Welcome to Gut Instinct, our new column spotlighting female founders who trusted their gut and pivoted to do work that deeply aligns with their values. Kicking off the column, Good Bacteria founder Anabel González speaks with Dr. Sara Bloom, the designer and founder of Mavie, a first-of-its kind membership app and community designed exclusively for moms. We loved Dr. Bloom’s story of taking care of women at every stage of motherhood as a clinical physician and then pivoting to create an app that shares this knowledge to a wider audience. In the following conversation, we learn more about the stories and science behind the three pillars of Mavie: Fuel, Flow, Feel.
Anabel González: I love Mavie because the app really supports moms in an ongoing, everyday way. Maternal wellness is often treated like a temporary, postpartum need. With Mavie I feel seen and met where I actually am, so thank you, Sara! What was your “why” for choosing to become a doctor and studying integrative medicine (and nutrition), and then maternal wellness?
Dr. Sara Bloom: I went into medicine because I have a passion for taking care of people in their most vulnerable time. It's such a privilege to be a part of people's health journey.
My mom is of Italian ancestry and the culture is of eating whole foods for health and community. When I was treating people, I made sure we were also including other important aspects of their life. Instead of just giving a pill for an ill, integrative health actually takes into account someone's lifestyle. What are their relationships like? What does their diet look like? What does their sleep look like? How do they function on a daily basis? These are all important components of somebody's health and wellness.
My interest in maternal wellness came from my own experience. I was pregnant with my oldest when I was finishing my medical training and realized, even as someone who was supposed to be trained in all of this, I felt totally in the dark. So much of the care was directed towards my unborn baby. I went on my own journey of trying to figure out how I could support myself and then support other women through the postpartum phase. I realized so many women were being dismissed with, “oh you’re tired, it's part of motherhood.” Being a mom is not a diagnosis.
My maternal wellness journey continued to evolve as I became a parent to two more children. I also saw my patients evolve and realized there's a gap in support for mothers between postpartum and then menopause.
AG: Are there any kind of consistent symptoms that women in your community have? I use Mavie, I meditate, and I try to eat healthy, but sometimes I'm just like, what is going on with my body?
SB: We carry so much mental load because we're parenting in the digital age—we are always on and always reachable. We have information overload and we are basically in this borderline fight or flight response where we never get a chance to recover.
That response is really helpful if you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger and you need that type of stress to run as fast as you can. But in the modern world, if you don't have the chance to recover, it's going to create what we call an allostatic load with chronic wear and tear on your body. We know chronic stress is not good for your health. It affects your metabolic health, gut health, hormones, sleep, and immune system. What I see with my patients and what I experienced myself after my third was born was your body starts to wave a white flag.
I was doing all the right things: the intense fitness routine, eating healthy, meditating, but I got shingles. All of a sudden I was a Type 2 diabetic even though I was a healthy weight. And I realized it was because I was pushing myself to live up to these wellness standards or routines that weren't made for me in mind.
Instead of trying to keep up with wellness standards that require so much energy from already depleted systems, wellness routines should be made for our bodies and the realities we’re living as mothers. There are so many seasons within motherhood. That’s why we make Mavie stackable, snackable and actually doable. The science says that even micro wellness can move the needle and that's the beautiful thing.
AG: I love the concept of micro wellness. I'm a recovering wellness optimizer and it became very stressful.
SB: I like to equate motherhood and its effect on our nervous systems to a boiling pot of water. Pre-kids, something might irritate you or be stressful and it would crank up the heat a little bit. But it usually takes a while for a pot of water to come to a boil. In modern motherhood we have all these external forces and stresses at play, not to mention the hormonal impacts of motherhood and the sleep deprivation. We're already cranked up! If we're always at a near boil, it only takes a little bit of heat to boil over.
Our issue is we're not fully turning down the heat. It's an epidemic of burnout that's happening amongst modern mothers and we have normalized and pushed through. It will be interesting to see what kind of health struggles our generation of women feel in 10 years if we don't find ways to support our nervous system.
AG: A big gap in knowledge is finding out that 15 minutes can make a difference for our nervous system.
SB: It's even less. We have made wellness to be this all or nothing experience. Knowing that every little bit adds up is empowering because you know if you can do a little bit every day, you're going to end the year in a much better place.
Mavie teaches you the everyday basics to build a resilient system. Having these quick, accessible, science-backed tools builds everyday habits that are beneficial to you. You have to get the foundation before you go to the next level.
AG: This column is called Gut Instinct. Was there an aha! moment for you that convinced you to pivot from clinical physician to tech entrepreneur? Why did it feel so potent in that moment?
SB: I still don't know how I ended up here in tech. [Laughing] The aha moment was really when I got shingles. I really tried to find an actionable solution to wellness and I couldn't. That's when the idea of Mavie was born. I knew in today's world, having support in your pocket would help moms feel just a little bit better every day.
AG: As a founder, I know what my passion is and I know we have to be so lit up about the mission in order to get to this point. There are things that I've had to learn that I wasn't trained for, like being a CEO, for example. What has your experience been on that side of the work?
SB: I mean, how much time do you have? I am learning every day. Like you, I have no experience being a founder or a CEO. My education background was medicine. For me, it's helpful that I am also the customer because I can relate, but I'm just learning as I go.
Being a mom has made this transition from practitioner to founder so much easier than if I had tried to do this pre-children. Because as a mom, I’m way more efficient with my time. There’s this fire, but also your instinct of knowing what's right deep down. Being a mother has given me more confidence in my own intuition even though the noise of social media can make you question it. That has really come through with how I run my business. We know there's a connection, the gut-brain axis, and the gut instinct feeling is there.
AG: I can totally relate to that. I speak to a lot of male investors and they don't quite understand why I could make such strong decisions based on instinct. But the truth is that women in general, but especially moms, have a spidey sense.
SB: Yes! I think it's important to remember that because there are going to be people who have more experience than me on the business side of this. Sometimes it's hard to follow your gut when somebody “knows what they're doing.” But at the end of the day, I feel like the good decisions that I've made still come from my gut.
AG: Mavie focuses the app on three pillars: Fuel, flow, feel. What are some of the physiological benefits of focusing on these three aspects of the body, especially for moms?
SB: It's so important. Bringing it back to what we were talking about before, the chronic stress that moms experience impacts metabolism, musculoskeletal system and mood. When we talk about having the basic foundation, fuel is nutrition. We focus a lot of our recipes on plant-forward, balanced meals that include a diversity of plants and fiber for gut health. We encourage eating a little bit of protein, fat and carbohydrates in the same meal for blood sugar balancing—we don't need that blood sugar spike to be an additional source of anxiety.
In terms of flow, we utilize movement as a source of energy because we know that exercise is one of the best non-drug ways to help your mood. There are so many studies that have shown that exercise can help women feel less anxiety and depressive symptoms. All of our flows are made by doctors of physical therapy who specialize in pelvic floor and physicians with a background in women's health. In addition to mental health, we're supporting the structures of your musculoskeletal system that we need to function on a daily basis.
Feel is all about nervous system resets, helping you get back into the rest and digest state. We have relationship tips, gratitude practices, things about identity and sensuality—all things that affect a mom's mental and emotional health. We really look at the physiology of how to support you.
AG: Being in flow, that's the goal. If moms can do something in this moment to find a bit of balance in their day, what should it be?
Two things: The first is to check in with yourself. How can we do anything if we don't really know how we’re feeling? From more of a physiological standpoint, deep breathing (where you inhale for four and exhale for six counts). If you can do that for about 60 seconds, there's evidence that shows it can activate your vagus nerve, the heart of your parasympathetic nervous system, and really calm you down.
In talking about that boiling pot of water, deep breathing is a small way to recover in between those boiling points. You can do it anywhere: right before you answer an email, on the pickup line, or if your child is having a meltdown in aisle three. Anywhere, anytime.
AG: I'm going to try that next time I'm in aisle three. We've all been there. What did being a mom teach you that you've brought to building this business?
SB: Resilience is probably the biggest one. There's something about motherhood where you show up every day. It doesn't matter what's happening in your own world. It doesn't matter what's happening in the world at large. We do it. We show up every day. Bringing that into my business is what carries me through. There are days where I'm like, “wait, why did I do this?”
Also, compassion. Being a mom has made me more empathetic and compassionate. Making decisions like that in business might not always be the most popular thing to do, but I think it's important to lead with a lot of heart, especially when your customer is a mom and vulnerable. We're here for her. We're not here for anybody else.
AG: That brings me to my last question. If there is a mom right now who's really struggling and reading this, what would you say to her?
SB:I would say you're probably doing better than you think. I probably would say a lot more, but if I had to sum it up: you are enough and you're doing enough.