Stephanie Hilfer is the founder of Viim, a branding agency. Success in her health journey affected her business and ability to be an effective entrepreneur. Join us to learn about the practices Stephanie put in place that allowed her to find more balance between her personal and work life. You can find the 10-year values and goals worksheet mentioned in the podcast here. Our free Ultimate Wellness Workbook is another great tool to create more balance and happiness in your life. Watch the interview on YouTube here: Automatically generated transcript, please forgive errors. Cheryl McColgan:Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. I'm Cheryl McColgan, the founder of Heal Nourish Grow. And today I am here with my lovely friend, Stephanie, who I met through her podcast. And she does such amazing work in the world of branding, which is a little bit unusual for this podcast. And we are going to talk about that at the end. But what is not unusual is the fact that Stephanie has really had quite a bit of a health journey that she's going to share with us today. And I think it's really relevant to this audience because many of us are entrepreneurs or just work in a very busy job, very busy lifestyle. And I think Stephanie is going to have some great information and takeaways for us about how to better balance your life if that's possible. But anyway, Steph, could you introduce yourself and share a little bit how you got to this place where you started to really focus on your health again. Steph:Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the great introduction. I'm Steph Hilfer. I do go by Steph. It's not offensive to call me Stephanie. My mom birthed me Stephanie, but I love the informality of being Steph. I love that we're just already friends when you call me Steph. So I am the owner, founder and creative director at Vim, as you said, a branding agency. And that, and I will say Vim has been a catalyst for me to continue. to focus on my own, not just health journey, but on myself. So as far as like what we talked about at one point was, in 2018, no, excuse me, 2017, prior to starting my own business, I was at this point where I was in full-blown tears, pretty much daily, around eating, around using the restroom, just constant feeling gross and icky. And I know we're diving deep into some like super TMI, probably stuff, but I know that your audience is probably going to resonate with some of this. Um, and I was just to this point of there's nowhere else to go. I have to do something. And luckily I had, um, my best friend since first grade and my sister-in-law who had worked with a holistic nutritionalist coach to kind of work through all of that. Wasn't necessarily for weight loss, but obviously I think there's always when you start to look internally at your health, I think that I definitely saw a benefit in that area as well. But I worked with this particular coach to really diagnose what was going on in my gut. We did a kind of handful of blood tests, stool tests, and we determined that there was some foods that were really not serving me well. And so I spent the better part of 2017, so 250 days of 2017, I essentially went whole food. Like just truly if the ingredient listing says banana, then you can eat it. But if it says flour and rich such and such oils, right? Not a single ingredient food. And my nutritionalist, her, or nutritionist, her program for me was not to just go 250 days eating this clean, but I'm not a good rule follower apparently. And I started feeling so good. Essentially I cut out caffeine, I cut out sugar, I cut out dairy and I cut out gluten. And then on top of those cutouts, I just ate whole foods. And I spent that whole year feeling the most, the word I would use for it was optimized. I felt so optimized and healthy and I know that if I hadn't been in that really healthy, beautiful place that Vim would have never came to be. Now Vim actually happened in 2018 after I had slowly started intro