We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Melissa Coulier and Melanie Samuels a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Melissa Coulier and Melanie Samuels, appreciate you joining us today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.
We have both experienced U-Turns in our career paths. In fact, these U-Turns paved the road that merged us together.
Melissa: I had a long, established career in commercial and editorial photography where I worked with many well-known brands and personalities. However, there was a major shift in the photography industry, one that escalated during the pandemic. In pre-Covid times, photography was starting to become much more accessible. Social media, more affordable camera options, and the immense need for constant content made the photography world more saturated than it had ever been. In the height of the pandemic, many brands and businesses stopped formally producing content and started creating their own. This not only cut costs, but opened up new possibilities to making photography more accessible. Needless to say, things really changed for me. My passion for photography and need to be creative faced a major roadblock. Enter Melanie.
Melanie: I had been working in the television industry for over 10 years. I worked on the Production side, and the demanding nature of it became my life. For anyone who has worked in Entertainment, you know you are lucky if you have a 12-hour day! I loved my job, but I began to struggle with any sense of a work-life balance. On top of that, it became really hard for me to prioritize my health. I had an ongoing toxic relationship with food, and the stress at work escalated this for me. I was struggling with an “all or nothing” mentality around what I thought it meant to be “healthy.” I didn’t see a solution in sight. I had always been fascinated in health and wellness, specifically nutrition, and I knew I needed to do something more with this. Then, I met Melissa.
Melissa: I was diagnosed with Lupus in 2006. The diagnosis followed a health scare where I needed to take a deeper look to see what was going on in my body. Living with Lupus has been difficult to say the least. The joint pain, fatigue, and skin flare-ups alone are enough to feel defeated some days. However, I never placed enough attention on my lifestyle and how that could be affecting things. As my friendship formed with Melanie, I opened up to her about this. She told me she was in the middle of getting her certification in Nutritional Therapy and shared many of the insights about holistic nutrition she was learning. It really resonated with me and we began to work together.
Melanie: Fast forward to March of 2020. My work as a new nutritionist was put on hold (my clients were initially seen in-person) and Melissa’s photography was also at a standstill. During a phone call, we talked about how inspired we were by her health strides. Melissa had gone off of her Lupus medications and was truly changing her life by making simple and enjoyable lifestyle changes. We thought, “we can help others do the same!” From our passion of sharing this message, Living Well with Mel and Mel was born.
Had we not made these U-Turns when we saw the weather changing, we would not be in this very place right now.
Melissa Coulier and Melanie Samuels, 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?
Living Well with Mel and Mel’s mission is to provide an inclusive community that celebrates bio-individuality and uses all aspects of your life to manage inflammation.
Our philosophy is if we can touch one life and inspire them to make the changes needed to feel better, we’ve done our job! We are so passionate about bringing realistic, sustainable, and well-rounded solutions to gaining back confidence in your body, whatever that looks like for you.
Our website features articles, recipes, wellness trends, and more. We are also active on Instagram and love going Live to connect with you and answer your questions about wellness and living an anti-inflammatory life. We are also in the process of creating goods that will help bring your personal wellness journey to life.
We are most proud of our focus on inflammation that looks through a wide lens. Often times, certain protocols or advice about health focuses on only one aspect of your life, such as food. While nutrition is certainly important in this journey, we factor in all aspects of your life including mindfulness, movement, relationships, connection, environment, sleep, and even what you put on your body. Each of these important elements of your life make a big difference in how you are able to thrive.
If this resonates with you, we’d love to invite you to join our community by following us on Instagram and joining our mailing list on our website!
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
We met in 2015 on the set of Fuller House at the Warner Bros. Studios. Melissa’s husband, actor Dave Coulier, known to most as Joey Gladstone, was acting and directing on the show and Melanie was working on the Production side. Melanie and Dave had been working together, and he mentioned that he had a very special Mel in his life. We became fast friends as soon as we met. We instantly connected and began getting together on the weekend for hikes, brunch, and coffee dates. Our friendship grew over the years of the show, and when Melissa moved away from Los Angeles, we continued to grow closer.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Our emphasis and commitment to human connection has helped us build our reputation within the wellness market. Health is such a vulnerable subject, and with this space being so overwhelmed with a multitude of information, we really make an effort to continue to nourish individual personal connection. We’ve done this through 1:1 consulting, answering our community’s questions as much as we can, and listening to where people are struggling. We try to share our own struggles with health in order for these very personal subjects to resonate with our community. We also strongly believe in offering information that is easy to digest, encouraging, and strays from any sort of “diet culture” mentality.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.livingwellwithmelandmel.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livingwellwithmelandmel/
Image Credits
Melissa Coulier