The Stretch That Makes You Sweat

Having a Lastics body is getting even better! Until now, Lastics has been about how you feel in your body, how you connect to it, how you stretch and move. The beauty of Lastics is in its nuance. The power is in its effectiveness. It exists because I believe happiness is tied to movement, and feeling good is tied to feeling free, which depends, at least physically, on flexibility.   

But feeling good also means that everything else is working on the inside of your body too. So, as a natural extension of our workouts, which connect you to your body from the inside-out, we are now creating fun, effective, chemically-conscious products that will treat your body from the outside-in.   

It’s been an interesting evolution for sure. I’ve been back and forth between the worlds of dance and beauty for a long time - two worlds that I love.  The first half of my life I danced. The second began with me getting my first “real” job at CHANEL and growing up in the beauty business with jobs at Barneys New York, Donna Karan and Philosophy.  Then, I went on to work as a consultant for many other top beauty brands. On the side I continued dancing and, without planning to, ended up using all those years of training to create Lastics, which has grown from a dance-based stretch class into a company, brand and way of being.

Now, my beauty hat is back on, but this time, I’m making the stuff myself for reasons I’d never have anticipated. Several years back, in another serendipitous turn, I got sick.  In fact, I’m not convinced I’d be here to write this if I left my health in the hands of the medical establishment. It was a yearlong ordeal after which, I emerged even sicker. My digestive system was nonfunctional. My reproductive system had a complete meltdown.  My immune system was shot. I was a mess.

I had to look elsewhere for answers and found out the hard way that medicine did not have them. We are brainwashed to believe that doctors have answers and pills hold “cures,” when they don’t. And because I continued to feel sick when I ate, (and I ate clean – or so I thought) I sought the advice of a nutritionist. 

With one simple hair test we learned that my copper, zirconium, mercury and aluminum levels were sky-high. Magnesium was disconcertingly low. My nutritionist was clear: we had to get the outliers back into balance, bring inflammation down, heal my stomach lining and reduce the toxic burden on my system. This meant I had to understand ingredients, read labels and learn to cook. I had to dissect and control everything I put into my body because what had never occurred to me was to question what was hidden in my food - or anything else.   

As I got my mojo going in the kitchen, I started thinking about what else I could make - besides food - to lower the chemical load on my body.  Because the other half of my illness was gynecological, I really wanted to get as many endocrine disruptors and estrogen-mimicking ingredients out of my daily routine as I could. Top on my list was plastic bottles (which was easy) and deodorant (not so much). 

I’d read article after article about how harmful it is, especially for women, to have the skin in such a vulnerable area around the breasts and lymph node glands, drinking up chemicals that have been shown to upset the body at best, and cause cancer and other diseases, at worst.  Plus, antiperspirants seal off the pores and prevent the critical excretion of sweat, which is there to help the body perform a natural cleansing process. It’s a double whammy.

As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything on the market that worked and was safe and was trustworthy. I work out. I dance. I teach. I cannot smell gross. Nor could I believe there wasn’t a way to control odor and sweatiness naturally at the same time.  And I was right. There was a way, and it smells like Lavender Spice and Honeysuckle Citrus!

I hope you'll join us on Facebook :)