We’re Back – Natural Living Family Podcast Returns

[0:00 – 0:42] Prelude
[00:00:00] Dr. Z: God willing, we’re gonna be delivering Baby at home like we did our other babies and Sabrina, I’ll brag on her for a second. She’s almost 47 years old. We just ran our family 5k a couple days ago, and Sabrina ran the one-mile fun run with the kiddos and… What was your time?

[00:00:17] Mama Z: It was 10 something, so it wasn’t a world record, but I was three days past my due date.

I did sprint at the finish line, and I never stopped. And I’ve been training for this, so it was my goal. As soon as I found it, I was pregnant. That, if it be the Lord’s will that I make it to full term, that I really wanted to make it to the race…
…
[00:00:41] Dr. Z: Welcome to the Natural Living Family Podcast, where we help you say no to overwhelm and yes to intentional living so you could take your health back God’s way. We’re Dr. Z and Mama Z, bestselling authors, Bible Health Educators, and Parents of Seven. And this show is all about equipping you with simple, low-toxic living and budget-friendly health solutions so you can walk in the abundant life you were created for.

This isn’t about chasing trends or doing it all, it’s about renewing your mind, rejecting toxic systems, and embracing God’s design for healing and wholeness. Because the truth is, God has a beautiful plan for your life, and yes, your health matters to him. Are you ready to get started? Awesome. Let’s dive in….

[00:01:30] Dr. Z: We’re back. We’re back. Welcome. Super excited, everybody. Wow. It has been a little bit since we’ve been, we be,

[00:01:40] Mama Z: yes.

[00:01:41] Dr. Z: What have we been up to?

[00:01:42] Mama Z: We’ve been up to quite a bit now… we’ve almost added three new members to our family.

[00:01:47] Dr. Z: Yes, this is the coming back, so this is gonna be a really fun episode.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with us at Natural Living Family or Natural Living Family Podcast, we’ve been on sabbatical that ended up being quite a break. It was, been about a five year break since our last episode, and that was basically because of COVID. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about what’s happened to us since Covid and where we’re at, and just reestablish the wonderful, wonderful relationship we have with our listeners.

And if you’ve never heard of us, I am Dr. Eric Zelinski. People know me online as “Dr. Z.”

[00:02:21] Mama Z: And I’m Sabrina Ann Zelinski, and people know me as “Mama Z.”

[00:02:26] Dr. Z: And we’ve been doing this natural living family thing since 2014. And it’s kind of funny because when we look at what we’ve done, we’re kind of like the OGs in the influencer world and the health space before “influencer” was even a trend. And everything changed in 2020. Like everything changed, right? Remember, just think, go back like where were you five years ago, right? And five years ago, literally today, as we record this podcast, we were in lockdown… and so in that time, we found out that we were pregnant with baby Ezekiel, and after that, couple years later, we had Baby Isaac, and you are pregnant with…

[00:03:08] Mama Z: Baby Elizabeth, Elizabeth Ann, baby Beth

[00:03:12] Dr. Z: And Baby Beth was due…,

[00:03:14] Mama Z: Last Wednesday be, so we’re 40 weeks plus six days at this point. Going strong.

[00:03:20] Dr. Z: Yep. And I was like, Hey, Sabrina, we gotta record this, , at least a quick little podcast before you give birth. And we, God willing, we’re gonna be delivering Baby at home like we did our other babies and. Sabrina, I’ll brag on her for a second. She’s almost 47 years old. We just ran our family 5k a couple days ago, and Sabrina ran the one-mile fun run with the kiddos and…What was your time?

[00:03:44] Mama Z: It was 10 something, so it wasn’t a world record, but I was three days past my due date.

I did sprint at the finish line, and I never stopped. And I’ve been training for this, so it was my goal. As soon as I found it, I was pregnant. That, if it be the Lord’s will that I make it to full term, that I really wanted to make it to the race. My average is usually 10 to 11 days overdue.

[00:04:11] Dr. Z: Wow. And you should have saw everyone, y’all like here she was, obviously, I would say the most pregnant person at the race. I mean this was like a big citywide thing.

[00:04:20] Mama Z: Yeah. There’s over 800 people,

[00:04:21] Dr. Z: almost a thousand people. And you see this, I mean, just super pregnant mom. And people were like, What is she? How pregnant is she?

And her mom, Mimi recorded this video and if you haven’t, check out Instagram. Y’all go to @naturallivingfamilyofficial. Check out our Instagram page ’cause we’ve been just putting up a bunch of reels. And you’ll see Sabrina run down the race finish line.
It was just such a blessing.

[00:04:44] Mama Z: And I beat a couple little kids right at the end.

[00:04:48] Dr. Z: Ah, and you’ve been coaching, you’ve been coaching run club now for what?

[00:04:51] Mama Z: I’ve been coaching run club since Esther, who’s now 16 and a half, was three and a half. And, we’ve made it part of our family exercise and it’s part of our family fun and something that we do all together.

[00:05:07] Dr. Z: And we wanna talk, if you wanna hear about home birth prep, all sorts of things related to natural living, low-tox living.
And we’ll talk a little bit about low-tox versus non-tox versus whatever tox, and we’ll kind of unpack all of that in the future episodes.

But we just wanted to reintroduce ourselves and let y’all know how excited we are, and to let you know that we’ve been praying for you. You have been in our thoughts and in our prayers.
Our listeners. Our readers, new, old, young, and it’s just been such a blessing, and I’m grateful for the last five years, and these five years we’ve been very productive in other ways. But we took a little bit of time away, and I’ll tell you.

We, I burned out. I think is fair to say, like I hit a wall and we had some just unbelievable, wonderful things happen to us, and we did a lot of things in a very short amount of time.

And I remember thinking in 2020, like I just took that reason that world stoppage as just a sign, as an excuse, as a good justification for me to take a step back and stop the 60-plus hour work weeks and all the grind and all the content that we were producing.

I mean, in a matter of four years, we produced more content than, quite frankly, most people will produce in a career. Summits, master classes, cooking classes, and home makeovers and garden classes, and we wrote three bestselling books, and she became Mrs.
Georgia. Almost won Mrs. America. We produced an award-winning documentary, and it was like one thing after another, after another. We are featured on Netflix, on 700 Club multiple times, just dozens of podcasts and radio interviews, and it was just unbelievable.

It was just what a blessing, and at the time, people really were interested in our information. On essential oils and do-it-yourself, non-toxic living, and we always shared our faith, and we’ve always shared our heart for the Lord and our mission. And so it was just a whirlwind . And I just remember when COVID happened five years ago, just thinking to myself, wow, I can kind of breathe….

And it was just a wonderful opportunity for us to snuggle up, and focus on the family, and focus on kids, and focus on our walk with the Lord.

[00:07:33] Mama Z: Yes. And I think part of it, too, was about just refining and making changes and really being. Our best versions of ourself and more productive in other ways. So, you know, even at the home, making all the products that we do and what we do, really streamlining things., So there was a lot of things behind the scenes that we really learned.

Not just openly that we’ve shared in places, but a lot of other things. And people started being very interested in, organization and how we streamline what we do with a large family and all of these other things. And so it’s been really cool over the past five years to really think about, oh yeah, what is it that we do when we do what we do?
And being very intentional about what we do.

[00:08:22] Dr. Z: Well, we wanna keep this short and sweet, especially this first back episode after five-year sabbatical, and just to lay out the vision of what we see going forward. And so we’ve been very blessed. We’ve been very blessed and privileged with a network of health influencers and experts, functional medicine doctors, and just wonderful people that are helping people. on social media through podcasts, radio, and all sorts of things. So what we wanna do is, what we plan on, interspersing some ‘me and Sabrina chatting’ like this at the house, with me interviewing experts, maybe some devotional time.

And one thing we’re trying to do is to help create an environment that is very much spiritual and very much rooted and grounded in natural principles that people can implement to help change their life. And as Christians, our foundation, first and foremost, is in the Lord. And we believe that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit.

We’ve been Christians now 22 years, and we’ve been married for almost 19, and I can’t imagine what our lives would be like without God. And I also can’t imagine what our lives would be like if we didn’t focus on this temple, on honoring our bodies, as the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

So my background is as a public health researcher. And as a chiropractor, I went to aromatherapy school, and I’ve been doing this now professionally for about 15 years. And so we have this. Doctor-tested, Mama-approved thing going because ultimately it’s Sabrina that’s making the products and doing the things at the home, and she’s created such a lower-tox environment for our family that we’ve been able to thrive in so many ways.

And so a little bit about your background, your mom as an herbalist, and you with essential oils, ’cause you really drove me in a lot of the way, and I had to come, kicking and screaming with a couple things.

[00:10:34] Mama Z: Yeah. You know, my mom is a culinary herbalist. And so she did a lot of things with herbs.

She’s still part of the International Herb Association, which has both culinary and medicinal people. So I got to sit under all these amazing people that taught all different kinds of things about utilizing plants as medicine and all the different routes that you could go in that way.

And one of those is essential oils. And one of her best friends just happens to be an Ojibwe Indian who specialized really in medicinal medicines. And ever since I was a little girl, if we had something going on, we would, call Mrs. B and she would tell us, what kind of lymphatic exercises to do, or what teas or what essential oils, or if we had something big going on, we’d let her know and she would make us a blend.

So I grew up that way, and Eric thought it was just smelly stuff underneath the counter of the bathroom. And that’s really where he saw those things until he had to do a lot of peer-reviewed research on essential oils. And he’d come home and say, Did you know that such and such did this, or such and such did that?

And I’m like, yes, I did. And that’s why I have it under here. That’s why I used it for our first birth, or this or that. And it was really great because he had the knowledge of what the peer-reviewed research said, and I had the practical application of what I had used it for. So it was like pieces of a puzzle coming together.

[00:12:10] Dr. Z: Hey, friend, real quick, if you’ve been listening and thinking, I wanna live this way, but I need help, well, that’s exactly why we created the Bible Health Academy. It’s our monthly mentorship and training hub packed with Bible health solutions, non-toxic living strategies, and the like-minded community.
You need to walk in the abundant life God designed for you. Whether you’re brand new to natural living or ready to go deeper, this is where transformation happens from the inside out. Visit biblehealthacademy.com to learn more. We hope you’ll join us.

[00:12:45] Dr. Z: Now, in our young twenties, we both struggled with real serious health issues, and we both dealt with some, just some demons in our life before we met the Lord. I’m sure we’ll talk more and more about that in future episodes. Between Sabrina dealing with an eating disorder and between me battling addiction to street drugs and alcohol, and just struggling when we met. Christ, God opened up a whole new world to us. And we lived a few hundred miles away from each other in Michigan. We didn’t know each other at the time, but we were living essentially parallel lives, hundreds of miles away from each other, and God was walking us through our own individual natural living journey.

And when we met and we ended up getting married six months later, it was a whirlwind, wonderful experience. To know that this is the person that you’re gonna spend the rest of your life with. And I’m like, boom. I couldn’t wait to slap a ring on her finger and get married. And here we are, seven babies later.

Praise the Lord. God walked us through how to combine our own individual passions and individual, just perspectives. And we just started living life like this together, and like iron sharpens iron, the Bible says, and that’s really what our marriage and our, what now has become, our Bible health ministry.

So when we decided to launch our website in 2014, it was just to put some recipes out there and just see what would resonate with people. I put some devotionals up there, and next thing you know, it took off like, whoa. I hosted a summit with my buddy, Dr. Josh Axe, many of you know, or Jill Winger from The Prairie Homestead.The Essential Oils Revolution back in 2015, and 165,000 people attended that event online. It was like the largest event ever of any sort regarding essential oils.

And it was like, whoa. And people like, who are these people who are Dr. Z and Mama Z, and it was just a whirlwind for about five years after that, and it was wonderful.

It was such a blessing, and I was looking at some of the numbers, and I couldn’t believe it. Like we’ve been able to reach more than 10 million people since we started this, now 11 years ago. And, so with that frame of mind, we come to you very humble and we come to you, I don’t wanna say broken.

But broken down in a good way, in a Biblical way that we’re here to help. We’re here to love, we’re here to support. We’ve gone through a lot of things, not just before Christ, but even right now we’re going through things, and I’m so grateful that God has shown us and continues to show us how to thrive in survival mode so that we can be fruitful and have a life worth living.

And a lot of the things that we do, and this is where Sabrina’s secret sauce, I cannot brag on her enough. The little things that prepare us for success day after day, over and over and over again, it’s helped us emotionally, mentally, and especially physically. And I’ll never forget during COVID. not freaking out at all.

And always just having faith that A, we were gonna be fine, and even more importantly, that we were okay. And that between my wife’s preparation and knowledge, and know-how we’re gonna be good. Whether it’s making our own soap or hand sanitizer, or having canned foods in the basement, just because we are always trying to be prepared. So all that to say is like, we come to you in a spirit of love and in a spirit of affection and desire to be a friend.

For those of you who need a mentor, for those of you who need, maybe a brother, sister in Christ to encourage you. That’s what this podcast is about. So you’re gonna get a mix again, you’re going to get a mix of expert interviews from our friends and colleagues, and you’re going to get, hopefully, once a week me and Sabrina can connect.

But I’ll ask you to give us a little bit of grace over the first couple months of this podcast because, you know, Mama Z’s gonna be nursing a brand new baby and mm-hmm. And I’m gonna be here to help as much as I can, obviously with diapers and stuff. But there’s a lot of responsibility and pressure on a new mom, even after six kids.
So you’re gonna be hearing a lot from me, and I encourage you to please give us a review. Let us know your thoughts and leave us your questions.

And you could actually go to naturallivingfamily.com/ask and submit your questions.

We’d love to feature you on the show. This is for you. We believe God put it on our hearts to come back in a way that we feel rejuvenated, inspired, and dare I even say, more prepared than last time. These last five years have really refined us. We’ve gone through a lot of trials and tribulations and things that have really helped us, and as we go through this podcast series with you over the next several months, we’ll share more and more of the stories of what God’s done, and He’s been faithful through it all, every single time.

We’re at a wonderful place in our family. We’re at a wonderful place with our faith, a wonderful place with our health. And other areas. There’s, there’s struggles, and you know what, we’re gonna work through that. Anything else that you wanted to share about us, about our mission, and about where we’re going with this?
[00:18:32] Mama Z: Well, just one other thing. We have so many different topics that we wanna cover, and I’m just so excited to really start bringing that out. I know there’s gonna be questions from everything from how we live our lifestyle to how we make things and how we organize and simplify life, and do other things even with a large family.

But we really wanna make sure that you feel open to be able to ask things, because I know that you will uncover other topics as well. So I’m just grateful and excited to really open this back up and take this to the next level and help you all grow as well.

[00:19:12] Dr. Z: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. I would love to end, I would love to end in the word of prayer, and I recognize that a lot of you listening right now are going through something challenging, whether it’s a financial crisis or a health crisis or something that is aching at your heart, many of you’re suffering. Even though we don’t know exactly what you’re going through, and we haven’t experienced exactly your situation.

We can empathize, and we could sympathize. I would hope to say very honestly and at a significant level. And I just wanna encourage you, I just wanna pray life over you, and I wanna invite you wherever you’re at right now, just to put yourself in a position where you could just take a minute and pray if you’re driving, obviously, don’t close your eyes, but if you can maybe pull over the side of the road or just press pause and find a place where you could just pray with us for just a second. I want to invite you to join us and to invite the Lord into your situation. Invite God Almighty into this part of your life that you need help with.

And that’s what I wanna pray for, and I’m so grateful. I’m just so grateful for our salvation. I’m so grateful. For our savior. I’m so grateful for the life that he has given us. I’m so grateful for purpose and mission, and we have a reason to live, ’cause there was a time in my life I didn’t have a reason to live, and I seriously thought about taking my own life because of that.

So Heavenly Father, Lord, we just come to You with hearts that are open. To receive what You have for us today, a word, an encouragement, even a correction, or a rebuke. We want what You have for us Heavenly Father, because You are a good Father and Your plans and purposes for us are only for good and only for our benefit.

You know exactly what we need right now. And for everyone listening, Father, in the precious name of Jesus, our Messiah, we ask that You speak to the spirit of everyone listening and encourage exhort, admonish, and guide into whatever it is that everyone listening needs to do to get through the situation that they’re facing.

To help them get through the situation that they’re facing with all joy, with all peace, with all confidence and faith, that, they’re gonna get through this and they’re gonna get through this. Well, Father, we just take a moment to enter Your gates with Thanksgiving and into Your courts with praise. And we thank You for those moments in our life, even today, for the special relationships that we have.
For the people that You’ve given us, for the sun shining down on our skin, for the beautiful fresh air that we could breathe outside, for the health that we do have, for the things that we do have. You’ve given us more than what we can ever ask or imagine, Father, and You wanna continue to do so, help us get out of the way so that we do not block any blessing or do anything that would prevent us from enjoying an abundant life.

We speak healing to everyone’s body. We speak healing to everyone’s mind and everyone’s soul. And Lord, we just commit this Natural Living Family Podcast to You and our Bible health ministry that it will reach people where they’re at, that you’ll give me and Sabrina and all the guests on the show words that will encourage and inspire in perfect season, in and out to give the listeners and to give our followers and everyone else that could be just stumbling upon this work, the solutions that they need to live a healthier, happier, longer, abundant life. We love you, God. You’re a good, good Father, and we thank You for everything. We thank You for life. Amen.

[00:23:41] Mama Z: Amen.

[00:23:43] Dr. Z: Alright. A lot of love, lot of appreciation for y’all.

[00:23:47] Mama Z: Yes.

[00:23:47] Dr. Z: Stay tuned. I got a couple really, really cool, fun interviews coming up that I can’t wait to feature with y’all.
We’ll get Mama Z back here. Please keep her in your prayers. Hopefully, by the time you listen to this, she will have the baby because we need this baby. This baby’s is gonna be a blessing to us. Our number seven, and we’ll see what that looks like.

But our God’s number of completion, so maybe this will complete my quiver is full. In fact, it’s overflowing. So a lot more to be said about that.

As always, this is Dr. Eric Zielinski, Dr. Z

[00:24:20] Mama Z: and Mama Z.

[00:24:21] Dr. Z: And our hope and prayer is that you and your family truly experience the abundant life. And thank you so much for hanging out with us.

God bless. We’ll talk to you soon.

[00:24:29] Mama Z: Bye-bye.

[00:24:31] Dr. Z: Thanks for joining us on the Natural Living Family Podcast. If today’s episode encouraged you, please take a moment and leave a review and share it with a friend. Your voice helps us reach more families with a message of hope and healing God’s way. Remember, Jesus came to give you life and to have it more abundantly.

For show notes, transcripts, and resources from today’s episode, visit naturallivingfamilypodcast.com, and until next time, stay healthy, stay rooted in truth, and keep choosing the abundant life.