know what that looks like for me. And I was exercising and I was working on my sleep and I was doing the things that I needed to take care of. And at the same time, I wasn't having any success. And I felt like I should be getting pregnant. I shouldn't be having a problem with this, right?

MARTIN: Right.

ELANIE: And so I started having to do a lot of digging and soul searching. And I started learning about other things that really impact our health. So obviously, it's important that we eat in a way that nourishes our bodies and move in a way that nourishes our bodies. But there were also other problems that I wasn't dealing with. There were past emotional traumas. There was a limiting mindset and beliefs, even having fear of getting pregnant, of being a poor mother or turning out to be...

MARTIN: Yeah.

ELANIE: You know what I mean?

MARTIN: I so know. Yeah, this is an interesting mosaic, goes into the whole picture of health, right? I try to help people. I usually started out on my four fingers, calling it toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation, and trauma, all of which have to be resolved and dealt with for wellness to well up.

ELAINE: Exactly. And there were so many pieces to it for me. I learned that I was allergic to wheat, like very allergic to wheat. And so that was something I had to take out. And I learned that my hormones weren't balanced. But I also learned that I was suffering from insomnia, and that was really impacting things. And I needed to work on it nicely.

MARTIN: And I'm wondering how much the wheat had to do with insomnia.

ELAINE: Yes, right, right. And then I learned that the job I was in was toxic and stressful. And it wasn't going to ever allow me to really feel safe. And so I learned the impact of stress and how that was hurting my body. And so I ended up actually quitting that job, knowing I don't know that I'll be able to get pregnant while I'm in this environment every day.

MARTIN: Yeah. This is just so delightful. I want to share the first pregnancy that my wife and I had. Which was, she said to me: “I'm going to resign once I’m pregnant.” And so we were going at it, young people doing their thing. And she was not getting pregnant. I said to her: “Listen, we have it backwards. You hand in your notice.” So she did. She was pregnant on the next period.

ELANIE: Yeah. That’s amazing.

KAY: No! Incredible.

ELANIE: Incredible.

MARTIN: Oh yeah. No it's totally what, just to confirm is that the cart and the horse or the chicken and the egg, you need to always think that it's the within, right? The inner drives the outer.

ELANIE: Yeah.

MARTIN: It's the idea that drives the physicality.

KAY: Exactly.

ELANIE: And it was for me too. After I left my job, I went to somebody who could help me process some past emotional traumas. And she also helped me process limiting beliefs. And so one of those beliefs was that it was safe for me to get pregnant, because we had gotten pregnant and had a miscarriage. And so I was afraid of getting pregnant again, because I was afraid of losing another baby. And so there were things like that I needed to process. And I needed to process some things from my childhood. I needed to process some things from when I was a teenager and an adult, that impacted me. Anger and resentment and bitterness and all these things I was holding onto, all of this, the stress from the workplace, the anger, the resentment, the trapped emotions, the limiting mindsets, none of those were creating a safe and pleasant environment for my body to be and to nourish a growing baby.

And as soon as I quit my job, I had a couple of sessions where we addressed those limiting mindsets and I went through and processed the emotional traumas. And within just a few months, I was pregnant after three years of trying. And so that was ultimately at the same time that we were going through all of that because it was several years. Kay and I had started the podcast and we're also learning about all of these things from guests, which is why I knew to try them. So we would have a guest on who would talk about the importance of emotional trauma and how emotions impact your body or the importance of stress and how stress impacts your body. And then I think, okay, I need to go try that piece. So then I would start working on that piece. So I was learning from other people all of these things.

MARTIN: Well, the universe was sending you the messages. You know how it goes, right?

ELAINE: Yes, absolutely. And at the end of it, I thought, I as a nutritionist, I've learned, you know, I've worked in clinical settings where people who implement the right nutrition don't necessarily get better. They don't reach the level of healing that they want.

MARTIN: Yeah. We need to stop and decide what right nutrition is.

ELAINE: Yes, yes, yes. And that's kind of your specialty, right? Which we learned from our podcast.

ELAINE: But let's say they're like me and they're eating in a way that honors their body, nourishes their body, works with their body. They've removed the things that are problems that are toxins for them. And it's still not improving. Then I thought there are so many factors that play into this. Maybe they need to work on their sleep. Maybe they need to work on their stress. Maybe they need to quit their job and find something that is actually in alignment with their values and their mission for life. Maybe they have a past emotional trauma that they haven't processed and they're holding onto the feelings from that. So that was ultimately the longest version, that was where the idea, the inspiration for the documentary came from. Let's tell people about this. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. Let's help people find the right way forward.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, consider this when you're filming your movie. The child that is going to choose you to be their mother needs to feel safe coming in. So until you are an environment for which this child is ready to actually nest in. It's not coming in. It's waiting.

ELANIE: And that was a big piece too for me. I actually worked with somebody who had some intuition with that. She was doing some massage work on my body and she said, I can't tell you why I'm getting this message, but this message keeps coming to me. She said, your child's spirit is not ready yet and they'll come when they're ready. And that was a big piece of it, too. I mean, I had to be ready. The child had to be ready. The environment had to be ready. So all of those things had to align.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KAY: Which really brings in like the podcast and the documentary. So, through the podcast, we had so many guests that just showed us a new way of being. And honestly, the documentary was like, we want to share with the world a new way of being. And we had so many experts on it. We need to film this and we need to show the world because we all just need a new way of being. And what we need.

MARTIN: Right on. So did you come to it in a similar manner, Kay? Or not as much drama?

KAY: Well, about coming into health and healing and caring. Well, gosh, I've always cared about just healthy living and being your best and a Elaine’s a nutritionist and I'm just a health enthusiast. I just like supporting and loving and sharing.

MARTIN: Don’t be discounting it. It only takes 1000 hours of learning.

KAY: Yeah. Fair. Fair. So I just could see what health looked like around me and what it looked like for the people who were thriving and living and loving. And I just looked at what they were like. And I just saw what sickness and dying looked like. And so I just am always choosing life and vitality. So I just leaned in with Elaine and when she's like: “Let's bring on this guest.” I'm like: “Yes! This is serving life and vitality. Let's do it.” And then when she was like: “Let's do the documentary.” I'm like: “Yes, my mission is to share light and love everywhere. So I'm in. Let's do it.”

MARTIN: Right. All right. So the mission, as far as I know is to try and finish this thing, right?

KAY: Yes.

MARTIN: So what's the gap between where we are today and where we want to be? We need to probably beg for money everywhere we can. Yes?

KAY: Yep. Money and time.

MARTIN: Money and time. Okay.

ELANIE: Yeah. The money is interesting. The money is out there, and I believe that. I took a filmmaking class and then a film funding class to learn about the ins and outs of creating a film because I am the producer and director and I don't have experience in that prior to this film.

MARTIN: Again, don't overestimate the experts. They’re just two weeks ahead of you.

KAY: Yeah.

ELANIE: Yeah. Right. And so I just thought, I wanted to get as much information as I could. And the leader of the class is a big believer in manifestation. She said: “The money is out there. You just have to know where to look. But it's out there. There are people out there who will want to fund your project.” And it was really helpful for me too because the leader of the class really loved our project. I mean, really did, and really has supported it the whole way and has believed in it and thinks it can be big, which is really honoring for me.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KAY: And it won the award.

ELANIE: Yeah. And we won an award after we began filming from her foundation: “From the heart productions.” And they gave us a hot film in the making award. So we have our first set of Laurel leaves, which is really fun because we only started filming in June of 2024. And it will take a few years to finish. But yeah, the money is the biggest thing. I looked at grants, and I have a lot of years of research experience. I had grants and funding from the NIH, so I knew how to apply for grants. But when you start looking at grants in the film industry, they serve very specific agendas. And because our film is not going to serve those agendas, and in fact, it goes a little bit against the status quo when we talk about the world of nutrition.

MARTIN: Right.

ELANIE: Because we're not promoting a vegan diet or a vegetarian diet, which there is a lot of funding for that. That's why you see so many of those films made because they're so much more funding available.

MARTIN: So this would be agenda driven by a foundation that happens to have an agenda.

ELANIE: Exactly exactly. So there's, that is just how it is. And when I started looking at grants, I couldn't qualify for a lot of them because I wasn't going to promote the agendas they wanted me to promote. And so then it turned to, okay, well, forget it. I applied for I think, eight grants. I did all the work. I put in hours and hours and I went through the process and I'm glad I did it. But at the end of it, I felt so frustrated by it. I thought, I'm not applying to these anymore because I have no desire to serve these agendas. I'm not going to change the heart and mission of my film to get money. And so I thought the people who want to see this project come forth will be the ones who help us bring it forth. And that's when we switched over to crowdfunding. So that's where we're right now is it's going to have to be grassroots crowdfunding.

MARTIN: I had a thought which was, if ever I fall on hard times, I'm not going to be looking for help among the rich who can easily afford to do it. I'm going to go looking for help among the poor who know what it feels like to be on edge.

ELANIE: Beautiful. That’s true.

MARTIN: Because you can get others to help you because they understand you or understand the situation you're in. Anyway, that's what I've seen. I've seen that people who don't have so much in excess are more willing to share. And yet, of course, yeah, to the likes of Bill Gates, this would be like a fart in the wind if I may.

KAY: Yeah. Yeah. In mind with his agendas.

ELANIE: It’s so true. And I am so much more likely when I see a good film that's trying to crowdfund. I'm so likely to pitch in and give them money because I'm like, I know what you're going through. It's so true. Yeah.

KAY: Yeah. Right. And as far as local fundraising, we've done, Elaine and I have put on a farm to table dinner night fundraiser with all locally grown food, which was awesome. That was pretty successful. And then we've done another crowd, we did a wellness women's retreat. So like what you said, we’ve had amazing over $25,000 of worth of fundraising done with our local women and people who aren’t millionaires. People just like us between our wellness retreat and the farm to table, we've had amazing support with the common person.

MARTIN: So that's why we're here. We're appealing to the common people here, the Life Enthusiasts who are seeing this watching this and saying, well, here are women ready to help the likes of themselves. The next generation who is facing these complications brought upon us them by the industrial age, we have totally soiled our nests with doing what we've been doing. And we have messed up our attitudes and approaches. We have been schooled in ways that distort our understanding of reality, nature, reproduction, health, wellness. So all of that needs to be set again, unpacked, restated, and repaired.

ELANIE: Exactly.

MARTIN: And so me, me looking back at it, right? I'm looking at my kids and my kids are having their kids just now, right? I have two little grandsons, presently three and five years old. And I am so grateful for my kids to have invested and sacrificed to be parents, because I know what it took for me and my wife to do that, because if we don't, this will be the last generation. We'll just fade out. All right. So that's me going philosophical on it. I am so appreciative of the fact that the young ones are despite difficulty willing to become parents.

KAY: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Even now with my kids to make sure that they eat, right? My husband's like: “Settle down, you're too extreme.” I go: “No, I want grandbabies. Stop it.” And I'm like: “I have an agenda. I want healthy, alive and well, grandbabies. Let's go. Yep.”

MARTIN: Yeah. That’s it.

ELANIE: And I think for me, so much of it is creating and spreading hope. So, the documentary, what it's going to do is it's following the stories of several families as they're healing from chronic and autoimmune diseases. And it's following those healing journeys and the things that they implement with the goal of providing all of our viewers with the tools that they need to undergo their own healing journey. And so at the end of it, what I, what we hope to accomplish is to get the film out to a wide number of people and equip those people with everything they need to heal from any disease. And so one of the families that we're following is in Canada and the husband has early onset Alzheimer's and he's only 49. And he and his wife had children later in life. And his wife has rheumatoid arthritis and other undiagnosed autoimmune things going on and chronic fatigue. And their girls are three and five years old. And basically the doctors have given Dennis the husband three to five years to be in the state that he's in before he becomes unrecognizable to his family, and they become unrecognizable to him. And we're about six months into his healing journey from something that we've been told as a society is not, is incurable, right? We're basically told Alzheimer's, once it starts, that's the end. There's no coming back. We know the medications for that particular condition don't really do much. And so his doctors basically just said, you have this, you will go another couple of years, get your affairs in order. Here's some medication that probably won't do.

MARTIN: Yeah. We'll hold it back for a while, but then the well breaks and it's over.

ELANIE: Yeah, exactly. And in the six months that we've been working with Dennis and we've really just dialed it in probably within the last three, he's already having improvements in memory and cognition the other day they were driving around and he recognized a building where he and his wife had had a market. And he gets lost normally when they're driving. So for him to not only recognize where they were, but recognize a specific building was huge. And when Kay and I first started working with them and talking with them and we went and filmed their first interviews, he would lose track of what he was saying. He would forget what he was saying in mid-sentence or he would forget what the word was and he'd get really frustrated. And he had to rely on his wife quite a lot to help him say what he needed to say.

And this last time that we just talked with them, we had a little Zoom meeting with them to check in and see how things were going. You would never even know he had anything. Any condition. I mean, he sounded like a new person. He said his energy is better. He's remembering to take his supplements now. He actually reminds his wife to take her supplements. He didn't have any problems with losing his train in mid-sentence. So that's just with three months of really beginning to dial in simply the nutrition piece and we haven't even implemented everything else yet. And so I think it's like there's so much that we're told as a society is hopeless whether it's Alzheimer's or cancer, heart disease or whatever, ALS, dementia. We're told these things are incurable but for every incurable person out there, there's somebody who has been cured from the disease. And so if they could do it, why couldn't you? And that's the message we're trying to get out is he hears the tools, here’s the things. It is possible. You have to believe it's possible. You have to tell your body it's possible. And so here's a film that puts you in that mindset and gives you what you need to accomplish that.

MARTIN: Alright. So how are we going to do this? Do you have a fundraising page or some such?

ELANIE: Yeah. So I just created a new one, so we did our first initial round of crowdfunding. We ran it from November to December and then that campaign closed and I just am opening a new one today that's going to be ongoing. So, there's a couple types of campaign you can have. We have some short ones that are sort of like sprints where we need to raise money quickly and so we set a deadline on it and we really push. And then we have an ongoing one where anybody who hears this at any time could donate and it goes to the project overall. So, ultimately what we need to raise for the project is going to be close to $200,000 and we've raised so far for about $22,000. So I would say we're about 10% of the way there, which is great. For grassroots, for crowdfunding.

MARTIN: Okay. So we need people to drop in $100 and we need 2,000 of them.

KAY: Yes. Exactly. That's the people that care.

ELANIE: Yeah. Exactly.

MARTIN: That should not be insurmountable, right?

ELANIE: No, right. It seems,

MARTIN: All right. Well, let's see if we can find 2,000 good men as they call it. 2,000 humans.

KAY: And what's the websites, Elaine?

ELANIE: So I have to publish the campaign to get the actual link, but we're on Allyra, A-l-l-y-r-a. Martin, do you do show notes?

MARTIN: We do. It'll be posted as a link.

KAY: Okay, we’ll have it in the show notes.

ELANIE: So let’s do show notes because the actual link is kind of a bunch of strings of letters and numbers and it's going to be gibberish. But it's under Renegade Nutrition Productions on Allyra and the project name is: “Alive and Well Healing from Within.” So you should be able to find it that way as well. But the easiest way would be to go to our website, which is therenegadenutritionist.com. And then if you click the documentary tab in the upper right corner, you'll see a donate now button on that page. So if you go to the documentary page, you can learn about the documentary. You can learn more about what we're doing.

MARTIN: So if this person, whoever this is listening on just their earbuds, so it's the renegade nutritionist, only one of them, even though you're looking at two, therenegadenutritionist.com, go there,

KAY: Documentary tab and donate now.

ELANIE: Yes. Yes. That's the easiest way. And you can also go to aliveandwelldocumentary.com.

MARTIN: All right. Awesome.

ELANIE: And that's the page. So that'll be the easiest way.

MARTIN: So as I see it at the end of it, we will be helping people create pregnancies that they were struggling with, create wellness, retain memories, just live life. Yeah.

ELANIE: Live pain free. Have the energy they need to be happy, healthy and thriving, because who wants to live if your life is not worth living. and health is the way to have a life that's worth living. So being in chronic pain, having total chronic fatigue, being tired, too tired to put your kids to bed at night. Who wants that, right? I mean, it's not just about not being sick. It's about, that's the whole title, It's about being well, being alive and well. It's not just about being alive. And so we want to give people the vibrancy, the energy, what they need to feel good. And for them to contribute on their own mission for the world, what's the vision and mission they've been given to carry out? And are they well enough to carry that out? So that's what we want to give to people.

MARTIN: Yeah. I think you're going about it the right way, telling a story and showing the story and unfold the timeline is really the way to do it.

ELANIE: Yeah.

KAY: And showing all the modalities of healing. So we have experts all across the world helping and we've had a lot of donations and people volunteering to help them, and just expert services and it's really neat. Everyone has came together to help them. It's really gorgeous.

ELANIE: And if any of your listeners want to give Martin, we can just say we'd love to have an interview too, with Martin. So if you're a listener and you're a fan of Martin's podcast, if you want to give, you'll help fund the way for us to get to where Martin is so we can film an interview with him too and talk about that. We can make it into the documentary.

MARTIN: Okay. I will here I will hereby comment the free donation of my time.

KAY: Okay, Elanie, I feel like you need to share Jason as well. Another subject in the documentary.

ELANIE: Yeah. Our other subject that we have right now is Jason and he's in Bend, Oregon. And we're actually getting ready to wrap up his story. So he came to us with rheumatoid arthritis as well as a huge amount of gastrointestinal distress that was caused by the medications that were prescribed to him for the rheumatoid arthritis that really messed up his GI system. And we are finishing his story because now six months in, he's almost completely better. He has no joint pain. He's moving freely and he's learned that stress is the thing that really triggers the gastrointestinal distress. And so he's actually working on what can I do to improve how he responds to stress, right? Because we can't remove stress from our lives. But like myself and your wife, Martin, he's looking at, I think it might be time for me to leave my job. It causes me a lot of stress. It's not bringing me, it brings him happiness, but it's not necessarily enough to counterbalance the.

MARTIN: Well, it's the response, right? We need to learn to respond to the inputs in other ways.

ELANIE: Yes. Yes. Exactly. So we're giving him the tools he needs to help his body respond appropriately to stress and he's looking and evaluating his life of what can I do, what's bringing me stress, what can I change? And so it's twofold. But yeah, that's really exciting. We've had great success with him, excited to be wrapping up his story. And then that brings it to that we will have some openings for more subjects. So if anybody is interested in applying, they can go to the same website, the renegadenutritionist.com, go to the documentary tab and they can look at the application process too. We also have a button for them to apply to be in the film. So we will be opening it up in the next couple of months to bring a new family on that we begin working with in the documentary.

And if it's, if you are struggling with something, a chronic disease and you're committed to improving your health, it's a good place for you. So there's a lot of advantages to being a subject in our film, which is having like access to the experts that we're having them all work with and getting the opportunity to work through improving your nutrition, your sleep, your rest, your recovery, your mindset, we go through emotional healing with you. So we give them all the tools they need at a greatly discounted price and we're able to supply supplements to all of our documentary subjects at no cost. So if you're somebody who's really been struggling with your health, it's a good opportunity to take control. If you're willing to share that journey with the world and you want to do your part to make the world a better place. So.

KAY: And supplements shout out to Standard Process.

ELANIE: Yeah, Standard Process is one of several companies, Nathan Bryan's N-101, he’s supplying nitric oxide to Dennis for brain health. Body Bio has been supplying us a PC, phosphatidylcholine supplement to Dennis. And Dr. John Lewis with Daily Brain Care has been supplying Daily Brain.

MARTIN: How come you never ask me for our super foods?

ELANIE: Oh, well, hey! I’m just learning about this now.

KAY: Yeah, we can get that on in the list too.

ELANIE: Yeah, yes.

MARTIN: All right.

ELANIE: Yeah, tell me more. You'll have to tell us more about that because I'm not so well,

MARTIN: We manufacture our own line of super foods and we have the baseline, we call them foundational. And we have four different ones in that, light, medium, heavy and all lights on kind of thing. And then we also have specialized, which would be something to deal with apoptosis, undoing the cells that have gone abnormal. We have one for dealing with certain cardiovascular health, clearing and cleaning and repairing. We have one to deal with liver issues, we call it the New Liver. And we have one for dealing with the gastrointestinal. And we have one for the kidney and pancreas for people who are dropping a lot of weight, the sarcopenia problem.

ELANIE: Okay.

MARTIN: And then we also have one for the bones and connective tissue, which would be, many people don't die of it, but it's miserable when you see them aging quickly.

ELANIE: Yeah, absolutely. Yes, well.

KAY: Amazing.

MARTIN: We have all that.

ELANIE: By all means. Let's talk about that because yes, that's what we're looking to do. And then in return, what we're doing is we're helping highlight those products that are so powerful that hold those healing capacities. So that's the trade off. And that's why it's been wonderful. We've had so much support from our product sponsors and we'd love to add your products to that line because then we get to highlight, we get to highlight the brands who are doing it right.

MARTIN: It's called product placement.

ELANIE: Exactly. Product placement. And it really helps our,

MARTIN: Yeah, you’re watching a movie and it's people who you would expect to be driving a fancy car are driving a Toyota Prius. Oh, because Toyota put a Prius into the movie.

KAY: Yes, yes, exactly.

ELANIE: Exactly. Yeah. And it's a win-win because there are products that really do work. And so we help people find those products and then the companies benefit because their products get seen. So yes, exactly. And our subjects benefit because they're getting hundreds of dollars worth of supplements at no cost every month, which is huge. You know, when you're on a healing journey, especially when you have something like Alzheimer's where we're throwing everything we have at it, that could add up. Dennis’s bills alone would be over 600 a month for supplements if we didn't have these companies providing them at no cost. So it's been a huge gift for our subjects too.

MARTIN: Yeah, awesome. Well, I think we should not stretch it. This is a fundraiser video. Here I am endorsing these women for their mission to get a movie out that's going to speak to the next generation. What do we need to do for our parents? And what do we need to do to become parents? And what do we need to do to keep ourselves strong and well enough for the journey?

ELANIE: Exactly. Exactly.

KAY: Well, thanks for sharing our message, Martin.

MARTIN: It's a pleasure. The Renegade Nutritionist and The Alive and Well Documentary.

ELANIE: Yeah. Alive and Well Documentary.

MARTIN: I'm so sorry. All right. Yes. Thank you Kay, thank you Elanie.

KAY: Thank you, friends. Go be alive and well.

ELANIE: Yes. Thank you.

MARTIN: Okay. Oh, if you're listening to it, this comes to life-enthusiast.com. Come and visit us there and ask questions. We'll give you answers. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Podcast. Thank you.