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Hi, everyone.
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This is Wendy Manganaro of Wellness and Wealth.
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Welcome back to another episode.
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Today, our topic is Ayurveda wellness for mind and body.
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I'm here with Gauri Junnarkar.
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And I'm going to read her bio and then we'll get right into it.
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Gauri Junnarkar is an author, international keynote speaker, nutrition, Ayurveda, and wellness expert.
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She is the founder director of iU nutrition and integrative practice combining the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda with modern nutrition, Gauri is a classically trained, by Jeff Pancakarma specialist and has more than 20 plus years in the field of Ayurveda.
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She earned an Ayurvedic Medicine degree from the University of Mumbai.
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She also holds a Master of Science degree in Nutrition from Texas Women's University.
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She's a dedicated nutrition professional 16 plus years experience as a registered dietitian nutritionist and 13 plus years experience as a certified diabetes educator.
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Her background in Ayurveda inspired her to do her master's thesis research on dietary curcumin, phytochemical, and tumeric and its effect in melanoma skin cancer, which was selected at the National Conference on Experimental Biology under Diet and Cancer and at the Texas Dietetic association conference.
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She has coauthored two books, a primer on Ayurveda, a practical guide and Ayurveda and yoga, a path to health and healing now published on Amazon.
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She has coauthored an e course primer on Ayurvedic nutrition designed for dieticians, nutritionists, and healthcare professionals.
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She's the host of the wellness show Wellness Bites with Gauri on YouTube as a podcast.
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She is highly acclaimed speaker and has presented an international local conference on Ayurveda and nutrition to physicians, dieticians, and healthcare professionals.
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Gauri believes that mind and body have a profound effect on each other.
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She loves to educate people in choosing the right food and lifestyle tools using Ayurveda and nutrition to nourish the body and mind to create a positive impact on health and wellness.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thanks for being with me today.
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Thank you so much, Wendy, and thank you so much for this opportunity.
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Yes, I'm excited to talk about this because, I worked with, somebody who does, Ayurvedic yoga, retreats, in Mexico.
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So it's really nice to have somebody on the show to talk about this.
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For those who don't know what is Ayurveda wellness, because there's many people Who think about the yoga practice of it and don't know that it's more than just yoga.
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Correct so when you think about Ayurveda and Ayurveda wellness, so Ayurveda, you can say is a sister science of yoga and Ayurveda 5000 years ago.
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And Ayurveda, what it does, it focuses on the mind and the body connection.
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So it's a, we can call it as a holistic system that focuses on the whole person approach with wellness as a base.
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So not only be able to focus on the nutrition part, which is the iveric nutrition, but also the iveric lifestyle, you know, the gut health and also stress management.
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So it becomes a very encompassing healing system.
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And that's important because it's the mind and body.
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And I think that so many people Focus on one or the other and forget that they have to put the components together because then they don't understand why they still don't feel better.
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But because it's such an old holistic approach, can you delve a little bit more into what, what types of things are in that?
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Because I know that it's food and nutrition and there's, a lot of little pieces as part of it.
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Absolutely.
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So Ayurveda is a very personalized system of holistic healing.
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In Ayurveda, you believe that every person is born with a dosha type or a prakriti, we call it, and every person's dosha type depends upon the three basic dosha, which is vata, pitta, and kapha.
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And in the in Ayurvedic system, the health, the diet, the lifestyle becomes personalized to every person's dosha type.
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as well.
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So the main gist of Ayurveda is creating a balance with diet, with lifestyle, with stress management.
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Also the different Ayurvedic therapies are introduced as part of the Ayurvedic wellness, which is Abhyanga, the massage.
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Then you have the Shiladhara and different therapies that have been customized based on the person's body type and what the imbalance is.
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So the idea with Ayurveda wellness is to create a balance with all these different approaches together.
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So how did you start?
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Was this something you grew up with or was this something you started later?
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I'd love to know your background of why this became important to you.
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Sure, growing up in India,, we grew up with Ayurveda.
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Ayurveda was a part of, you know, our food and diet.
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One incident that definitely that triggered me towards learning more about Ayurveda is I remember that I was helping my mom, cutting vegetables.
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And, in India, what we do is every day we would go to the farmers market and pick up fresh vegetables.
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And then when you come home, then, you know, you cook with those fresh vegetables.
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So I was helping my mom with, cutting those vegetables and I had a cut.
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So my mom said, you know what, why don't you go and you know, wash your hand and take just a dab of turmeric and just put it on the cut.
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And I was just wondering, how would turmeric help in this place?
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So she said, just trust me, put the dab of turmeric on the cut.
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And after some time, one of the things I've found is it had stopped bleeding.
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And after a couple of days, that wound had completely healed.
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And I was you know, in so much of awe as to have something as simple as, you know, turmeric, which is an everyday spice that we use in our food that helped with the healing process.
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And that propelled me into learning more about what is Ayurveda and what exactly it is and what does it have to offer.
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And then I got into getting my actual formal degree into Ayurvedic medicine from the University of Mumbai and started learning more about it.
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I was working as, an Ayurvedic physician in India as well, in one of the companies and things as well, managing a clinic.
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So I delved a lot into the actual Ayurvedic practice there as well.
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And then when I came back, I was thinking about what can I do to bring that Ayurvedic knowledge to the people over here.
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And that's when, with my background in nutrition, I started Ayur Nutrition, which is an integral practice with Ayurveda and nutrition.
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That's fascinating.
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I'm always looking up holistic health things when things happen I always try to do that first, but I've never heard of tumeric for a cut.
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I want to take a moment and I want to delve into your your bio, because my father passed away from melanoma.
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So I'd love for you to just discuss a little bit about your research with that, because I don't think most people know how dangerous melanoma can be if it's not cared for and it does lead to death.
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My father had gone to get something removed and they didn't completely remove it.
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And so years later, it caught up to him.
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Unfortunately, I don't think enough people go get skin checks either, but that's just me.
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So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your research.
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Sure.
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Sure.
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So this was a research I had done during my master's studies, and this was an animal study where we looked at a group of mice where this was fed with, you know, a diet which had turmeric and curcumin as a base.
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Now, curcumin is a phytochemical in the turmeric, which actually what we call the most important ingredient in that.
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So these mice were fed this turmeric diet.
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And they were induced with melanoma to find out, what was the condition before and after, when they were fed at the tumeric diet what was the condition later.
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It was like a 28 or 30 day study.
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And we found that, they had some lab draws and things.
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And with that data, we were able to determine that, with the diet, which had the turmeric, the cumin, curcumin part of that, that actually helped with reducing some of the risk factors with the melanoma.
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Oh, wow.
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That's fascinating.
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So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your client's perspective, how things have changed for them in terms of balance.
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Absolutely.
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So one of the things I've seen over the years Wendy, is that, it's not just the diet part, but we also have to give equal importance to the mind and the stress management as well as the gut health.
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Because in Ayurveda, we believe we are what we digest, not just what we eat, but we go beyond and ask, think about is what we digest.
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Because we know that if you're able to digest things correctly.
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We're able to absorb those nutrients correctly.
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As a result, we're able to make those tissues and hormones and enzymes in the body correctly.
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That means we are able to produce those building blocks that our body needs correctly.
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So everything hinges on the part where that means our digestion needs to be correct.
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So what I find is that overall when we focus on four basic things.
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One, definitely our diet.
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Second is our gut health, third is our stress management and fourth is our lifestyle and sleep.
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And I find that when we focus on all these things again through the Ayurvedic wellness, we're able to achieve a much better result when it comes to one person's health and wellness.
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And that's what we focus on when it comes to our programs or even our Consult things is an, is a whole person approach, is not just a, you know, nutrition is very important.
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You know, the diet comes first because we need to know through,, a person, body type, what particular foods are more aligned for that person.
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Then you think about what lifestyle is more aligned for the person, what does that imbalance and how we can bring that, balance back and then that gut health.
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And the last most important is sleep, as I said, is that all these things we really have to focus and when we think about a plan.
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Which actually focuses on all these things, only then we can think that a person can achieve better health and wellness.
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So for female entrepreneurs who are wondering is this something that could be useful for them?
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What are the warning signs that this could help or what are the things that you see that people come to you and they're like, I'm struggling with this.
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So some of the warning signs that I see a lot, especially the female entrepreneurs, because there's so much of stress involved, right, and especially with us females, what are the thing is we always give and give and give and we always keep ourselves at the back burner.
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So it's time for us to think about making ourselves as our number one priority and focusing on our health and wellness.
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So from the warning signs could be if you're noticing sudden weight gain, or you're feeling that your gut is not functioning well, there's a lot of digestive issues, or for example, there's issues with sleep and things as well.
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Or the issues with, let's say, for example, women's health, you know, PCOS or thyroid and all these issues or hormonal imbalance.
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So any of these warning signs, definitely as something for you to think about, what can we do to think about it, bring all our health and wellness back into balance.
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And that's where the Ayurveda wellness actually helps a lot.
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I like that you said that there's a couple things because the other thing that I find is that women ignore all those warning signs and then they're like what's wrong with me.
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I was going to ask you if you see more people who are going through pre menopause because even for me, I'm like, what in the world is this non sleeping thing suddenly.
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Do you see people during the times where the woman's body changes, because I imagine that we would need this more because all of a sudden notice such drastic changes in our body.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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And especially in a premenopause, or even when a woman is going through menopause, there's so many changes happening, the hormonal changes happening, especially weight gain and things as well.
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A lot of times there's a lot of fluid building things there's thyroid issues that can mean changes in the hair, or for example, voice a lot of times as well.
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So all these changes, definitely, if a person is experiencing things, it's time to think about how we can add that eye with our wellness.
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As part of the oral complementary care as well.
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And I would love to know from you too, because I think that sometimes people hear about this and they're like, is this going to be hard?
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Is it really hard to be not hard in the sense of like it's changed can be hard.
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I get that.
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But is the actual practice of learning how to cook differently learning how to, because I think that's what people also get overwhelmed.
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With or women get overwhelmed with they're like, I am just barely getting, you know, my business on dropping kids off at school and 500 games during the week.
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How am I going to add a healthier lifestyle into this.
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So I'd love to hear your experience of how that works.
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So how it works with our either the programs that we have in place, what we do is that we know we work one on one with every person and we customize that program for every person's need.
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And not only are we focusing on the diet part, but we also going to, one of the things we're going to actually start including is actually either the cooking.
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So not only for the diet part, the consult part, but we're also going to show how can you cook some of these simple recipes and you can improve the health of not only yourself, but also for your family as well.
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That makes sense because I think that's where people get overwhelmed.
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They're like, this is a nice idea, but how am I going to actually implement this?
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You know what I mean?
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I think that that's an important part of it.
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So I have a final question.
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How can female entrepreneurs take the first step into Ayurveda wellness?
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One of the things I can definitely do is get in touch with an Ayurveda practitioner who's well versed with you know, all the aspects of, you know, women's health when it comes to, they understand what it means to be an entrepreneur.
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And again understanding that how things can be more customized, become, make it more personalized.
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for every person.
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So again, getting in touch with an Ayurvedic practitioner, they can get in touch with us as well.
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And we do have a discovery call that they can actually book in and they can get in touch with us.
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And we can talk more about, what are the different things and what are the journey with Ayurvedic awareness look like for them.
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And and I'm sure during that you have many questions that you ask because that would be the best way to find what works for them.
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So I want to thank you for your time today.
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I know that you have an offer.
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So I'd love for you to tell everybody what your offer is.
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And I will have all the links in the show notes.
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So we do have offer for an ebook, which focuses on the five tips on the lifestyle changes and think how easily they can actually make a plan, but including five different steps and make a simple lifestyle plan for them.
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And it's a completely free ebook that they can get.
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Thank you so much for your time today and thanks for sharing about this because it is a beautiful lifestyle to integrate in.
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Thank you so much, Wendy.
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Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.
