Pilar Gerasimo quotes

Pilar Gerasimo is a renowned health journalist and expert in holistic well-being. With over two decades of experience, she has become a leading voice in the wellness industry. Pilar is the author of the bestselling book "The Healthy Deviant" and the co-founder of the popular wellness website Experience Life. Her work focuses on empowering individuals to take control of their health through sustainable lifestyle changes. Pilar's insightful articles and interviews have been featured in top publications, making her a trusted source for health information. Stay updated on Pilar's latest insights and tips for living your healthiest life by following her on social media.

Want to escape the vitality-sapping pull of our Unhealthy Default Reality? Start by upgrading your awareness, resilience, and healthy-living know-how.

- Pilar Gerasimo

The mass-media advice and conventional health prescriptions I’d been attempting to follow were not working for me. Or for most of the people I knew.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Taking time to rest and recover immediately after a stressful experience can save you days, weeks, or even months you might otherwise lose to illness, injury, or mistakes.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Stop breaking yourself, even when that means breaking from convention.

- Pilar Gerasimo

So, what does it mean to live in a society that reliably produces more unhealthy, unhappy people than healthy, happy ones? It means we are all facing the same, socially awkward choice: Break the rules, or break yourself.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Refuse to let the dominant-culture machine roll over your healthy autonomy.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Our culture trains us to react slavishly to external triggers and sensory cravings (Ooh, I smell doughnuts!) but to ignore our body’s signals, symptoms, and state-changes (Ugh, I feel drained, or Ouch, my stomach hurts).

- Pilar Gerasimo

Often in our culture, what looks like a willpower problem is a chronic depletion and distraction problem.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Looking back, I can see now that my efforts to conform were squeezing the life and light right out of me.

- Pilar Gerasimo

In a hyper-challenging situation (like the one we are living in now), an aware, energized, resilient person stands a far better chance of surviving than a distracted, depleted, fragile one.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Imagine a world in which our current ratio of healthy to unhealthy people was inverted. What if, instead of most people struggling and only a tiny minority thriving, it was the other way around?

- Pilar Gerasimo

I learned what I now call the Skills of the Healthy Person. I gave up dieting, calorie counting, mass-market magazines, and TV. I learned how to make and enjoy whole foods. I abandoned bikini-body workouts and discovered ways of moving that I actually enjoyed. I started spending a little time outdoors each day, honoring my need for sleep, and safeguarding time for play and relaxation. I stopped chasing success as a metric of success.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Healthy deviants are individuals who choose to pursue healthy lives in an unhealthy mass culture.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Growth requires practice, exploration, and experimentation. It also responds well to positive encouragement. So affirm your progress.

- Pilar Gerasimo

For much of my life, I tried hard to pass for normal. That didn’t go so well.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Do you take a lot of proactive steps to safeguard your health, including some steps not promoted by large, authoritative organizations?

- Pilar Gerasimo

Do you sometimes encounter resistance, judgment, derision, or feel stigmatized as the result of your socially-odd but healthy choices?

- Pilar Gerasimo

Do you actively challenge or reject the health-sapping norms, social expectations, and values of our unhealthy culture?

- Pilar Gerasimo

Developing the ability to closely observe your own experiences without judging or dismissing them helps you hear what your body is trying to tell you.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Dare to make disruptive healthy choices daily — even (or especially) in the face of resistance.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Choosing to be a healthy person in an unhealthy world means becoming an outlier. It means frequently walking against the traffic of a mass-hallucination — and that’s not something most people are prepared to do.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Call out the crazy. Laugh in the face of nonsense, even when it’s official, authoritative nonsense.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Being a healthy person in our unhealthy culture is ridiculously challenging — at first, anyway.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Becoming and staying a healthy person in our culture is tougher than it ought to be. You can’t just roll merrily along with the unhealthy status quo, or you’ll become part of it.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Be responsive to your body: When your body is thirsty, give it a glass of water. When it longs for a walk around the block, a few minutes of sunshine, or an extra hour of sleep, make that happen. Your body clamors for rest because it needs rest. Acts of self-care may also be the only thing standing between you and some breaking point with a high price tag.

- Pilar Gerasimo

As you begin deviating from the status quo, don’t be surprised if you raise some eyebrows.

- Pilar Gerasimo

Amplified awareness is the ability to consistently notice, assess, and respond to what’s going on both within and around you.

- Pilar Gerasimo

A healthy deviant makes against-the-grain choices. It is a different frame of mind. It is being a social renegade, challenging the status quo, and defying cultural norms.

- Pilar Gerasimo

As a rule, healthy people have mastered some skills that unhealthy people haven’t... yet.

- Pilar Gerasimo

As I experimented with new ways of living, my life got incrementally better. Then dramatically better. I discovered that normal was indeed overrated, and also profoundly damaging — at least for me. I also discovered that there were many ways of living that I enjoyed more.

- Pilar Gerasimo