About Pilar

 
Pilar Gerasimo, author of The Healthy Deviant, founding editor of Experience Life magazine, and co-host of The Living Experiment podcast.

Pilar Gerasimo, author of The Healthy Deviant, founding editor of Experience Life magazine, and co-host of The Living Experiment podcast.

Hi. My name is Pilar and I'm a Healthy Deviant. 

I'm also an award-winning health journalistpodcaster, and social explorer (more about my personal and professional background here). 

I initially began using the term Healthy Deviant a few years back to describe myself and the somewhat unusual way I have come to live. Then I started using it (fondly) to describe a growing and diverse group of others who are choosing to live in their own sustainably healthy ways, despite some very real social, cultural, and environmental barriers to doing so. 

Healthy Deviants are individuals who choose to pursue healthy lives in an unhealthy mass culture. But Healthy Deviance can also be cultivated within families, groups, teams, communities, organizations, and the world at large.

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I've written a book, The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World, in the hopes that it will inspire more people to embrace their own Healthy Deviance, and then join forces in a non-conformist movement for healthy change.

Today, a lot of Healthy Deviants wind up feeling like oddballs, at least some of the time, because they don’t quite fit in with the unhealthy world around them. Ultimately, my goal is to make it easier for a lot more people to be healthy and happy, so we can all live in a better, more beautiful and sustainable world. And that's not really such an odd idea, is it?

Want to come meet me or hear me speak? Take one of my online programs, or book me to come give a talk (in person or virtually) at your school, workplace, or community center. I also love doing cool podcasts, radio, and TV shows. Get in touch with me to talk more.

Looking for my media kit? Get that here.

 
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Professional Background

  • Author of The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World (North Atlantic Books, 2020)

  • Co-host of The Living Experiment, a top-rated podcast with more than 1.5 million downloads to date 

  • Founding editor of Experience Life magazine, an award-winning healthy-living publication with a national reach of three million 

  • Former top health editor at Huffington Post

  • Visiting Faculty for Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Heroic with Brian Johnson, Studio/E

  • Featured guest for major media outlets and health platforms, including Blue Zones, Mindful, Huffington Post, Thrive Global, Mayo Clinic TV, Best Self Magazine, and more.

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Personal Background

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To me, a big part of being healthy in an unhealthy world involves learning to make choices that work for you, rather than defaulting to choices that suit or impress others.

So, having lived in New York, Paris, and the Bay Area, I have chosen to make my home on an organic family farm in the Midwest.

Having flirted with big-deal jobs and celebrity social circles, I’ve always happily returned to the peace and quiet of my rural life in the middle of nowhere.

I find I do a lot of my best work when I’m not “working.” And my biggest accomplishments have all involved doing things that other people said could not (or should not) be done.

I’m a Fulbright scholar with an abiding love for rescue pit bulls and yoga-mat napping.

A banner day for me includes four dog walks, three plates of real food, two cups of fair-trade coffee, and at least one really big “aha!” moment.

I love the smell of healthy soil. I brake for squirrels. I am not on Tik-Tok.