This week I am delighted to be sharing my interview with the inspirational Alexx Stuart. I have been lucky to know Alexx for quite a few years now and I’ve been following her Legacy Project, Low Tox Life for some time. Over 2000 people have gone through Alexx’s amazing program and with over 50,000 followers on Facebook her community is growing daily. It’s no wonder. As the incidence of chronic disease, ADD, autoimmune, obesity and toxicity levels increase people are searching for answers. And Alexx is a fountain of knowledge. Her wisdom, energy and passion for low-tox living shines a big beautiful light on how we can all start to live happier, healthier lives and make informed choices about what we eat, what we put on our bodies and what we use in our homes.

Read on to discover the story behind Low Tox Life and the amazing Alexx Stuart. 

Q&A

What inspired you to create Low Tox Life?

I’ve always thought how can I help? How can I serve and do great things and feel really useful? That’s always been the metric for me. From my time working in the cosmetics industry and empowering a woman recovering from cancer. To introducing two regulars when I was bartending who later married and had a baby. Helping people have their best life has always been an underlying theme for me.

Along with the skills, I discovered in these industries I experienced ill health for a very long time. For over two decades I suffered from chronic illness – chronic tonsillitis four to five times a year, glandular fever, constant fatigue, weekly migraines, polycystic ovarian syndrome and big auto-immune issues post pregnancy. I knew something had to change. I decided I had to end the vicious cycle of antibiotics after antibiotics. As Einstein said: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It’s been 14 years since I discovered naturopathy but that practitioner changed my life! Since then I’ve experienced a mild case of tonsillitis when my son was a newborn but that’s it. It was a truly significant moment when I realised when you do things differently, you get a different result!

Sometimes it takes a while to work out what your ‘different’ is going to be. It could well have been the reverse. If something is happening to you over and over again, you need to think outside the box and get a different pair of eyes if you can’t look at it differently yourself.

As I learnt about the food system on my journey to wellness I wanted to share what I discovered. I was horrified by the discoveries I made from cosmetics to baby goods to fabric softener. The fact that petroleum-based ingredients can be in our food and that’s legal? There is nothing about our physiology that understands what petroleum is inside us. It just goes “what the heck is that? It’s not food” That can cause a lot of issues, as can all the chemical preservatives that are in there. I immediately felt a huge sense of injustice.

My writing was born out of my activist streak. I’ve always been conscious of justice whether humanitarian, political (which I lean more to) or systems. And food is such a huge part of that. Conglomerates decide what we eat and that’s how Low Tox Life was born.

Why the name Low Tox and not Zero Tox?

The reason for Low Tox versus No Tox or Zero Tox is that our world isn’t black and white. There is so much grey, and it’s important to acknowledge doing the best we can with what we have at the time: budget, mental capacity, whatever those markers may be.

We should be celebrating anything that helps us make a better choice. I wanted to give people a sense that you don’t have to be perfect, just a little bit better than yesterday, that beautiful Maya Angelou-like sentiment, that we can always move towards better.

In the year before making your career change, how would you describe your mental, emotional and spiritual state to a close and trusted friend?

I can’t believe we were so blindsided in this way. I was angry. Not at my friends or my mum who didn’t know. I wasn’t angry at my surrounds but at the system that allows us to eat spinach that’s three weeks old from three states away when a farm locally could be producing that for us.

It was extreme dissatisfaction at our education system. I can go to the best private schools and come out after 13 years and have no idea about the correlation of what goes into my body and the state of my health. What are we doing? We’re grooming bankers, lawyers, doctors, social workers, psychologists, all sorts of wonderful people, but we’re not grooming critical thinking in our own personal lives, and that system is all too convenient.

Born out of the industrial revolution, our education system focuses us on task and vocation and doesn’t make room therefore for enough about life and living, creativity, the ability to think independently and weigh up information. It puts food and cooking as inconveniences that are beneath us while we do our ‘important work’. The ‘convenience message’ is so strong, that someone will take care of those insignificant things so we can get onto more important matters. There’s no work than any of us can do if we’re dying. Preparing meals and connecting with our families is a luxury not afforded to all. It’s what allows us to be healthy, strong, clever, happy and it’s time it got the recognition it deserved for that and that we stopped saying “poor me I have to cook.” Lucky you, you have food and family and are safe. It’s time for a reframe.

Was there an event/events which served as catalysts for the work you now do?

It was a huge year of revelations. I must’ve lost a couple of friends over that because I was so passionate, upset, angry. When you first see the light on something, it takes a while to then calm down and take baby steps. I was 28 when I discovered the toxicity in our food. And 33 when my son was born and I learned about environmental toxins.

How do you feel Low Tox Life brings your unique talents to life?

I’ve always wanted people to feel that change was possible and to help them feel connected at a deeper level to themselves and to nature – even if you’re an inner city chick like me. I love communicating and coaching and believe I’m a good “flicker on of switches” for people. I help people see things a new way without making that judgemental and that’s important for igniting curiosity in people, I think. If I could take every other task out of my business and just hang out with my community, that would be my dream. Write recipes, research pieces, speak at events and talk to my people, that’s actually my goal: to grow enough that I can focus on serving my community, while clever accounting peeps, admin peeps and strategic peeps can help me in other areas. We’re nearly there! Everyone helping where they’re most helpful. It just makes sense, right?

What gives you the most fulfilment is it when people have a shift in their wellbeing?

It’s not necessarily a shift in their wellbeing, it’s a shift in their consciousness. I’m not trying to sound like Deepak Chopra but it actually is. When you get someone who is completely unconsciousness to what goes on their skin, what air freshener they’re plugging in, what they’re washing their clothes with, what they put in their mouth etc. When you take that person and guide them to some serious hardcore shocking information, it’s like what?? A lot of people can’t believe it. When you guide them to the other side, its impact on their health and on the world, it’s all about people and the planet. That beautiful circular economy where we stop throwing everything, thinking nothing’s going to harm us. That person will never look at a supermarket aisle in the same way. And they will feel positive and empowered about that instead of devastated, freaked out and not know what to do. When I know that my business and programs have helped that person come through as a happy person, that’s my goose bump moment.

What’s the biggest highlight so far?

It was October 2014 and my first Go Low Tox e-course. By the second week, when people started noticing their child’s eczema disappearing, their wheezing was gone, they weren’t breaking out in hives. I was always thinking if this could help someone, and when 360 participants started a thread and all of them started talking about things they were realising I was winded. I was crying in my living room at 1 am because everyone was up and excited. I realised that there was something in this. It was the most useful that I’d ever felt in my life.

How does your work serve a higher purpose?

I’m part of a grassroots movement.

I was talking to a wonderful and super successful entrepreneur and she shared with me the tough conversations she was having with government, counsels, banks, to do the work she was doing. I was talking about my struggle that this is still quite fringe, to admit that some of these chemicals are harming us. There’s a lot of research published in the Lancet or Pubmed, very reputable medical journals but it’s still very new. I was telling her it feels like, if I went to the top and have those conversations, everyone would call me some random hippie weirdo woman, with no qualifications who was a lunatic, fearmongering. But I’ve had over 2000 people do my courses. You can’t call me a lunatic for the anecdotal changes that have happened to them and their children. I feel that I can be in that grassroots movement, we don’t have to worry about systems and the big guys. We can mutually, gently change the market as a concerned people. I.e. This product that has some dodgies based on science, and this product has no dodgies, both are effective and similarly priced, which one are you going to use? There’s no contest. In grassroots, you can do that without feeling like you’re threatening big guys. I’m an activist at heart, and I’ve found a way that makes it calm, beautiful and useful at the grassroots level as opposed to being on current affairs, exposing people. I like to help people transition to feeling fabulous, not angry, just feel a beautiful feeling of influence in their circle of life. Those ripples end up calming everybody. It’s all in the way you do it.

What great lessons have you learned so far in life?

I’ve learnt over the years that the obstacle is usually myself or you. When things aren’t going right I know it’s me. I’m the obstacle, no-one else. The buck stops here. I’m the bottleneck. Think about when you’re working with someone on a project and it doesn’t go well. When I don’t explain a project well enough for that person to know exactly what they had to do it’s my fault, not theirs. That’s a huge learning. Especially in a blame-oriented society. We’re mini America, in that litigious way. “I’m the victim of this person doing this”. It’s quite a hard lesson to suck it up and do some brave self-analysis but it’s by far my greatest lesson.

So really what you’re saying is we need to become more responsible and take ownership?

Yes. Absolutely. Another is: don’t wait to make a change if you see changes needed to be made. Just start. Start with your neighbour, your street, school, local cafe. You don’t need to wait till you have a PhD to qualify. Anyone can affect any change. As a changemaker myself, the number one thing I grapple with is, “Do I deserve to be having this voice”. I bet every changemaker out there is saying: am I going to be found out? She’s not even a doctor and she’s saying these things? Anyone can make a change, anyone can positively affect the life of a fellow human being or a larger group of people. If you’re frustrated by the way things look or are, then do something about it, even if it’s just in your family.

How would you like to be remembered?

As someone who was really helpful, empowering.

If you could give people one piece of advice what would it be and why?

My mind went straight to career, probably because I’ve had several incarnations of career. On the career front: It’s never the end and it’s never too late. If you feel like you’re not being of service in your current role, find the path or context in your industry that aligns you to a sense of purpose. So that you feel useful. I think humans need to feel useful. We forget that money is a small part of the metric when people feel successful. Feeling useful brings about goosebumps.

It’s never too late to start tapping into a higher purpose. That doesn’t mean you need to go and build schools in Africa. It could be: there are a lot of divorced women who need financial help. It could be anything. When you tap into a sense of purpose within the identifiable skills that you have, you’ll expect a level of satisfaction (at work) like never before. Sometimes that will take a coach to help you articulate that. It certainly did for me.

Bonus Questions: Who or what is your favourite:

Musician?  John Lennon. He was probably one of my first crushes as well. It was just something about that man. He was a big picture thinker. It’s not just about the tune but everything about that man, what he stood for. Amazing that a celebrity at that level could be used to channel peace in the world. Mind blowing. John Lennon was an amazing human, it was so much more than the music, but him as a being in the world, and how much you can do and spread.

Author? Brene Brown. Instead of looking outside for every solution, she makes you confront the inside and the interactions and what they reveal about you. Daring Greatly was a masterpiece and probably my favourite book of the past 10 years.

Mantra or Quote? Maya Angelou: Once you know better, you do better.

Find out more about Alexx Stuart and Low Tox Life:

Website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook

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Thank you for being here and consciously choosing to explore the different ways that ordinary people are living extraordinary lives by serving a higher purpose through their daily work. Everything we do here at Your Legacy Project is designed to inspire and empower you to live your legacy and bring your unique talents to life.

So tell me do you live a low-tox life? After being diagnosed with an auto-immune disease I know first hand the affects of toxic overload. Have you done Alexx’s course? I’d love to know what’s your number #1 healthy / low tox tip and how has going low-tox changed your life? 

Hundreds of people visit this site each week and you’ll never know the difference you can make in the lives of others by sharing your own personal experience. Please share your comments below I can’t wait to read them.

And remember, Live With Purpose.

Brooke