At BrilliantRead Media, we always strive to bring meaningful and powerful stories from India and around the world to empower and motivate our growing community. As part of this endeavour, we invited Pooja Mahajan for an exclusive interview with us. Pooja is a Nutritionist, Wellness Coach and an Influencer. Let’s learn more about her background, journey and her advice for our community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Pooja:
Your journey includes healing from spondyloarthropathy, how did that experience shape your philosophy as a wellness coach?
My philosophy didn’t come from a textbook. It came from being bedridden, unable to move even an inch, with pain so severe that breathing itself hurt.
Symptoms started in 2021. For almost three years, I went from doctor to doctor, some said slipped disc, some tagged it as spine inflammation and prescribed painkillers, steroids, a brace or a belt (depending on where the pain was in my spine). No one looked deeper. No one asked why a relatively young woman was in this much pain. I wore the brace, took the medications, and kept getting worse.
It was actually my physiotherapist who finally asked the right question. He suggested I check my HLA-B27 marker. It came back positive in early 2024 for ankylosing spondylitis, a form of spondyloarthropathy. I finally had a name for what had been dismantling my body for three years.
When I saw a rheumatologist, he put me on biologics and explicitly told me that physiotherapy would be a waste of money. That nothing else would help. Only the medication.
I didn’t accept that. I had already reversed pre-diabetes and insulin resistance in 2020, entirely through nutrition and lifestyle, after my labs showed elevated ESR and CRP alongside the metabolic markers. I had already seen what the body could do when you stopped suppressing symptoms and started addressing the environment driving them.
So I went back to physiotherapy. I overhauled my nutrition to reduce the systemic inflammation that AS thrives on. And when arrhythmia and anxiety took hold, my resting heart rate was consistently above 120 bpm, almost always, my Apple Watch barely stopped alerting me, and I turned to Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering programme. That practice fundamentally shifted my nervous system in a way no pill had touched.
I am not anti-medicine. Biologics are part of my story. But medicine alone was never going to be enough, and I knew that because I had already lived the alternative.
That experience gave me three things that shape everything I do with clients: I always look for the root cause before the remedy. I always treat the whole person: food, sleep, movement, nervous system, and mindset. And I never tell someone their body cannot heal, because I know what bodies are capable of when given the right conditions.
Was there a defining moment when you decided to move from personal healing to helping others transform their health?
It was gradual, not a single lightning bolt, but looking back, the thread is clear.
Before my own diagnosis, my family was already navigating serious health challenges. My husband was dealing with hypertension and other conditions.
My parents and extended family carried diabetes, cardiac issues, hypertension, stubborn weight, chronic sleep deprivation, and rheumatoid arthritis. I found myself researching, experimenting, and applying what worked for me to their situations, always with their individual labs, symptoms, and lifestyle as the starting point, never a copy-paste approach.
It worked. Not the same protocol for everyone, but the same framework. Root cause first. Food, lifestyle, and mindset as the tools. Individual biology as the guide.
When my own health crisis deepened, and I came out the other side, I realised I had been coaching, informally, for years, for my family, then for friends, then for strangers who heard about the results.
At some point, it became clear that this was not a hobby. This was the work I was meant to do. Getting certified gave me the formal structure, but the real education had already happened, in my own body and in the people I loved most.
You work across autoimmune, metabolic, gut, and hormonal health , how do you create a personalised roadmap when every client’s body responds differently?
I start with a root cause map, not a symptom list. Most of my clients arrive having seen multiple specialists who have each treated one piece of the picture. A gynaecologist for the irregular cycles. A gastroenterologist for the bloating. A general physician for general day to day issues.
No one has sat with them and asked: what is the single thread running through all of this?
The answer is almost always upstream of every symptom they are presenting. Chronic stress dysregulating cortisol, which destabilises blood sugar, which drives inflammation, which triggers hormonal imbalance, which disrupts gut integrity, which activates the immune system. Or everything starts with the nervous system or gut dysbiosis or gut permeability, and everything else follows. These are not four separate problems. They are one cascade with multiple downstream expressions.
My roadmap starts by identifying where in that chain the original disruption happened, and working backwards. Then I look at their labs (not just whether values are “normal,” but where in the optimal range they sit and what the pattern tells me), their food habits, their sleep, their stress load, their emotional environment, and their history of major life events.
Every protocol I build is individual because everybody has a different entry point into that chain. The framework is consistent. The application is never the same twice.
There’s a lot of conflicting information in the nutrition space, how do you help clients cut through the noise and build sustainable habits?
I ask them to stop looking for the perfect diet and start looking for the right signal. The reason nutrition information feels so contradictory is that most of it is population-level research being applied to individuals. Intermittent fasting works brilliantly for some people and creates havoc with cortisol in others.
A high-protein breakfast is the right call for someone with insulin resistance or hormonal imbalance and exactly the wrong call for someone with impaired kidney function. Context is everything, and context is what most social media nutrition content strips away completely.
What I do is give clients a framework to read their own body’s signals: how their energy holds after meals, how their digestion responds, how their sleep quality tracks against what they ate.
The Kaizen Score system I use, tracking energy, digestion, mood, sleep, and cravings weekly, gives us objective data on whether a change is working, within days, not months.
Sustainable habits follow naturally when someone understands why a habit works for their body specifically. The behaviour change becomes effortless once the mechanism is clear. Nobody needs willpower to stop eating something that demonstrably makes them feel terrible.
How do you balance scientific protocols with intuitive healing and lifestyle changes in your coaching process?
I don’t see them as opposites; I see them as two languages describing the same thing. When I was in the middle of my arrhythmia, my resting heart rate was sitting above 120 bpm despite everything I was doing nutritionally; science told me my nervous system was in a state of sustained activation. Inner Engineering gave me the tools to actually shift it. The outcome was measurable. The mechanism was biological. The approach was ancient.
In practice, I lead with science because my clients are intelligent people who deserve to understand what is happening in their bodies, not just be handed a meal plan. I explain the mechanism.
Why food sequencing, eating fibre, then protein and fat, then complex carbs, blunts the glucose spike. Why eating your largest meal between noon and 2 pm aligns with your body clock. Why that 3 am wake-up is often a cortisol pulse, not a sleep disorder.
But the science only lands when the lifestyle context supports it. A protocol that doesn’t account for someone’s stress load, their family’s food culture, their relationship with their own body, that protocol will fail regardless of how evidence-based it is. So I hold both. Always.
What are some of the most overlooked root causes you see in people struggling with chronic health issues?
Three come up again and again, (in no particular order)
The first is blood sugar dysregulation that isn’t diabetic yet. Pre-diabetes and insulin resistance sit silently for years, driving fatigue, weight gain, hormonal disruption, and inflammation, while every lab comes back “normal.” I reversed my own pre-diabetes through this lens. It is almost universally the starting point for the people I work with.
The second is a dysregulated nervous system. We treat anxiety as a mental health problem and rarely ask what it is doing to cortisol, gut motility, thyroid function, and immune regulation. A body in chronic fight-or-flight cannot heal. Full stop. This is biology, not philosophy.
The third is gut permeability and dysbiosis that no one has investigated. Most people have never heard of leaky gut, the breakdown of the intestinal lining that allows bacterial fragments and undigested food particles to enter the bloodstream, triggering systemic immune activation.
When the gut lining is compromised, it shows up as joint pain, skin flares, brain fog, hormonal disruption, autoimmune attacks, symptoms that look nothing like a “gut problem” on the surface. Gut dysbiosis, an imbalance in the microbiome, compounds this further, disrupting everything from hormone clearance to mood to immune regulation. It is implicated in nearly every chronic condition I work with, and it is almost never the first thing a conventional workup looks for.
What’s one transformation story that deeply moved you and reaffirmed your work?
She was 31. Marketing manager, high-performing, the kind of person who holds everything together for everyone else while quietly unravelling on the inside.
She came to me with no period for nearly four months, a new jawline acne she’d never had before, unwanted facial hair, exhaustion that sleep wasn’t fixing, and weight that wouldn’t budge despite eating well. She was anxious, constantly overthinking, and carrying a lot of emotions she’d never quite let herself feel.
She’d already seen a gynaecologist, a dermatologist, and a GP. Each had treated their corner. No one had looked at the full picture. No one had asked her what the last two years of her life had actually been like.
When we ran her labs, everything connected. Elevated prolactin. Unopposed estrogen with no progesterone to balance it, because she wasn’t ovulating. Insulin resistance is sitting quietly in the pre-diabetic range. Inflammatory markers are elevated. The acne, the facial hair, the missing periods, none of it was random. It was one story, told through multiple symptoms.
And underneath all of it was chronic, unprocessed stress. Her body had been running on cortisol for so long that her entire reproductive system had gone silent.
We started with blood sugar- food sequencing, protein at breakfast, no skipping meals. Then her sleep and cortisol rhythm. Then, slowly, her gut. And the thing that mattered the most, without which the above couldn’t have worked well, she started actually expressing what she was feeling instead of pushing through it. That piece mattered more than any food change; nervous system regulation and stress management are key.
By week six, her energy was different. The acne was settling. By week ten, her period came back on its own.
In session nine, she said something I still think about: “I think I’ve been holding my breath for two years. I didn’t know that was allowed to stop.”
Her body hadn’t given up on her. It had just been waiting for her to stop treating stress like a badge of honour.
That’s why I do this work.
What are the biggest mindset blocks people face when dealing with chronic or autoimmune conditions?
The first is the belief that their body has turned against them. I hear this constantly, “My immune system is attacking me.” I understand why that framing happens, but it keeps people in a victim relationship with their own bodies. The immune system is not attacking arbitrarily.
It is responding to an environment, inflammatory food, chronic stress, gut permeability, and toxin load. Change the environment, and the immune response changes. The body is always trying to protect you. Our job is to make that easier for it.
The second block is all-or-nothing thinking. Healing is not linear. The Kaizen philosophy, small, consistent, compounding improvements, is an antidote to this. One per cent better every day. That is enough.
The third is outsourcing authority entirely to a diagnosis. A label is a starting point, not a ceiling. My AS diagnosis told me the name of the process happening in my spine. It did not tell me the ceiling of my recovery. I decided that.
If someone could start with just three habits today to improve gut or hormonal health, what would you recommend?
Just three? I’ll make them count, and I’ll be honest about what “starting” actually means, because context changes everything.
One, eat in the right sequence. Fibre first (salad, sabzi, cooked vegetables), then protein and fat (dal, eggs, paneer, chicken, fish), then rotis, rice, or carbs last. This single shift, no change in what you eat, only the order, blunts the post-meal glucose spike, reduces insulin load, and starts affecting bloating, energy, and cravings within days.
That said, fibre is critical, and most people are severely deficient in it. But someone with active gut inflammation, IBS, or significantly compromised motility cannot simply load up on fibre overnight. It can worsen symptoms before it helps. The type, timing, and amount of fibre needs to match where the gut currently is. This is exactly why context matters more than any single rule.
Two, get morning sunlight within 30 minutes of waking. Ten minutes outside, before the phone. This anchors the circadian rhythm, which governs every hormone in the body, cortisol, melatonin, insulin, oestrogen, testosterone, all of it. Most people notice better sleep within one week of doing this consistently.
Three, add one fermented food daily. Homemade curd, kanji, fermented rice, idli, and dosa batter. These reseed the gut microbiome and support short-chain fatty acid production, which reduces inflammation, strengthens gut lining integrity, and directly influences mood through the gut-brain axis. Indian kitchens have always known this. We just stopped doing it.
But here is the nuance most people miss: if someone’s gut lining is already significantly compromised, chronic bloating, food sensitivities, skin flares, or a history of heavy antibiotic use, introducing fermented foods aggressively can cause a flare rather than heal.
The gut lining needs support first. Jumping straight to probiotics or fermented foods when there is active gut permeability is like reseeding a lawn with cracked, dry soil; the seeds won’t take.
This is why I never hand anyone a standard protocol. What heals one person can temporarily worsen another, and knowing the difference requires looking at the full picture, labs, symptoms, history, lifestyle, all of it together.
What is your larger mission in the wellness space, and how do you see your work evolving in the next five years?
My mission is specific: I want every person in the Indian community, wherever in the world they are living, to understand that the symptoms they have been told to manage for life are often reversible.
That “your reports are normal” is not the same as “your body is well.” That their cultural food traditions are not an obstacle to healing, they are some of the most powerful medicines they already have access to.
In the next five years, I want to scale the 90-Day Kaizen Protocol without losing its precision. The programme works because it is deeply individual, and I intend to keep it that way. That means building a practitioner community that shares this root-cause framework, creating group learning alongside 1:1 coaching, and eventually building educational content that reaches people who cannot yet access a coach.
The wellness industry tends to serve people who are already relatively well. I want to reach the person who has been unwell for a decade, has seen six specialists, and has been told there is nothing more to be done. I was that person. I know they exist in the millions. And I know their body has not run out of options , they just haven’t found the right questions yet.
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