We were lucky to catch up with Caralee Lacie recently and have shared our conversation below.

Caralee, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I call myself a Holistic Wellness Coach because I am more than a nutritionist and more than a trauma-informed coach, I’m someone who helps you tie all the pieces together. I’ve never fit neatly into predesignated categories, and my business is no different. I’m a person who has struggled with both my physical and mental health throughout my life. I lived through many childhood traumas, both personal and familial, while also constantly struggling with food insecurity, food sensitivities and allergies and many other undiagnosed health ailments.

I sought help for my physical health issues in my teens and early 20’s, but was never able to find helpful guidance through mainstream channels. After years of being told it’s all in my head and my labs looks good despite my debilitating fatigue and constant pain throughout my body and a growing list of food sensitivities, allergies and aversions I finally decided to take matters into my own hands. I hit the books, hard. I began reading everything I could get my hands on about nutrition, trauma and eventually minerals. And throughout this process I learned how to heal myself.

I found that as I healed my physical body with ancestral nourishment, water, light, frequency and environmental changes my emotional body began healing in stride. I found that even though healing was often triggering emotionally I was more capable than ever to deal with those triggers due to the changes I had made in my diet and lifestyle. I began to understand deeply how much my body, mind and spirit must be healed as one cohesive whole, and not as piecemeal specialties. If my physical body is stuck in survival mode from lack of care and resources then my emotional body won’t be able to heal, due to lack of energy and focus. The more I leaned into this line of thinking the more truth it revealed, and before long I knew that this is the work I am here to do– to guide others into healing. The type of healing that encompasses your whole being.

Caralee, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m someone who has always living my life by following my intuition. I’ve never really had long term goals or plans in the traditional sense. Instead I live by a loose list of things I want to do and experience in my life, and I make choices towards making those experiences happen for myself. So like most things in my life, I sort of stumbled into becoming a trauma informed life coach and nutritionist. Even though I experienced childhood trauma I knew that I didn’t want that experience to define my life. I wanted to work through it and move on. My goal was to learn how to live with trauma being a part of my story, but not the defining feature of it. As I healed and worked through my triggers I began naturally helping others to do the same, first my friends and family, and eventually clients.

As I healed from trauma I found myself feeling stuck at times, not having the energy or will to go on due to my chronic illnesses. That’s when I began studying nutrition and minerals and focusing on transforming my environment into one that is conducive to healing. As I got deeper into the nutrition world I found people began asking me for advice and I felt so fulfilled by being able to offer them helpful solutions. That’s when I decided I needed to become a coach, because being able to listen deeply to others and offer them guidance on how to move forward in a gently supportive way would be a dream come true of a career. But just teaching about nutrition felt flat, and just working with trauma felt equally flat. So I began dreaming up ways of combining the two.

I now offer 1:1 mentoring and coaching for a holistic overview of your life and needs with actionable guidance. I focus on gently shifting lifestyle and diet patterns to be more supportive for the deep work of building resilience in your nervous system. The entire time I was in thick of my healing journey, I was living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to afford any extras, so I have placed an emphasis on making my work as affordable as possible to everyone. I write a weekly Substack article on the topics of nutrition, minerals, mental health and culture, all articles are currently free and for those in a position to offer financial support I have the fees set as low as possible. I’m working on launching a podcast, and I hope to launch a course portal where people can take themselves through the basics of healing, with optional personalized support as needed.

Currently my Substack is a labor of love, I hope that it brings healing to many. I’m proud of the articles I’ve put out so far and I have big plans for future articles. I also love the work I do 1:1 with clients and watching them transform their lives for the better.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I am an autodidact. I completed some college in my late teens and early 20’s before deciding that I could learn more about the fields I am interested in if I did my own research and study. This fact was probably the biggest hurdle that I had to overcome in order to begin coaching. In.a world where college degrees, certifications and other official titles are king, I felt like an imposter in my field when I began. I was and am confident in the knowledge I possess and the deep layers of understanding I have developed with regards to trauma, nutrition and minerals, and I don’t know of anyone teaching the things I know in the way that I know them. But that didn’t stop my brain from spiraling about my lack of official qualifications in the beginning. In order to unlearn the bias I had against myself for being “uneducated”, for having not gone the traditional route of school and college and certifications I had to intentionally seek out others who are excellent at what they do, brilliant minds in their fields, and classically uneducated like me.

I needed to build a mental framework where people like me have value and merit, and that there is plenty I can offer to the world without ever stepping foot in another college class. This was a difficult thought process to override, but when I took time to sit with the facts– the thousands of hours of independent study, countless hours of reading books written by experts, textbooks, studies and research papers, the documentaries and lectures, the podcasts, the hands on experience of helping friends and family heal and my own personal experience having lived through everything I teach — I could no longer deny my own expertise, in spite of my choice to go an untraditional direction with my education.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

My business is currently all online. I mainly rely on free platforms to post my work and reach new clients. There wasn’t a huge financial investment needed in order to pursue coaching, which was a good thing for me. I have worked in retail, restaurants, bars and private homes as a nanny or cleaner for most of my life. So I funded this business and still do fund it through nannying and taking short term jobs in the service industry. The platforms I do invest in I budget carefully and save for, and I have scaled slowly.

I am still very much at the beginning of launching my coaching business. What that looks like is working 30 hours a week in a job and using my free time to write, research and take on new clients as they come in. Like I said before I have always wanted my work to feel accessible to those who need it, so even though I might be able to scale quicker with higher rates, and big ticket courses I’ve chosen to keep my rates at $50/hour for 1:1 sessions, $5/month for Substack gold, and when I eventually launch my course I hope to keep the cost low. I’m still working for other businesses as I build my own, and so I know how difficult it can be to invest in your health in this economy, but I believe that the more people who are able to achieve great health and mental resilience the better life will get for all of us. So I am willing to work a little harder on the side to make sure that those who want to access healing can.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://caraleelacie.com
• Instagram: @caraleelacie
• Twitter: caraleelacie
• Other: https://caraleelacie.substack.com