Meet Trailblazer Christina Carlos and Amanda Feller

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christina Carlos and Amanda Feller.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We met each other more than five years ago when we were both the only two to arrive on time to a mutual friend’s birthday dinner…Although knowing us, we were probably both super early. Needless to say, we immediately hit it off, ended up working for the same marketing company and have been working together in corporate America since then. Through our time working together and becoming close friends, we recognized that we both had a shared passion for food. Not just eating it (although that is high on our list) but also knowing what we are putting into our body, how it affects how we feel and how we can turn nourishing ingredients into delicious meals. Together we took our passion for nutrition and turned it into a blog. We both have very different journeys to what led us to be passionate about nutrition so here is a little about each of our backgrounds:

Amanda: Most of my high school and college eating habits consisted solely of sugar, coffee, more sugar, and to round it all off- sugar. I was always on the go with sports, school, and work, so my diet was not something I ever thought twice about because it was strictly about convenience for me. I was extremely thin, had zero muscle, bruised like crazy, and also had six oral surgeries in a single year due to dental issues from my poor eating habits. I knew I was unhealthy, I felt terrible all the time, and decided I had to make a big change. It was not until I was a few years into my career that I decided to start focusing on my health and nutrition and start taking care of myself. I slowly started getting into working out and recognized that I had to do more than just get myself to the gym to feel better. I (painfully!) made a conscious decision to start cutting back on sugar and replace it with protein, fruits and veggies, and nutrient-dense foods. I became really interested in ingredients because even the so-called healthy foods are often full of additives, sugar, and artificial ingredients. Clean eating has helped me feel so much better and has made such an impact in my life, so I wanted to share what I was learning with friends, family, and others through my own creative outlet.

Christina: It was during my sophomore year of college that I got pneumonia. After being treated for it, I still wasn’t feeling much better. My pneumonia was gone but I still felt terrible – I had headaches all the time, I was nauseous more often than not and I had stomach cramps that never seemed to go away. After getting lots of tests done, including celiac and other allergy tests, my doctors couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong. I was scheduled three months out to get an endoscopy to hopefully offer more insight into what was going on. During that time, my mom had heard from a friend of hers about a food sensitivity test (different from the food allergy tests I had already received). At this point, I was willing to do anything to make myself feel better. I ordered the food sensitivity panel, went to a lab to get my blood drawn where they shipped the samples off to the lab that would do the full analysis. I got my results back and after determining that I had extremely high food sensitivities to wheat, gluten, barley, malt, rye, and yeast, I immediately changed my diet. I did extensive research to determine what ingredients to look for on nutrition labels that contained those foods. Within four days of eliminating those foods out of my diet, I felt a million times better. It was at that point that I never stopped looking at nutrition labels and really examined what I was putting into my body. It’s truly amazing how foods can affect how you feel – both physically and mentally. Ever since I have had a passion for baking and cooking with clean ingredients that I don’t have sensitivities to but that also provide amazing health benefits.

Amanda’s love for writing and Christina’s love for cooking along with our shared passion for nutrition are what brought A Healthy Hint to life!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
For us, it’s been a relatively smooth road! We’re lucky that we have amazing jobs, amazing families, and amazing friends who have supported us along the way. On that note, we should mention that we have full-time marketing careers and A Healthy Hint is simply a creative outlet and hobby for us that pushes us in new directions. Unfortunately, the money making aspect of blogging doesn’t happen overnight. 

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about A Healthy Hint – what should we know?
A Healthy Hint was born from two people who are women obsessed, label-obsessed, ingredient-obsessed, article consuming, internet scouring, food lovers trying to better ourselves through nutrition and what we put into our bodies. This blog was born when we decided to start at the source of a recipe: the ingredients.

After years of recipe copying and Pinterest stalking, we noticed a trend. The recipes in a blog post seemed to simply be a backstory on how the writer’s husband really loves egg dishes or their son threw a tantrum and they now need a quick dinner option. If we were being honest with ourselves, we did not want to read that blog babble. We would instead scroll to the bottom, grab the recipe and bounce off the page, time and time again. We decided that we could do something about this, and provide healthy, delicious recipes while also providing readers with education on the nutrition behind the recipe, empowering the reader as we had empowered ourselves.

A Healthy Hint was created as a way to bring people recipes that we modified and made our own, recipes we have created ourselves from scratch, and recipes that are tried and true classics.

So much of the media coverage is focused on the challenges facing women today, but what about the opportunities? Do you feel there are any opportunities that women are particularly well positioned for?
Well, why don’t you tell us about opportunities that men are well positioned for? Those are the same opportunities that women are well positioned for. Mic Drop.

In all honesty, we are incredibly lucky that we both grew up in households where we never felt that as women we were held back by anything.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ahealthyhint.com/
• Email: hello@ahealthyhint.com
• Instagram: @ahealthyhint
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ahealthyhint/

Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.