Marilyn Beuster

Marilyn Beuster has been in the travel industry for most of her working career; in 2009 she opened her own travel agency, iTravelsmart. Business and life were both bespoke until March 2019, when the entire tourism industry was turned on its head by the Covid-19 pandemic leaving a lifelong passion for travel in threads.

However, the pandemic has allowed her the opportunity to undertake two very personal journeys for herself. Marilyn took the time that the pandemic offered to start a wellness and weight loss business, Marilyn Beuster Wellness, and a food range called YummyKeto.

Her journey started two years prior to Covid. She had previously lost 40kg of weight in a short period of time with a host of tablets and gym to fit into her wedding dress, only to rebound to her then original weight of 120kg. Marilyn found the need to do a mind and body reset over the following year, and lost 60kg (half her weight), and has kept it off with a formula of whole foods, intermittent and prolonged fasts (healing fasts) ever since.

Paying it forward

Many people asked Marilyn how she had lost weight and kept it off. She explains, “I had to lose weight for my health, and I researched how to do health first and weight loss as a by-product.” Consequently, she was able to start helping her friends with their lifestyle choices and the word grew.

During lockdown, Marilyn says one morning she was out walking in her slippers, probably with the little freedom we had, in tears, and worrying about earning an income, when suddenly she knew that she had a journey to follow. Now in the time of chaos, was her time for creativity. This was the test to act and follow through on this gift of her own health plus the knowledge she’d learnt, to pay it forward. She explains, “I walked into the house, and I said to my husband, Mike (who is a digital developer), you’ll need to make me a website, so let’s formulate this. We spent about a week just getting the structures right. Covid afforded a time when there were no distractions, and we started the Marilyn Beuster Wellness journey.”

Marilyn birthed her guided three-month wellness coaching course, and her new company, “Marilyn Beuster Wellness”, which soon became a phenomenal success. To date, over 670 people’s lives have been changed and over 350 people have been coached to renew themselves – not just locally, but also internationally.

Story of health

Many people were asking what to eat and how to prepare the foods that Marilyn was eating. Although recipes were put onto the website, Marilyn made the decision to put the foods into production under the ketogenic lifestyle genre and birthed the business “YummyKeto”. Her biggest drive is to heal people’s gut and microbiome through her food. She commented, “Imagine the shock and joy in level 5 lockdown, after launching our home-made sugar free ice-creams, bone broths, Kefir Greek yogurt – first on the market, and specially prepared and ‘loaded’ spinach meals, which went into a local home produce store, and fast led to bigger chain stores buying into this story of health.”

Marilyn says she is proud that her two new businesses have given local suppliers a boost as well as have employed new staff during lockdown. However, she is prouder of the hundreds of lives she has been able to help and change through her experience.

Her goal for the future is to teach people that healing starts in your kitchen and that they need to start thinking about their health differently. Healing starts with food, and with things that are for free – fasting and prolonged fasting, because that is what this journey is about. The future of medicine is changing, and functional doctors are starting to realise that healing starts within. Healing doesn’t start with tablets but with the food you eat, healing your microbiome, your gut health, and your immunity.

If Marilyn had to tell the younger version of herself what she knows now, she would say look towards health and the way we perceive our body confidence and the way we look at food. “I would tell her now, how to heal yourself with food, how to fast, and how to treat and heal your hormones.” As she is talking from a women’s perspective, because men are a little bit different, her future goal is to teach young ladies how to heal themselves with food, to take responsibility for their food, and to build their knowledge around health.

Empowerment is a journey

Since it’s not a diet, but a lifestyle choice, Marilyn has loaded tons of advice onto her website for people to use and practice on their own. “Empowerment is a journey that I’ve walked, and once you have those tools, you can use them and reflect them onto others. The thing about women is that when we get things right, we shout it out from the top of the mountains, so it’s using that influence in this whole journey of health and wellness,” she explained. “My mantra, and what I practice, is that ‘Health is your wealth and wealth is your health’, and that’s what we need to teach to empower and influence others.”

However, she added, “It is important to show gratitude and self-love, and if you can project that over someone else, you will empower them and the other people that are looking in from the side-lines, and people that are looking straight at you; it all starts from small things.”

Marilyn says that as travel is coming back, she has another challenge, which is how to divide her time. She added that she can’t give up something where she helps people to make memories. She says, “I’ve got fellow women and men (‘my village’) that help me too, just as I help them, as that’s what’s made my success – through their success.”

Marilyn concluded, “Take on things that you love, do it in the comfort of your home; you don’t have to find outlets to fix yourself, you can fix it yourself in your own home.”