WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Healthy as a Horse: Pilot Episode

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Ella Malone talks with Hillsdale Holisitc Health Club President Analise Hess about holistic health, the club, and how prioritizing health will help athletes with performance and wellness. 

I'm Ella Malone and this is Healthy as a Horse. Welcome to the show, Annalise. Thank you. This is Healthy as a Horse. First episode, really excited to have you here. Talk about health for athletes. If you could just introduce yourself, that would be great. Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on. I'm super excited to be here. My name's Annelese Hess. I'm a senior here at Hillsdale College and I'm in Capacama and I'm the founder and president of the Women's Holistic Health Club here on campus. Awesome. So, we're What inspired you to start the holistic health club? How did you kind of also just get started in a journey of prioritizing your holistic health? Yeah, so my mom was diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease when I was 15, and that's an autoimmune thyroid disease. And so that really launched my interest in holistic health as a whole. I started reading books, listening to podcasts. That's like all I did in high school. And when I got to campus, I'm from California, so I kind of thought, oh, no one in the Midwest cares about this. But the more conversations I had, I realized that there were so many girls on campus who also cared about health and wellness and how to steward their own health and learn about how to steward the health of their future families. And there was nothing like this on campus yet. So through the Kiho program, which I'm a fellow of, we decided to start the Women's Solistic Health Club. And it's our second year now. And we've hosted a variety of speakers. And we have about 40 active members. So it's been a super fun time so far. Awesome. You said you listened to a lot of books and podcasts, who specifically kind of helped guide you. Yeah. When I was in high school, I listened to

Kelly Leveck a lot. And I'm also loving Alex Clark, who you mentioned. Courtney Swan has a great podcast. And then books. There's Shanna Swan. She has some really good books out there. And I'm also in a politics of health class right now. And we have an awesome book list for that. And I can try to pull that up. Okay, I found it. So there's the Ultramine Solution. And that's by Mark Hyman, Food Fix, also by Mark Hyman and then dark calories by Shanahan. Okay. So those three books are like, if you're looking for a good place to start in the holistic health space, like definitely read those.

And if they're in the book list at Hillsdale College, you're probably pretty reliable. One big question that I am really trying to answer just through this show is that I keep hearing people in the sports complex or just in sports in general saying that being an athlete at the Division 2 level here and then even higher than that Division 1 pro sports comes at the sacrifice of health, which is a big question. Like, do you think this is true? And if so, how can we fix this? Yeah, I think that the term like sacrifice of your health is a really, really big statement. Yeah. I don't think that anything you have to do, like has to come at the sacrifice of your health. Yeah. I think that there's different things that you prioritize, but you will prioritize what means the

most to you. And it's going to be the same with athletes as it is with like a really busy mom, right? Like having kids doesn't have to come at the sacrifice of her own health. Yeah, she's going to be up probably like 15 hours in the day and like running after her kids and like barely having time to eat herself. And I'm sure like for athletes it's a similar situation in like a very different way. But you will make time for the things that you prioritize. And as long as you are prioritizing your health and making a conscious effort to do that, I don't think that health has to come at the sacrifice of that. Totally. That's a really great example. Thank you. How do you think prioritizing holistic health could help athletes with performance and wellness?

Yeah. Well, just to define holistic health, some people might think, oh, it's like kind of voodoo and like kind of abstract. But it's really simple when you think about it. It's just looking at your health from, I mean, this is redundant, a holistic perspective. So like if you get a cold, you don't just like throw cold medicine at it. You try to find out maybe I have a cold because I've, you know, been sleeping only for four hours a night the last week. Maybe I have a cold because I have this underlying issue that I don't know about and I need to do labs to figure out what's going on. Okay. So it's really just like looking at your health as a whole because your body is a system. In order to perform the best that you can, you want to be like making sure that everything in your body is like working according to its system. Because like if one part of the, you know, chain is broken, you're not going to be able to perform as well. So it's really about like taking a step back and like evaluating what. is going on. And once you're able to do that and really prioritize like the health, like nutrition,

fitness, like recovery, sleep, all of that, then you're going to be able to perform the best and obviously lead your team to victory. Yeah, awesome. Well, that's all the questions I have. Thank you so much for being on the show. And maybe we'll hear from you again. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. Thank you. I'm Ella Malone, and this has been Healthy as a Horse for Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thank you.