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Photographed by Geordy Pearson.

Attitude Adjustment: 7 Women Challenging Wellness Norms

Health trends can be fickle: For every renewed SoulCycle membership, there’s a Shake Weight sitting unused in a closet. And, it doesn't help that it can be almost impossible to separate new trends from passings fads. But, there are always a few voices that can be trusted — the experts making a splash without leaning on gimmicks. It's those revolutionists that we're paying tribute to today in this latest installment of Beauty Nation: The New Provocateurs.

We joined forces with the tastemakers over at Revlon to spotlight seven wellness experts whose advice is truer than that old “apple a day” adage could ever be. And, we're getting them to dish on everything from what it takes to run five marathons in five days to how you can better love yourself and your body (and we're not just talking figuratively, here). These women are nothing short of radical — and could reconstruct everything you think you know about health, sex, and beauty. Read on, and you might end up changing much more than just your workout routine.

Robin Berzin

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With the Internet at our disposal, we're all guilty of playing doctor. Can you blame us? What with long wait times, little face time, and high copays at the doctor’s office, googling our symptoms can seem like a great alternative — that is, until we realize we're not dying of a rare and deadly disease. What we really need is someone like Dr. Robin Berzin, who’s tearing down the walls between doctors and patients in a way that’s never been done before.

Between her blog Health Uncensored, where she delivers a no-BS approach to medical insights, and Cureatr, a type of WhatsApp for the medical set that she cofounded, Berzin is singlehandedly bringing the archaic healthcare system out of the dark ages of pagers, excruciating lines, and limited doctor/patient communication to our fast-paced age of information at the ready. Basically, she’s the best thing to happen to wellness since Kombucha.

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BN_Feature4_Vertical_Robin_BPhotographed by Geordy Pearson.

Why it’s important to be uncensored
“Trust is everything in a doctor-patient relationship, and I think patients know that if you’re willing to say something they don’t want to hear, they can probably trust you. My lack of filter on my blog, Health Uncensored, is something I have the luxury to do as a functional medicine doctor that doctors who only have 10 minutes with a patient might not. [I use that medium] to be honest and answer questions and educate. I think the era of just saying ‘do this, take that’ is over, thanks to the Internet. You have to be able to explain why you’re recommending something, and why it’s relevant to that person specifically. The power to be honest and forthright is critical. Authenticity is really what [healthcare] is about.”

What everyone gets wrong about body image
“I think that as much as we celebrate individuality in our culture, there’s a lot of pressure to conform to a certain weight, a certain standard of beauty, a certain shape of a bum, or a thigh, or a nose. I certainly wish that we celebrated more people who look different than what we see in movies, on TV or in magazines. In all the naked people I've seen, I have never seen an 'average' body. There's no normal.”

What beauty means to me
“Beauty is the freedom to express yourself and get away from the conformity of our society. My most beautiful friends find a way to show their interior in the exterior through fashion and beauty, and that’s the coolest thing about beauty. It’s like an art form; it allows you to be creative.”

Why I don't diagnose with pills
“[At my clinic], we practice 'functional medicine' where we focus on getting to the root cause of the disease rather than just trying to Band-Aid a symptom with drugs. A lot of conventional medicine is a pill for every ill, and we don’t believe in that. We believe in looking at the context of your life: How you grew up, the medications you’ve taken, the foods you’ve been eating — all in context to figure out what’s really driving your disease. We don’t just try to manage your symptoms, and I think we have a lot of success helping people this way.”

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Albertine Dress; Kara Ross Bracelet; Mercer Marcs Rings; Sergio Rossi Python Heels.
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