Episode #2: Christina Blacken
Christina Blacken is a strategist, storyteller, and founder of TheNewQuo.com, a platform, consultancy, and community on a mission to flip the status quo through storytelling. Christina helps people + organizations transform the soul of their ideas into powerful stories that cause change and move people to action.
Throughout her eight-year career she's seen the power of stories for inspiring action, including motivating 300K young people to volunteer on social issues through cause marketing projects she worked on, to securing 5.6M in profits for a variety of companies and teams she's worked for while crafting stories that connect them to the communities they care about. You can peep her work in Elle.com, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Marie Claire, The Huffington Post, Mogul.com, Attn.com, and Trive.com among other outlets. As a Utah native & NYC resident for the past 9 years, she knows far more uses for jello than she’d like to admit.
For Christina Blacken, an early pre-diabetes diagnosis was the wake-up call she needed to take control of her health and her life. Not taking “no” for an answer, she did whatever it took to get the answers she needed for her health, eventually venturing outside of conventional medicine to learn about the impact of food and nutrition. From the social struggles of restrictive eating (and how to handle them) to Christina’s thoughts about how to make nutrition changes realistic and sustainable, this episode is all about what it means to take your health into your own hands.
Here are some of the things Christina and I chatted about:
Christina’s journey learning about the impact of food and nutrition
Pushing her doctors for a diagnosis and not taking no for an answer
Going outside of conventional medicine to find answers for her health condition
The relief at finding Victoria Albina, a holistic doctor who helped her find answers
The impact of changing her diet and listening to what her body needs
The social struggle of going out to restaurants with friends and family
Why deprivation in a diet is not the answer — and what the alternative is
The magic of nutrition: how intentional food and lifestyle changes can alter your blood work in just months
How Christina celebrates the small wins in her health journey
Food hacks: Christina’s talks about healthy hacks for her favorite comfort-food recipes (she and her boyfriend both love this chicken pot pie). She also loves this 90 second Keto breadas an easy, low-carb fix if she finds she’s craving bread and doesn’t want to spike her blood sugar.
“So many [health] documentaries promote that there is only one correct way to eat that applies to everyone, and if you deviate from that you’re failing.”