Show Notes
In this episode of
Totality Living Well, Scott and Michelle introduce themselves and how they came to be health coaches in Knoxville, Tennessee.
- Scott and Michelle began their health journeys early in life.
- Scott remembers meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger and admiring his bodybuilding as much as his ballet training.
- Michelle questioned everything as a kid. She wanted to figure out why her family members suffered from diabetes and heart conditions. She even questioned what lunch ladies were serving her in school, which led to some awkward conversations.
- Having lived in both Colorado and Tennessee, Scott and Michelle acknowledge the health gaps between Western and Southern America.
- The couple discuss how their love story intertwined with their health and business goals.
- Ebbs and flows are a part of everyone’s lifestyle. When your healthy habits are right on track, Michelle says that’s when real life will set you off balance. As an adult, parent, and businesswoman, she’s been there and survived.
Transcript
Michelle: Welcome to the Totality Living Well podcast where we probe into the nitty-gritty aspects of health: the good, the offbeat, and even the controversial things that aren't always discussed. Whether you've had a long-standing curiosity or simply want to know more about a topic, we're here to explore the solutions and answers to empower you in body, mindset, and spirit.
Scott: Hey guys, Scott and Michelle Williams here. Healthy living consultants, certified in nutrition fitness and neuromuscular massage.
Michelle: We’re parents, business owners, and understand the challenges that life can bring with keeping the elements of your own health on track while ensuring that the kids, parents, pets, and loved ones in your life are also taken care of with the resources they need for health and longevity.
Scott: We're so glad you joined us.
Michelle: Welcome listeners to the introductory Totality Living Well podcast. My name is Michelle Williams, and I am joined today by my husband Scott Williams. We are co-owners of Totality Living Well, a health and wellness company based out of Knoxville, Tennessee. And we are stepping into the podcast world to share our life experiences and expertise in health and wellness, and we are so honored that you have chosen to listen to our first episode.
Scott: Thank you for joining us today. We're excited to talk a little bit about who we are and how we came about. Michelle and I met here in Knoxville about seven years ago, and we both were looking at, just, the community and basically what we felt was missing here. And basically just the concepts of health and wellness, and how people actually looked at this community and health and wellness, both coming from a different geographical area of the country. And we both looked here and said, “Wow, we could really do some great things here.”
Michelle: Yeah, one of the things that we noticed, too, that the idea of health and wellness for a lot of people entailed getting a prescription filled, and then going to grab their salad at a fast-food restaurant, and maybe just doing a little bit of something here and there—mowing the yard for a little exercise. And we wanted to introduce people to a way of living that we had grown accustomed to, especially out in the West. We each came from Colorado, where it's pretty much a health mecca, but I guess we've always lived a life of health and wellness. So, Scott, why don't you just share with everybody how you got started?
Scott: Yeah, when I was a young kid—I actually grew up in the Midwest, I mean Indiana, and up there was meat and potato country. They did three vegetables and boiled them to death and that was about it. But once I moved out to Colorado, I saw just a little bit more about how to treat your body, really. And then I got an opportunity. My father took me to an early contest of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Columbus, Ohio.
So, I got to meet Arnold initially and was very inspired by him. But then also for people that are of our age range, I also got to meet a gentleman named Jack LaLanne. And Jack LaLanne was an icon of health wellness in the early 1900s, and he was just very inspiring. And the guy was probably in his 80s at that point in time, was strong as a house. And he just gave me advice, and he said, basically when it came to nutrition, he said he made it and he said if it came in packages, he didn't buy it. It was fruits and vegetables, if he wanted pasta, he made his own pasta, if he wanted bread, he made his own bread.
He said, “You've got to stay away from the additives that are out there.” And he says that's the way for him on how he was able to keep himself in such a great condition of health and wellness. Which, you know, it went back for me as a young teenager, and I was so inspired by that. I was like, okay, right away, I went home, and it's like, I'm going to have better eating habits, I'm going to hit the gym, I'm going to exercise, I'm going to take care of myself, and just continue that the way that was, basically. And I just really got inspired by that. And I decided I wanted to help others as well.
Michelle: So, Jack LaLanne asked you a question when he first met you, that actually was a life-changing question. And I ask that, a lot, of my first-time clients, too, and that question was, “How frequently do you poop, son?” [laughs].
Scott: [laughs]. Exactly. And it's all about the fact is when Jack, his motto was when you ate, you should go to the bathroom. You should poop within 15 to 20 minutes after every time you eat. And, basically, if you're not doing that, then your system is not working properly.
Michelle: Yeah and I think so many people, just when it comes to digestion like that, that's something that they don't really even address or think about the frequency. So, the way you eat and the way you move, all of that not only affects your digestion for the better but it also, it helps with cellular turnover and all of that. And that's just—it all fits together, and I think you saw that at an early age.
Scott: Yeah, definitely. It changed my life in the way I was doing things, was before I was eating fast food, I was going out, I was doing stuff like that, and probably I didn't have very good bowel movements at that point in time. But once I got on a health train, but more vegetables in my life, and more fruits, and more things that—it made me feel so much better energetically. And it also made me just perform better as a kid. I could think better in school, I could perform better in sports. It just all around made me a better person in that way.
Michelle: And then you got to meet Arnold again after you started walking that healthy lifestyle. So, tell us a little bit about that.
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I got to meet Arnold a second time there. And Arnold was just such an inspiration because even though he was a bodybuilder, and everybody knew him for his muscle mass, he still was iconic because he was doing things that people didn't even think about. Arnold did ballet. And if you can believe the fact that a gentleman that size actually did ballet because, at that point in time, they didn't have any formal yoga, they didn't have a lot of formal stretching ideas. But he did ballet, which opened his body up, to be able to keep him injury free, to keep him flexible, and to be able to train harder and still care for his body in that way.
Michelle: It's almost like a lot of those principles and that line of thinking is starting to come around and be more widely received, and even taught now, which is kind of cool because both of those guys were just so iconic and before their time. They just set the tone in the bar for health and wellness.
Michelle: It's really cool that that all led to your next steps. And that's how you got started with your education.
Scott: Yeah, so I guess basically, from that point on, I just knew that I wanted to help people. I dabbled in a couple different types of jobs, and things just weren't right for me. So, I basically knew that through personal training, through nutritional consulting, and then also 10 years, 15 years later, I went on and did neuromuscular massage work and trained in that because I started seeing the benefits of helping people that had injuries, helping people stay away from injuries, and helping people get through pain that they didn't even know they had, and how they could take that and get that out of their lives so that they actually could physically move because people would say, “I just can't exercise because my back hurts too bad.” “I can't exercise because I've got this bad neck.”
But if you found a way to actually help people change that, that didn't take any effort, necessarily, for them, except for to lay on the table and actually get work done on them, and then to find out what the possibilities were. And then that always opened the door for me, too. People will say, “Well, how should I eat?” Or, “How many days a week, do you think I need to exercise?” So, basically, we could get them healthy on the table, we could change the mindset that they had. And then they start inching into interest in other realms of taking care of themselves.
Michelle: And then at one point, you started helping people move, and you had this cool idea. Tell us a little bit about what you did.
Scott: Yeah, so actually, um, when I was a young teenager, I decided that I was tired of the large gym scenes and all the hype about it—because all they wanted to do in the gyms were sell memberships, sell memberships, and then hope people didn't show up. Because if people didn't show up, they could keep selling memberships. If everybody showed up, they would be over-occupancy. So, I thought about it and I was talking to one of my clients at the time, and I said, “I got this great idea.” And she was a really sweet lady. She was an attorney, I think, in her probably late 50s. I had helped her—when she came to me she had a hard time lifting things. Her and her husband—I mean, her husband was like a big marathoner and she was having a hard time keeping up with him.
And basically, I got her to the point where she was curling 25-pound dumbbells, and she was able to go on hikes with her husband at the end of the day and keep up with him. And so she was so excited that she wanted to help me in any way possible. So, I said, “Okay, this is my idea.” So, she said, “You know what? Come see my banker.” So, what I did in the early 90s, basically, was I started a mobile gym. So, I took a 35-foot school bus, renovated it, put equipment into it, stereo system, lights, everything you could do, and then I rolled around to businesses and homes, and I trained people in the Denver Metro area.
Michelle: I love that story and I think just—I love your heart too. Of course, I'm married to you, but you've got a great heart. And then after you did that little journey with the bus, I like what you did with the bus.
Scott: Well, so at that point time, when I decided to park the bus—the hard thing about the bus was the metro area was getting too busy, it was hard to get around, and truly, I needed a crew of buses. I needed five to be around different places at different locations for when people needed to be trained. So, I decided to park that situation and I got out of it, and actually got myself outdoors a little bit more. So, while I was sitting on this bus, I didn't know what to do, I thought I bought—I tried to sell it, nobody was really that interested in it. And then someone had called me up and they said, “Hey, we’re really interested in your bus. We saw it.” That thing. And so basically, they came over to look at it and ended up being a family. And they were basically, like, living out of a tent. And they wanted to purchase the bus so they could actually live out of it.
Michelle: I love it. And I love how your heart speaks through all of that. And I think that's part of the reason that we started working together, too. We met in Knoxville, Tennessee, after coming out here from Colorado, and you were trying to get your business up and running, and my professional background for so many years had been in marketing. And after we had become friends, I said, “Hey, let me just try pitching you to a couple of these TV stations and see what happens.”
I said, “But the first thing that we need to do is, I want you to start with one word that we're going to base your whole media campaign on, your publicity.” And I said, “Take a few days, that's all you got to do.” And because this is an important word, and we need to really think carefully about that.
And you said, “I don't have to think. I know my word.” I said, “What is that word?” You said, “Integrity.” I think I fell in love with you that day. [laughs]. I was like this guy really not only walks this walk, but he's got heart behind it. So, it was pretty easy to fall in love with you after that, and to start a business, and sharing our stories together and how they paralleled.
Scott: You know, and I think that it was a great experience that we fell in love at that point in time. And by talking to you, I want you to tell them a little bit about your story and what drew you into health and wellness.
Michelle: Okay, so I am 52. And so back in the ’70s, we did not have internet, we did not have all of this immediate access to information. We had to go to the library and look things up or read the encyclopedias, and what you got from those encyclopedias, that was what you're going to get. And I was always interested in healthy eating just from a young age and noticed that a lot of my relatives kept coming down with the same types of illnesses, diabetes, gallbladder problems, heart disease, high cholesterol. Just, you name it and it was just kind of the norm.
And I started thinking, “Why? Why does everybody get that when they get older?” And it was my maternal grandmother who came down with gallbladder disease. And I thought, “Well, how does that happen? What does the gallbladder do?”
So, I was seven and started researching what the gallbladder did. And I learned that it metabolizes fats. And then I started looking at what we had in our foods in the way of fats, and then how we kind of started eating a lot of fats with just everything we did, a lot of processed foods. And by the time I was in fourth grade, I thought, “Well, what's it going to be like if I take 30 days, and go without sugar?” Just 30 days, no sugar at all.
And then at the end of that 30 days, just binge on sugar, and go to McDonald’s, and have a Sprite, and have a Big Mac, and an apple pie, or an ice cream, or anything like that. And my mom thought it was kind of funny. And so I started reading the labels. And that became not so funny to her because I was questioning everything. And then at school—I was in fourth grade—started asking the lunch ladies about what kind of sugar was in their food and nobody could tell me so I started boycotting school food.
And it really wasn't funny when the principal called to meet with my mom because nobody else wanted to eat school lunch. And so that was that weird time period where everybody was like, “I want to be a movie star. I want to be a nurse, I want to be a teacher. I want to be—” anything but a nutritionist and I wanted to be a nutritionist.
So, it was a fun thing for me and my grandfather. After he retired from the military, he had a huge garden in Tennessee—or in Mississippi, rather. So, I would help him with that big garden and I learned a lot about organic gardening, which is still a big passion today with our garden, that you get to till for me every year.
Scott: Of course I do.
Michelle: You love me. [laughs].
Scott: I do love you. That's the reason I do it.
Michelle: But we do grow some superfoods. And so anyway, that was the beginning of that. And then fast forward to when I could go to college. And I did get a scholarship to a great school that had a great nutrition program. I was 17, and I chose communication of all things.
But it was always a passion of mine and came back to it full circle. I now have all of the certifications in that. And I was really interested in youth nutrition when the boys were first born, and wanted to get them off to a good start. So, that was the first big interest and the first certification that I had to help them. And you and I started talking, and we realized that all generations needed good nutrition. And then I also had just my passion, hobby of running and exercising, and then I just fell in love with weight training after I met you. So, there’s our story.
Scott: And that's great. It's one of those things that you just evolve through life, and you really and truly grow, and you add more tools to the toolbox as you go along. And that's the nice thing about it, being a little bit more of a seasoned professional in this business is, the more people you touch and the more clients that you have, the more challenges you've seen, and the more things that you can teach them on how to apply those challenges. And all of us have challenges in life. Even today, we have our own challenges.
But you have to find and look at what types of things will actually help you. And there's a lot of professionals out there, and they'll say, “You just follow my checklist. You do this, this, and this. You do it this way and you're going to have the perfect body, you're going to have the perfect life, you're going to have the perfect kids, you're going to have the perfect job.” But realistically, that doesn't work that way. Nobody out there has that perfection, and that might have worked for one individual, but that doesn’t work for other people, and so you just cannot follow a standard out there. And so those are some of the things that we want to help dive into.
Michelle: Yeah. And we really do take a comprehensive approach to health and wellness. And it's more than just your body which, that's a lot of what brought us into our health journey was just the interest in how movement, and nutrition, and flexibility, and all of that adds together. But then there's so much more to health.
And the component of your mindset, and what you tell yourself, and the way you think, and then also your spirit. And that's what differentiates us from animals, and I think a lot of times that's overlooked with people looking at a comprehensive health and wellness program. So, when we started Totality, we said that it's going to be Totality Living Well, in body, mindset, and spirit. So, in this podcast that we are about to pursue, we're excited to just delve into all kinds of topics that maybe aren't always first and foremost in the media, or social media, or in the articles. And we're going to look at some things that can be practical in helping people move along.
And I know that as a certified youth nutrition specialist, there have been many, many days with our now grown—almost grown sons who are 18 and 16, where I was like, “Do I have to really feed them today? [laughs]. It's kind of a pain. I'm getting tired of this.” And so, as parents and as business owners, we understand the challenges, and we understand real life, and we're not going to try to act like we know it all because we don't, and we are looking forward to talking with experts in different areas of health and learning from them, but then also sharing what we have learned with our listeners, and with the goal of just empowering all of you in your health journey, so you can live a quality life.
Scott: And truly, that’s what it’s about. It’s really at the end of the day, when people talk about what they want to do, so many people say, “I’m going to work hard for 30 years, 40 years, and then when I retire, everything's going to be great.” Well, you know, it really depends on what you do when you take care of yourself along the way because you can't wait until you're 55, 60 years old to start taking care of yourself. Because you'll realize the fact that, “Oh, wow, this isn't what I remember.”
Michelle: Yeah. And that's one of the first things that I tell my clients. Strap in because you're about to go into a ride of your life. As soon as you commit to really taking the reins on your health, real life is going to happen like never before. And that's going to be anything from financial issues, to relationship issues, to illness. I mean, it can be anything. So, it's about walking mindfully through all of the hurdles and the challenges. And so I'm really excited about some of the things that we've got in store.
Scott: I am too. And we're going to look at it from both angles because Michelle works a lot with females; I work a lot with males. And just getting a feel for what both people struggle with throughout life, and their tug of war, I would say, between taking care of themselves and taking care of their family.
Michelle: Yeah. And one of the things that we want to do with our podcast, each time that we have one, is to leave our listeners with three tips. And so we started brainstorming, what could we do in this introductory podcast for three tips?
And the first one is to practice mindfulness in your life with your health, but always remembering that your health is not just about your body alone. It is the body, mindset, and spirit. And I think when you do take that comprehensive view of your health, it really opens your eyes to what you can be doing for yourself.
Scott: And our second step is really about self-care. It's vital. In order to take care of others, you got to take care of yourself first because if you put yourself on the back burner all the time, between your kids, your job, your husband, anything, you're going to wear yourself down. And when you wear yourself down, you're not good for anybody else.
Michelle: Yeah. And then the third one, too, it's just, don't overcomplicate the journey. And I think that that comes when we do listen to so many plans that have been pre-mapped out for us. It's just like, “I've got to execute this perfectly, or it's a wash.” And it's about ebbing and flowing, and simplifying it, and just focusing on a couple of things. So, I'm very excited about some of the things that we're going to be introducing to our listeners.
And we just want to thank you so much for taking the time to learn who we are and what we stand for. And we invite you to tune into our next podcast where we're going to be expanding upon the three tips that we just mentioned, and give you some valuable insights that we've discovered as health professionals in walking our lives of health.
Michelle: Elements of living a healthy lifestyle come in various forms. Sometimes we don't have all the answers we need, and sometimes we don't even know that we have a need until we have important discussions.
Scott: That's the inspiration behind why and what we do with Totality Living Well and helping others live a life of true balance in body, mindset, and spirit.
Michelle: We love hearing your comments, questions, and feedback as you navigate your own health journey. We're grateful that you've taken this time to join us. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast through Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you choose to listen to podcasts.
Michelle: And check out our website
totalitylivingwell.com for other tips and customized health programs available.
Scott: We'll see you next time.
Michelle: Remember, keep your health front and center. It's priceless. In great health, always.