Our Brain And Gut Are More Interconnected Than Most Think ‒ Interview With Chandra Zas

Hi, I’m Chandra Zas, I am the health coach who helps humans fall-in-love with healthy. I treat "healthy" as an accumulation of making daily loving decisions that serve our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. The two greatest organs impacting our health, wellness, and performance are our brain and our gut. Our brain and gut are more interconnected than most think.

We have more input than we take responsibility for: diet, stress, and lifestyle habits are what create health or lack of. Did you know that our gut sends more signals to our brain than our brain does to our gut? Our bodies have deep wisdom and an incredible ability to heal itself, I call it being your "Own Body Expert." Every day, in practice with my clients, symptoms that they have been tolerating and or medicating for years, will heal. Simply because they’re responding to life's stressors and feeding their bodies differently by applying the process they learn in my Food and Mood Program. Health is not about restriction, guilt, force, or fear of missing out. Health is falling in love with feeling good. It is a lifestyle that is sustainable because it feels truly and deeply good. As a client, I work with you and your relationship with yourSelf, with your mind, and with your body every step of the way, to get you feeling, being, and radiating healthy.

Chandra Zas, The Health Coach for Falling in Love with Healthy

In­tro­duce your­self! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you bet­ter.

Thank you for hav­ing me here, my name is Chan­dra Zas. I feel very grate­ful for be­ing here to­day with the health and the life ex­pe­ri­ence that I have. When I was twelve, I re al­ized that the state of my health would lim­it my life if I con­tin­ued as I was. I re­mem­ber think­ing that I would like­ly not be able to have kids or trav­el. Hav­ing fig­ured out my health is what has made the life I live now pos­si­ble, en­joy­able, and even ex­cep­tion­al. At the time of this in­ter­view, my fam­i­ly and I are just now set­tling down in Reno af­ter trav­el­ing the world for the past six years, I am on no med­ica­tions, and I have a ra­di­ant four-year-old.

What is your busi­ness name and how do you help your clients?

I named my health coach­ing busi­ness Zen Odyssey be­cause I found that health requires both aware­ness and an em­brace of our own unique health jour­ney in all ar­eas of our life; body, mind, and emo­tions. I help my clients be­come their Own Body Experts to nur­ture their own health in my Food and Mood Pro­gram.

What would you like to achieve for your­self and your busi­ness in the fu­ture?

My long-term goal for my busi­ness is to make my Food and Mood Pro­gram fi­nan­cial­ly ac­ces­si­ble to any­one who wants to im­prove their health and life. I see a mas­sive need in our west­ern world for peo­ple to un­der­stand and take charge of their own health.

Who in­spires you to be the best that you can be?

Be­ing a moth­er has in­spired me to tru­ly be the best ver­sion of my­self. Know­ing how im­pres­sion­able small hu­mans are and know­ing that role mod­el­ing is the best teach­ing has cat­a­pult­ed me into changes that I have want­ed to make for a while. For ex­am­ple, when my five-month-old reached up to share my gela­to ice cream in Greece, I looked at the ice cream and said to my­self, “If I know that sug­ar feeds every­thing not healthy in our bod­ies... then why I am eat­ing this my­self?” I threw away my gela­to as a de­ci­sion to fur­ther walk my talk as the hu­man I am: deeply ded­i­cat­ed to health.

What is your work in­spired by?

I be­lieve that be­ing alive is an in­cred­i­ble op­por­tu­ni­ty we each have. The way I choose to live my life and coach my clients is cen­tered around feel­ing ful­ly alive and em­bracing each of our own hu­man po­ten­tials. When I was a kid with­out my health, I felt like I en­dured many days; now I wake up ex­cit­ed to live.

If you could change one thing about your in­dus­try, what would it be and why?

If I could change one thing about the health in­dus­try, it would be to stop think­ing that we have to or should be healthy. This pres­sure, guilt, and re­stric­tive way of think­ing only make us feel worse and push­es us to in­dulge in sab­o­tag­ing habits to feel bet­ter. It is a vis­cous cy­cle that I help my clients break and is the back­bone of long-term sustain­able health changes.

Tell us about a piv­otal mo­ment in your life that brought you to where you are to­day.

At fif­teen, I asked my fam­i­ly doc­tor what I could do to sup­port my health and not be on med­ica­tions. Af­ter push­ing the ques­tion, he mur­mured, “diet, stress, and life­style;” but he gave me no ‘how’ or fur­ther in­for­ma­tion. It took me an­oth­er twen­ty years to decode what diet, stress, and life­style meant. My life’s work is, now, shar­ing what I dis­covered: choos­ing foods that serve our body, tru­ly reg­u­lat­ing our stress, and liv­ing dai­ly in align­ment with what serves our health.

Health is far sim­pler than most imag­ine; it is root­ed in fos­ter­ing our con­nec­tion to our own in­ter­nal wis­dom. The key is in un­cov­er­ing the food and emo­tion­al be­liefs that do not serve us.

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