In this episode of “Seeking Voices of Health, Healing and Hope“, my guest is the amazing Dotsie Bausch. Dotsie has been a pioneer in the plant-based movement and runs an amazing campaign called Switch4Good that focuses on eating more plant based and the “ditching dairy” movement. She has caught national news with her campaign against companies that don’t allow milk alternatives or charge extra for them. Dotsie has been remarkable in every step of her life. She was once a journalism major, a New York runway model and an Olympian cyclist who won silver! I marvel at the images of Dotsie on the Olympic podium. She is beautiful and a lovely human being. I have had the pleasure of talking to her about so many things: about plant-based nutrition, health, removing dairy and she has even given me amazing makeup tips which I have yet to do by the way! Sometimes when we see people, we only see those beautiful parts, but Dotsie has had hardship too. Some people might not realize that Dotsie suffered from anorexia/bulimia, attempted suicide twice and had a cocaine dependency. I hope to talk about some of these important parts that make up the amazing Dotsie Bausch.
Some of the highlights we talked about:
- How do you describe yourself?
- What makes you happy?
- How do you keep the joy in your life?
- You had anorexia. Can you speak to this?
- Why do you think you developed this?
- What advice do you have for me, a mother of two girls, who want social media, have kids talking about calories.
- You comment in your TED talk that you were loved as a child and that maybe you didn’t have some grave moment that made you go down the path you did. Can you speak to this?
- What’s it like to be addicted to cocaine?? How did this start and how did you stop?
- I have worked with many addicts and at times, have been jaded by seeing the same face in the ER after they had overdosed. How do I start seeing the human behind the addiction?
- Why did you stop? What made you do it? What does one need to do to get someone out of this state?
- You attempted suicide two times. What do you remember about those moments?
- What was it like to be an Olympian at near 40? Did you feel like you had to compete with the young people? How did you?
- Do you have down moments now? What do you do to get out of your funk? How do you stay out of your dark places? Is that the goal? To stay out of the dark places.
- You have become so passionate about plant-based eating and in your TED talk, you show pictures of how seeing slaughterhouses impacted you. You talk beautifully about the benefits of plant-based eating. What two things would you like to say about this?
- Hope is a hard thing to have sometimes. What would your message be to offer other people hope? How would you use your voice to impact others?
