Words of Wellness with Shelly
Do you get confused by all of the information that is available regarding ways to improve your health and wellness? Do you often become frustrated or overwhelmed with decisions on how to be your healthiest? We all know and understand how important our health and wellness is to the vitality of our lives, however navigating the wealth of health and wellness information available can often feel overwhelming. Understanding the significance of our well-being in leading fulfilling lives is crucial, yet determining what steps to take that are essential for our health can often be confusing.
Welcome everyone to "Words of Wellness"! In this podcast, hosted by Shelly Jefferis, M.A., a seasoned health and wellness professional with over 35 years in the industry, all of your questions will be answered and clarity will be provided through personal stories, education, tips and inspiration. Throughout her profession, Shelly has always had the heart and desire to help others feel their best and live their best lives through her supportive and compassionate approach. Through engaging solo and guest episodes, several topics will be addressed, questions will be answered and clarity will be provided in an effort to lead you to a healthier, more energetic life. With a master’s degree in kinesiology, extensive experience as an educator, speaker, coach, and entrepreneur, Shelly brings a wealth of knowledge and a genuine passion for empowering others to feel their best. By featuring industry experts and relatable individuals, the podcast promises personal stories, practical advice, and inspiration. She is excited to come to you weekly sharing all she has experienced, learned and discovered through the years. Whether you're seeking to elevate your well-being, gain practical insights for personal health, or simply be inspired to live a high quality vibrant life, this is the podcast is for YOU! Be sure to tune in weekly and join us along our "Words of Wellness" journey and embark on a path toward a healthier and more fulfilling quality of life full of happiness, energy and joy!
Words of Wellness with Shelly
Shelly's Shares: We Can Turn The Tide On Chronic Disease
What if the biggest health gains don’t come from a new app or miracle plan, but from seeing our food system clearly and taking one small step at a time? Shelly shares why a proactive mindset beats quick fixes and how decades of teaching kinesiology led her to connect the dots between ultra-processed foods, pesticides, and the rise of chronic conditions showing up earlier in life.
She unpacks insights from documentaries like Fed Up and Breaking Big Food and explore how sugar, additives, and market incentives shape what lands in our kitchens. The data is sobering—more preservatives and artificial ingredients, more exposure to toxins, more metabolic trouble among kids—but the path forward is refreshingly simple. Think consistent, doable habits: one more home-cooked meal, one family walk after dinner, one swap from neon snacks to whole-food options, one move toward non-toxic cleaners and personal care. These choices don’t just add up; they compound into better energy, mood, and resilience.
I also talk about the tension between medication dependence and lifestyle change, and why everyday actions—sleep routines, stress management, strength and small healthy steps —are powerful levers for long-term health. For parents, the message is clear: model what you want your kids to copy. If you’re looking for structure, join our Healthy Habits Into The Holidays series starting November 4 for focused support during a busy season, and watch for enrollment in our 12-week Moms Who Flourish mentorship launching after the new year. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review to help more families find practical, hopeful wellness. What’s the one habit you’ll start this week?
CONNECT WITH SHELLY:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wellnesswithshellyj https://www.instagram.com/momswhoflourish
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShellyJefferis
A few of Shelly's favorite clean products:
High quality, clean nutrition and beauty products: https://shellyjefferis.isagenix
Clean-crafted wine, free from chemicals & pesticides:
https://scoutandcellar.com/?u=healthyhappyhours
Cayla Gray- Non-toxic cologne & perfume: https://caylagray.com/wellnesswithshellyj (10% discount)
JuJu Non-toxic candles & air fresheners:
https://goodjujucandles.com/?ref=mrtgnygh
Coupon code for 10% off: ShellyJefferis
Thank you for listening to the Words of Wellness podcast with Shelly Jefferis. I am honored and so grateful to have you here and it would mean the world to me if you could take a minute to follow, leave a 5-star review and share the podcast with anyone you love and anyone you feel could benefit from the message.
Thank you and God Bless! And remember to do something for yourself, for your wellness on this day!
In Health,
Shelly
We really need to be proactive with our health. We have to be very proactive with our decisions and not just short term for our health and our wellness, but long term. Do you get confused by all of the information that bombards us every day on ways to improve our overall health and our overall wellness? Do you often feel stuck, unmotivated, or struggle to reach your wellness goals? Do you have questions as to what exercises you should be doing, what foods you should or shouldn't be eating, how to improve your overall emotional and mental well-being? Hello everyone. I am so excited to welcome you to Words and Wellness. My name is Shelley Jeffries, and I will be your host. My goal is to answer these questions and so much more. To share tips, education, and inspiration around all of the components of wellness through simple ambience episodes. With 35 plus years as a health and wellness professional, a retired college professor, a speaker, and a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I certainly have lots to share. However, my biggest goal and inspiration in doing this podcast is to share the wellness stories of others with you. To bring in guests who can share their journey so that we can all learn together while making an impact on the health, the wellness, and lives of all of you, our listeners. The ultimate hope is that you leave today with even just one nugget that can enhance the quality of your life, and that you will, we all will, now and into the future, live our best quality of lives full of energy, happiness, and joy. Now let's dive into our message for today. Hi, my friends. Welcome back to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelley and I am your host. Thank you for tuning in and listening. And if you are new to our podcast, thank you for being here. I had Words of Wellness put on my heart probably seven, eight years ago. I knew I wanted to start a podcast. The name came to me. I'll never forget that moment. It took a few years for me to get started, but here we are, and I cannot believe that soon we will be coming up on two years, two years that I've been doing this, and I just love it so much. And I love sharing wellness, all complete wellness with all of you. And I love sharing my guests with all of you. I just feel like there's so much value in what everyone has to offer. And my whole goal is to get that information out to the world so that we can just be healthier beings and live longer lives full of vitality and energy and health. So here we are. And on Mondays, Mondays are the Shelley Shares episodes where I hop in here and I either share a personal journey, a personal story with you all, or I give some information that's on my heart, on my mind as it relates to our overall wellness and our overall health. So I don't know how many of you, my listeners, know that I have been a college professor for over 30 years now. And I started my journey teaching at a university, and from there I went on to become a part-time adjunct professor at a community college, which is something that I I have done for over 30 years. And I actually retired a couple years ago. However, I still have the opportunity to teach classes online, which has been a huge blessing. So I have taught in the kinesiology department all the years. I have taught health. I have taught just about every single fitness class you can think of. And I used to make the joke that I could never, the only class I could ever never imagine teaching was karate, because I just, of course, had no experience in that. And then wouldn't you know it that when the country shut down and everything stopped, there was a semester where I was offered, there was one class, and because I had seniority, it was offered to me if I wanted it. And I jumped in and I took it. It was an online class, and wouldn't you know it was karate? And I did it. Somehow I did it. Um, don't ask me how, because I don't at this point remember how I did it, but I did it. And so I guess you could say, I guess I could say now that I've taught every every fitness class possible. So it's been a really long career, and I I've been blessed. And through that journey, something that I did with my classes for many years, I started sharing a documentary called Fed Up about, I probably started sharing it with my students maybe six, seven, eight years now. It's it's an older documentary, however, I always find it to be very, very eye-opening for my students. And every semester that I would share it with my students, I would always take notes and it would always get me fired up again to share the information. Because for any of you who have watched the documentary, you know that it talks a lot about the issue of diabetes in in younger and younger people. It talks about how much sugar is in all of our foods, and it really touches a lot upon the money that different companies are making off of us and our food choices. And that does not mean, and it obviously we know now, it doesn't mean that they have our health at heart. As many of us know. So we can pretty much always trace trace the money, and that is usually unfortunately the root of all motivation when it comes to food and the the food supply that we we have. And I was thinking about this the other day because I listened to a newer documentary the other day called Breaking Big Food, and it had some key points that again I wanted to hop in and share because I just it just reiterates what we are up against in the United States when it comes to our food supply and chronic disease and all of the different illnesses that we are facing. Because let's face it, what we have been doing for decades is not helping us, it is hurting us. And I used to share with my students a graph that would show the incidence of the use of pesticides and chemicals as that increased over years, the incidence of allergies, asthma, autism, ADHD, all of those increased almost at the same level as the use of pesticides increased. So I just want to make that point because what we are experiencing now has been decades of the increased use of pesticides and chemicals, and the increased exposure of toxins that we are all being exposed to daily. And I've talked about this before, and it's a very, very important topic that I share, that I have researched for years, that I speak on, and it's been a really big part of my life in increasing the awareness has been my goal. Increasing the awareness with my students, increasing the awareness with my clients, increasing the awareness with families, with moms about what we're being exposed to and what we can do to reduce that exposure and to help us be healthier, help our families be healthier and future generations be healthier. And you know, it's gotten worse over the last 40 years for sure. Currently, with children, 50% are either overweight or obese. 50%. Now I'm sure there are maybe one or two here or there, but 50% now are overweight or obese. And of course, that just leads to a whole other group of problems and health issues that these that these young children are experiencing. We now know that 38% of children have been diagnosed with diabetes. Now, if we think about this, they the iron ironic thing about this is that this used to be called, I don't know, many of you probably remember, but this used to be called adult onset diabetes. Adult onset because it only happened in adults. And now 38% of our young population is being diagnosed with diabetes. We have to make some changes. We must make changes again. Over the course of the last 30-40 years, it's just progressively gotten worse. Now, what has happened? Well, we have more preservatives in our foods, we have many more processed foods, and then we have more and more foods that are containing artificial ingredients, artificial sweeteners, coloring. I mean, thankfully, there's more and more awareness happening around this topic. I really believe that to be the case. And it you see that it's being shared more, it's being discussed more, and changes are happening in some companies, thankfully. So this has been something that's been going on for years and it's gotten progressively worse. And as it's gotten progressively worse, our health has gotten progressively worse. And many of the health issues that we face nowadays are because of our environment, our daily exposure to toxins, and our food, our food supply. So it's a it's definitely a crisis. And I wanted to jump in here and just briefly talk about it, share these statistics. I mean, this is just a very brief share, but it's just a reminder, just a reminder, especially for my mom's out there, my dad's out there, families out there, to really, really take this to heart and and and take it, you know, it's a serious issue. It really, really, truly is. And another thing that's so alarming, going back to children who are overweight and obese, is that doctors are now recommending and prescribing Ozempic to children as young as 12. Now, can you can you even believe this? Now, here's the thing that you can believe once they are hooked to these drugs, they've got them. They've got a lifelong customer. A lifelong customer. And that's the concern with many of these chronic diseases. People go to the doctor, they get prescribed medication, and most of these medications will be something they have to be on for the rest of their lives. Unless they make some really serious lifestyle changes. And yes, it is possible to reverse some of these chronic illnesses with proper lifestyle changes. Changes in the food that we're eating, adding exercise into our daily routines and just making better overall health choices. And I have to say, for my parents out there, and obviously a parent myself, we we are setting the examples for our children, and we are the ones that really need to make those changes, especially if we have young children. Because if things are not changed, this this is a very, very dire situation. And I'm always a very hopeful and positive person, and I really truly believe that we can make a change, and I do think that things are getting better, a little bit better, but it's still very concerning and very alarming what we are faced with. And I think, you know, it's gone on for so many years that it has gotten so bad that now people are noticing. And I know for me personally, even though my degree and my career and my work has been in health and fitness and wellness and nutrition for decades, this isn't something that I was aware of early on. It was probably about midway into my career that I started going, oh my gosh, I need to be telling my students about these concerns that we have. These are the concerns with our food supply, our food system, toxins, chemicals, pesticides, things that we're being exposed to on a daily basis. So I think that the main thing like I always say is I I just want to increase the awareness around this topic. I had my guest from last week's episode who has her own cleaning line and house household line of products that are non-toxic. And the best that I can do is encourage you all to really do your own research, but also seek out non-toxic products as much as you can. I have some links in my show notes on my podcast of products that I use that I have found, and there's many more. I don't have them all listed, but I have a few. And I'm happy to share more of those with you. If you'd like to know more, feel free to reach out to me and just message me on Instagram. Another thing that I share with my moms who flourish community is when I put on live events, I do speak on this very topic. And I also will share for my moms out there that beginning November 4th, we are starting a healthy habits into the holidays program. It's just gonna be a four-part series, a four-week mentorship program for all of my moms. And we are going to talk about just healthy habits as we head into the holidays, as far as our nutrition is concerned, our exercise is concerned, managing stress and all of those areas. So it's gonna be short, but it's gonna, we're gonna target those topics right before the holidays. So if that's something that you would like to be a part of, please reach out, message me on Instagram. It's going to be very, we're gonna pack a lot in in a short amount of time, and it's gonna be just finishing right before we get heavy into the holidays. So I would love to have any of you join us. It's gonna be a really great four-part, four-week series on this very topic, just working on healthy habits as we head into the holidays because a lot of times that's a a challenging time, right? We get faced with a lot of different challenging moments, and our schedules get a little bit packed. And I want to offer this to all of my moms out there to kind of ease some of the stress and offer some simple tips and some things that you can incorporate into your routine right away that will help you into the holidays to just keep your habits healthy. Doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself because life is meant to be enjoyed. I will always emphasize that, but I'm going to help everyone with some ideas and tips to help everyone through the holidays to stay on track with their health. And then after the first of the year is when we are going to open up, well, I'll open up registration before the end of the year, but we're going to start our 12-week moms who flourish mentorship program. And that will go a little bit deeper into these different areas, and I will definitely in that program share more about toxins and what we're being exposed to and how we can reduce our exposure and just lead healthier, cleaner lifestyles as we move forward. So I wanted to share that with you all as it relates to this episode today, that I will be diving deeper into this very topic in my 12-week program that will begin after the first of the year. So if you'd like more information on that, please also message me. Instagram is the best way, or you can also text through this episode. You can send me a text. So, with that being said, everyone, I hope you find a little bit of value in this. This is again just kind of setting off the alarm that we really need to be proactive with our health. We have to be very proactive with our decisions and not just short term for our health and our wellness, but long term. And the choices we make now, the habits we start now, are going to pay off over time. I promise you, even if they're small things, small things that you do. I'm teaching a walking class now with my college students. And I notice a couple of my students, um, it's a walking class, and you know, a couple of them do their walks with their families, and you know, just little things like that, taking a short walk with your family or with your significant other, just little things like that, getting out, getting fresh air, taking a walk. All of these little things that we do add up over time. So I want to encourage you to, you know, think of think this week maybe of something, something that you can do, one small step that you can do that will benefit you and your overall health and the health of your loved ones. So, with that being said, I hope you all have a beautiful, blessed rest of your week. And we will see you next time on Words of Wellness. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll see you next time. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. I hope you gained value and enjoyed our time together as much as I did. And if you know someone who could benefit from today's episode, I would love and appreciate it if you could share with a friend or rate and review Words of Wellness so that more can hear this message. I love and appreciate you all. Thank you for listening. And if you have any questions or topics you would like me to share in future episodes, please don't hesitate to reach out to me through my contact information that is shared in the show notes below. Again, thank you for tuning in to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelley Jeffries, and I encourage you to do something for you, for your wellness on this day. Until next time, I hope you all have a healthy, happy, and blessed week.