USC students Julia Paul and Lena DelBianco just set up the last plate at their picnic table. They are used to preparing assortments of their favorite vegan and gluten-free snacks and gut-healthy drinks, but this act has never meant as much as today. It’s April 7th, and the pair is about to host an intimate gathering to celebrate the latest milestone of their health journeys—the launch of their business Wholistic Renewal.
Both Paul and DelBianco are set to graduate this May. Paul, 21, is a senior at USC Marshall, studying business administration with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. DelBianco, 22, is a senior at USC Annenberg studying public relations with a minor in consumer behavior. But this is not what they’re celebrating.
If you had met them a few months earlier, you’d have assumed that Julia Paul and Lena DelBianco would be toasting to their new jobs in corporate finance and PR respectively; but instead of accepting their return offers, they decided to take a chance on founding a business in the holistic wellness space. Backed by entrepreneurial parents and a growing client waitlist, the pair has decided to ditch the corporate world and help people access “natural ways to optimize … hormone and gut health through functional lab testing and lifestyle choices that address root causes.”
One Company, Two Tough Medical Journeys
But Wholistic Renewal wasn’t born out of chance.
Paul was only ten years old when she started experiencing symptoms that New York’s best doctors couldn’t diagnose or treat. She fought debilitating fatigue, gut issues, and hormonal imbalances well into her teenage years, which led to many school absences and a poor quality of life.
Maria, Paul’s mother, soon realized that her ability to find another way of healing would determine her daughter’s future. In 2015, the year before Paul entered high school, her mother’s research led them to Europe, where they ordered a functional lab test for diet-induced sensitivities, known as a Mediator Release Test. The results showed an extremely high sensitivity to dairy and gluten which remains undetected with conventional tests, and changed Paul’s life.
“The first summer that I was healing I was in bed all day long with no energy to do anything else and I started watching a lot of YouTube and got obsessed with fitness influencers,” Paul said. “I made it my goal … to feel strong after feeling weak in my body for so long,’ … build muscle and to get stronger physically and mentally.”
Wholistic Renewal now offers this same sensitivities test to its clients.
DelBianco would face similar hardships in her early college years despite living a healthy lifestyle. Her regular workouts and mindful eating couldn’t prevent severe hair loss, brain fog, and joint pain, which are atypical at the age of 19. The doctors were as clueless as she was—until she started looking into breast implant inflammation.
Unbeknownst to her, the breast implants she got at the age of 18 were triggering a reaction that compromised her whole immune system. After taking them out, she regained control of her life.
“I’m still on my healing journey … but feeling so much better, I feel like myself again,” DelBianco said. “And I can honestly say I’m so grateful that I went through all of that because now I feel like I’ve almost gotten a taste of all the issues you can have [and] I can put myself in our clients shoes.”
A Promise of Wholistic Renewal
Paul and DelBianco founded Wholistic Renewal to provide others with the guidance they wish they had on their healing journeys. This includes providing their clients with a thorough analysis of their symptoms in the context of their health choices and medical history. The founders, who are certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN) Practitioners, can order the necessary functional lab tests and interpret them, then devise a customized protocol to guide their clients through a 90-day program of supplements and lifestyle changes to improve their health.
“One of our clients was having a full body histamine reaction, which is essentially due to a compromised immune system in her gut, and dealing with horrible hives, swelling, food intolerances, inflammation, and histamine reaction,” DelBianco said. “Doctors had her on six allergy medications a day and a steroid shot, and she was like, ‘There’s no end in sight, like, what is going on?’”
According to DelBianco, the client saw a drastic difference in her skin and cut back most of her medication within a month of working with Wholistic Renewal.
Reaching as Many People as Possible
Paul and DelBianco wanted to make accessing holistic health services easier. That may explain why Paul and DelBianco opted for a fully virtual company and bundled their services in eight different packages, with prices ranging from $350 to $3500, tending to different needs and income groups. Each package is based on the expertise they gained when they studied to become functional diagnostic nutrition practitioners, and will be improved upon as soon as they gain further insights and access to new research.
“The end goal is using all the hardship and all the health struggles that we’ve been through and turning them into something good,” DelBianco said.