Listening to What’s Right for Your Body

It’s time to move beyond restrictive diets, calorie counting, synthetic supplements, and lengthy lists of foods to avoid. The team at Sakara Life wants you to focus on what you can eat. Sakara Life co-founders Danielle DuBoise and Whitney Tingle are revolutionizing health and wellness through whole food nutrition—providing the body with essential nutrients it needs to function at its best.

“The heartbreak of wellness right now is that it has turned into another diet or a crazy to-do list,” DuBoise explains. “That is the antithesis of nourishment and taking care of yourself—thinking that you have to pressure yourself into doing something or you need to be perfect. We aim to tune down the noise that is in wellness and encourage people to get to know their bodies.”

On The World’s First Podcast, Erin and Sara Foster discuss with the co-founders why it matters what you put in your body and how to take better care of yourself. They explore the story behind Sakara Life and what separates them from “nutritionism-focused” brands. 

A business born from personal experience

Erin explains, like clothing, that the health and wellness space is saturated, making it difficult to stand out in the market. Sakara Life’s remarkable success began as a simple idea in 2011. DuBoise, who struggled with disordered eating patterns throughout her life, had an epiphany:  food is medicine. 

“It’s not about what you should not eat. We idolize the ‘no’ list. At Sakara, we talk about what to eat. The idea of perfection is not my world anymore,” DuBoise says.

In 2012, DuBoise and Tingle started the plant-based meal company with just $700 from a 500-square-foot New York apartment. Today, the business has more than tripled in profit. With early endorsements from Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop and subsequent media coverage, Sakara has grown into a profitable nationwide service.

“I think it has to be one of the toughest businesses. It gets more difficult as we scale. We are sourcing food from all over the world. We are sourcing high quality, fresh food that is delivered at your door. It has to taste good and look delicious,” DuBoise says. 

Tingle says the company prioritizes incorporating more plants into their customers’ diets. Ninety percent of Sakara Life clients are omnivores who use the service to get higher quality and more diverse plant foods.

What you put in your body matters

DuBoise tried countless diets throughout her life: “The grapefruit diet, the cabbage diet, the South Beach diet, the Atkins diet—the craziest shit. It left me feeling like an alien in my body. I had no idea, I could feel good in my body,” she says.

After studying pre-med in college and working at a hospital, she switched her focus to nutrition. Later, DuBoise earned her Master’s degree in functional medicine and human nutrition. Through studying how  food impacts the body, she began to better understand gut health and the microbiome. 

“There is a gut-brain connection, a gut-skin connection, a gut-liver connection. You should base your diet on whole foods, mostly plants, and a lot of variety. That is the key to a healthy gut,” DuBoise says.

Tingle’s wellness journey centered on chronic acne: “I was trying everything from the outside to to clear my skin. But it wasn’t until I focused on the inside—my gut health and getting enough nutrition into my body—that my skin started to change.”

Practical tips for better self-care

It’s important to understanding what you put are putting in your body is crucial. DuBoise advises avoiding says that any food that is ultra-processed foods, items cooked in hexane (which is used to make seed oils), or those put to a high degree of heat. 

She also warns against the fear mongering of nutritionism, which focuses on the health implications of individual food products: “With nutritionism, there is always a villain and a good guy. At any given point in history, when it comes to diet trends, you can always point to who the hero is and who the villain is.”

Another tip is to incorporate diverse foods into your diet. “There really isn’t a food on the earth that does not have a yin to its yang. There are things it can do to promote health, and there are things that can not be good for you. That’s why you focus on a diversity of foods,” DuBoise says.

Erin admits that this can be hard: “We are creatures of habit. We eat the same thing every day because we know how we are going to respond to it. So we have to learn to diversify our food.”