Wellness

Well-Intentioned: How Moon Juice Founder Amanda Chantal Bacon Stays Content, While Minimizing Her Content

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Photo: Courtesy of Amanda Chantal Bacon / Illustration by Ivana Cruz

From mantras to meditation, mindfulness to manifestation, Well-Intentioned offers an intimate look at how to make space for self-care in meaningful ways, big and small.

Amanda Chantal Bacon is experiencing something of an awakening—literally. “The no sleep in my 20s, when I had my son, was fine,” says the Moon Juice founder and clean-living evangelizer whose daughter, Vajra, was born almost two years ago. “But this time around, as I’m approaching 40, it was different. I’m just starting to feel confident in my return to healthy sleep.” Bacon is certainly not alone. After a year in which the pandemic has wreaked havoc on our physical and emotional health, heightened stress and anxiety levels have made quality z’s yet another casualty of the COVID-19 era. They’ve also made Bacon a very busy woman. “Insane,” is how she describes the uptick in traffic to her beloved wellness brand, which began as a humble destination in Venice Beach, California, for cold-pressed juice and house-made nut milks 10 years ago and has since evolved into a panacea for beauty-from-the-inside-out salvation by way of active, maca-dusted walnuts and cosmically named nutritional powders. In 2018, Bacon—a New York–born culinary school grad, who trained under slow-food champion Suzanne Goin—tackled beauty from the outside with a six-piece skin-care line that taps into her holistic approach (and aspirational art direction). But it’s her curation of adaptogenic and herbal “dusts,” which she formulates with a leading biochemist, that have largely contributed to Moon Juice’s seismic growth on the back of a supplement boom that is projected to reach $272.4 billion in the next seven years. SuperPower, Bacon’s just-launched immune-boosting capsule featuring liposomal vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D, and beta-glucans is “the first 100% U.S.-sourced immune supplement in this form,” she says with pride. “We really lead in source, dose, and form,” she continues about Moon Juice’s point of difference in an increasingly saturated market, noting that her vitamin D is vegan—and derived from button mushrooms grown on an organic farm in Amish country, Pennsylvania. But much of its success can be attributed to a specific intangibility. “This is really my passion,” Bacon adds. Here, she shares her hard-earned formula for health, contentment, and at least eight hours of solid shut-eye.

1. Remain Nonreactive.

“Being able to contain a situation and ‘sleep on it’ has been a necessary step in my growth—in business, at home, in public, politically, nutritionally. It touches everything. It took me a while to trust this one, or have the energy to attempt it properly, but it’s like a muscle: The more I’m able to practice boundaries and restraint, the easier it becomes. Some people by nature are born with this kind of grace. I was not. I’m a fiery feminine Aries. Action and quick reaction were my survival skills and what I thought my authority was made of. I’ll be honest, as a young adult, the constant reference to ‘being grounded’ sounded boring and scary. But it was a lot easier to find patience when I found some biological homeostasis, which was a decade-plus journey for me, which is too long. That was actually the impetus for starting Moon Juice. It shouldn’t have taken so long. I assumed I was just a temperamental person, but I came to realize that impatience, crankiness, anxiety, sleeplessness, depressiveness, exhaustion were not personality traits but a biological situation. Through getting healthier, and balancing my hormones with things like Sex Dust in my coffee daily, my microbiome with things like Ion Biome, and my cortisol levels, I was able to solve a lot of these issues. SuperYou was born out of my ‘things.’ I was cocktailing, but I realized that these four adaptogens—shatavari root, ashwagandha root, amla fruit, rhodiola root—were game changers. I could see the change, feel the change, and the change showed up in my blood and hormone blood panels, which are so important to do regularly, either with a functional medicine doctor or with all the new at-home health tech out there, as stress and hormones have so much to do with our gut—they all interplay. From a stronger physical and mental place, I can make larger commitments to other practices that further dial into my ability to calmly take triggering information in, and get back to it with clarity. This is something I want more of, and am constantly working on!”
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2. Stay Rested.

“If you’re a new mom and not sleeping, it’s okay—it’s a season in life; you’re in battle. Don’t trip out on all the sleep advice out there (like this!). It will return. I’m not good without eight hours. I’m also no good with forcing sleep via melatonin. I have to be very strategic about time management since I get up at 5:30 a.m. and ensure my body wants to drift off around 9:30 p.m. I don’t drink caffeine after 12 p.m., I try to abstain from blue light exposure after 7 p.m. (which I cheat by having a blue light blocker on my phone), I drink a big glass of Magnesi-Om with L-theanine an hour before sleep, and then I lower all the lights in the house, which is an effective trick for your brain. Like [with] children, I have found bedtime rituals to be very effective in putting me to sleep too. And if I don’t drift off after laying in bed for 15 minutes, I listen to Pele Reports, this kooky weekly astrology report that I’ve listened to at bedtime for over 10 years. I really recommend starting to build equity in listening to audio before sleep. It could be a song, a particular person’s voice recording, a sleep meditation, or if you are really having trouble, find a hypnotherapist and have them make a tape for you to listen to nightly. This really works.”
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3. Be Content.

“Content, not content! Seek peacefulness, not more social media fodder. Being content is a more desirable state to live in than being happy, which starts to feel unrealistic and forced. From a baseline of contentment, happiness may come and go, but sadness, anger, and fear can roll in and out as well. Underneath all that is a baseline contentment between you and you. Everything I’ve mentioned is essential to getting to this state, but if there was only one tool available to me, I would choose meditation. I have a meditation, a mantra from a Vedic lineage, that I recite. But it could be as simple as sitting for 20 minutes each morning with your eyes closed listening to your breath, or prayer, or taking the same time each day to stop all the noise and get really present. Don’t let the wellness industry ever make you feel like your natural connection to yourself is lacking. It just needs a daily visit from you. I also use a gratitude hit if I’m feeling down and negative—so, just a quick reality check of all the simple things that are a blessing. Like the fact that I’m breathing along with my loved ones. All of the attention around mindfulness and meditation becoming an accepted part of our lives is great. But the underside of that is the commercial aspect. The wellness industry is a beast. You don’t need a guru, a pillow, an app, or a group to help: You bring your focus back in, and out, and in, and out. A mantra is really helpful for this, and I like to use breath as an immediate signal to the body that you are safe, and you can calm down.”

4. Feel Younger.

“I believe age is biological, not chronological. I’ve thought about age in this way for a while. How our bodies and minds perform over time has 80% to do with your lifestyle and 20% (some argue only 10%) with our genetics. Our epigenetic clocks are dynamic, and our daily habits set the tick rate. As I approach my 40s, I’m having more fun than ever researching and incorporating ways to stay young as I grow old. Life extension isn’t enough; we need vitality in our 90s. This is very different from the goal of wanting hair and skin to appear younger than it is through optical illusions, which I’m not knocking. I’m talking about actually slowing down the aging process on a cellular level, and it’s never too late to start! This is how I set my tick rate daily:
Take a master antioxidant formula every morning. Time speeds up when you have more free radicals than antioxidants in your body. Free radicals attack cells and cause oxidative stress, which is the root cause of accelerated aging.
Prioritize daily stress management. Manage cortisol levels to help slow accelerated aging.
Get deep sleep. Regenerate cells and enable the brain to rewire.
Walk, or engage in any kind of gentle movement. I have totally dropped the ball in this department lately, but exercise lengthens telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes that shorten as we age, and I’m hoping I can get back to walking at least three times a week.
Meditate. Increase telomerase and repair telomeres.”

5. Get Present.

“There’s no place that makes me feel more well than being fully present with my family. This sadly doesn’t happen automatically for me, so I try to stay vigilant. Against all of my impulses, I put my phone down in the evening and on weekends, and dive into my children. I haven’t always been this person, and it’s usually in the evening when I’m feeling fatigued and beat up from the day that I need help with this shift. But there are definitely things you can do to help get there: Take some magnesium, look into your child’s eyes, have a snuggle with a pet if you don’t have children, hug someone, kiss someone, have a shower to wash off the day. You can even give yourself a self-massage with a Theragun for a burst of oxytocin for an immediate chemical hit to feel present. And it’s okay if being present needs to come from the executive part of you: Tell yourself that you have a meeting to get present with your life, and do it. Figure out the things you need to do to get there, show up, and commit.”
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