Meet Lauren Papanos

We were lucky to catch up with Lauren Papanos recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren, great to have you with us today and excited to have you share your wisdom with our readers. Over the years, after speaking with countless do-ers, makers, builders, entrepreneurs, artists and more we’ve noticed that the ability to take risks is central to almost all stories of triumph and so we’re really interested in hearing about your journey with risk and how you developed your risk-taking ability.
I grew up a child of a father who was a serial entrepreneur and a second-generation immigrant. My grandparents (his parents) were immigrants from Greece that grew up in the Great Depression. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents as a young girl and they showed me grit, courage and perseverance. My grandmother didn’t speak much English and my grandfather had a stroke before I was born which impaired his language and stripped him of his driver’s license. Despite this, everyday I spent with them, we navigated public transportation together to go to my favorite places. My grandmother would run into the middle of the street to pick up pennies for her savings. I saw how hard they worked to create a good life for my dad and his younger brothers and how they wanted to share that with their grandchildren. My father inherited many of these same tendencies. He was and still is a serial entrepreneur, trying his hand at everything. He is a very resourceful man and says yes to any project you need help with. He doesn’t use Youtube to teach him, he takes the risk and uses his baseline knowledge to figure it out. He will spend hours until he can fix it. As a serial entrepreneur I saw him start many businesses. Some more successful than others. He was never afraid, even when they failed. He got back right on his feet and tried something new. He always has a new idea and follows that idea fearlessly. I get my creativity, adventure and fearless pursuit from him.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am the owner of Functional Fueling Nutrition. We are a team of licensed Functional Registered Dietitian Nutritionists who believe in treating the body as a whole, recognizing that every aspect of your health is interconnected. Our approach addresses the root causes of health issues and uses nutrition as the way of healing. As a young girl, I spent many days in my mother’s organic garden learning about herbs and the role that specific nutrients have in our healing. Being near plants and growing up in my Greek culture instilled in me a deep appreciation of food as medicine and holistic health. From my own healing experience I got both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nutrition sciences and got licensed as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist. I then went on to receive additional years of training and certifications in functional medicine and endocrinology (hormones). I love that practicing functional medicine embodies so many similarities to my cultural Greek roots. I call this The Athenian Way and it embodies: food as medicine, healing with herbs and nature, restoring homeostasis in the body and mind-body balance. I began my career working in various high performance settings. My initial dream was to bring food as medicine and functional nutrition to the active population. I ended up leaving high performance and began consulting with an internal medicine office with patients ages 45 – 85 dealing with everything from heart disease, diabetes, kidney stones, menopause to cancer. What I learned from this work was that all individuals want to perform at a high level and that functional nutrition was the answer to help them get there. I saw countless patients reverse health conditions, get off lifelong medications and restore vitality so that they could show up for the things that mattered most to them in life. I knew I had to share this work with more and more people. I took all of the best practices I learned from seeing what and how people heal and founded Functional Fueling. Today we offer private coaching where we combine the powers of advanced lab testing and food as medicine to help people reverse health conditions and restore their most vibrant health.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three most important qualities were: remaining a student of my craft, being investigative and always remembering that your customer/client is a human first and foremost.

Find something you are so passionate about that you want to forever learn about deeper and deeper. Question what you hear and use that to guide your investigation and create your own thought process. This helps you establish a philosophy and approach that is different than everyone else. Listen to people’s stories, get to know them on a deeper level than just business and don’t be so worried about time. You can’t get back the moments with people and those are the ones that matter the most.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?
This past year my husband got diagnosed with a rare disease that came as a total surprise. One day he was in the most vibrant health and the next we were in the hospital in a life threatening position. Since this diagnosis there have been many setbacks and challenges along the way. Going through this really forced me to slow down and focus on the most important things in life: health and our loved ones. Through this experience I desired simplicity in my life and my business. I went through my business and got rid of any fluff and consolidated our services down to just three. I completely transformed one of my services, my monthly membership and aligned it with me and the journey I’m on in life. I completely parted ways with creating things in my business for what others needed or wanted and the outcome of what I was creating. Instead, I created what I needed and wanted to share with the world. Doing this has been so freeing. It’s been challenging to unlearn and relearn how to share my expertise but I have enjoyed it. I am excited to see how this new version of me and my business evolves.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Arielle Levy Photo

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