Healthy Deviance with Pilar Gerasimo
Week of March 28, 2026
Intro to Healthy Deviance: The Art of Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World
Have you noticed how tough it is for most folks to get and stay healthy these days? Welcome to life in the Unhealthy Default Reality, where chronic illness is the norm, where vicious cycles are difficult to avoid, and where deviating from commonly accepted modes of living is the only solid survival strategy. Learn how to bust out of unhealthy “normal” ruts and make your joyful escape to a better, healthier, happier way of living. Tool/Exercise: Weird Symptom Checklist: Are You Breaking Yourself?
Nonconformist Competency 1: Amplified Awareness
The extraordinary importance (and vanishing art) of paying attention to your own actions and reactions; reclaiming your calm and focus in a world of nonstop disruption and distraction; interpreting the signals your body is sending you; harvesting the rewards of willingness rather than fretting about “willpower.” Tool/Exercise: Renegade Ritual: Morning-Minutes Practice
Nonconformist Competency 2: Preemptive Repair
The power of getting ahead of the damage that’s done to our body-minds as the result of living in our pro-inflammatory culture; avoiding states of reactivity and vulnerability; rebuilding vitality, resilience, and autonomy in microdoses. Tool/Exercise: Renegade Ritual: Ultradian Rhythm Breaks (URBs)
Nonconformist Competency 3: Continuous Growth and Learning
The necessity and reward of embracing a growth mindset around health and self-improvement; leveraging (vs. loathing) the tension between where you are and where you want to be; building on existing strengths and identifying areas of opportunity through non-judging self-observation. Tool/Exercise: Renegade Ritual: Nighttime Wind-Down.
Healthy Deviant Know-How: The Survival Skills of the New Era
Beyond “diet and exercise,” a distillation of the current skills and practices essential for becoming and staying an unusually healthy person; how to trade white-knuckle effort and info-overwhelm for simple, small-scale experimentation; Healthy Deviance as a Flow experience. Tool/Exercise: Inventory of Healthy Deviant Strengths and Needs.
Pilar Gerasimo is an award-winning health journalist, pioneering social explorer, and author of The Healthy Deviant: A Rule-Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World (North Atlantic Books, 2020).
Best known for her visionary work as founding editor of Experience Life magazine, Pilar has also served as top health editor for The Huffington Post; visiting faculty for the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, School of Applied Functional Medicine, and HEROIC Academy; and co-host of The Living Experiment.
Today, she guides people through personalized health-transformation experiences via her online courses and Healthy Deviant U membership experience. She also lectures at universities, leads workshops at top retreat centers, and consults for organizations committing to transforming whole-person health at work and around the globe.
Pilar lives her family’s regenerative, communal farm in Wisconsin with her three-legged pit bull pal, Sally Sue. Learn more and take the “Are You a Healthy Deviant?” quiz at healthydeviant.com, where you can also subscribe to Pilar’s Healthy Deviant Digest newsletter/blog.