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Physician Stacey Funt discusses her article, “The healing power of travel: How adventure transforms mind, body, and spirit.” Stacey explores how travel serves as a potent remedy for physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. She highlights how wellness adventure travel integrates lifestyle medicine principles—movement, whole foods, relaxation, and community—while often promoting restorative sleep. Stacey shares inspiring stories, like a woman who lost fifty pounds preparing for a life-changing trip and another who embraced fitness through active travel. She emphasizes the emotional uplift from group connections and the spiritual renewal sparked by nature’s awe-inspiring moments. Offering practical advice, Stacey encourages listeners to use travel as a self-care catalyst, drawing from her own healing trek in Nepal after personal loss.
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Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Stacey Funt. She is a physician, and her KevinMD article is “The healing power of travel: how adventure transforms mind, body, and spirit.”
Kevin Pho: Stacey, welcome to the show.
Stacey Funt: Thanks so much for having me.
Kevin Pho: All right, tell us a little bit about yourself and the KevinMD article that you wrote.
Stacey Funt: Sure, thanks. So I am a physician, and about 12 years ago I also went back for lifestyle medicine, and I became a board-certified health coach. I have been a global adventure traveler my entire adult life, and so right before COVID, I started to have the idea of combining the two together.
And so that is when I came up with the idea of adventure travel. Actually, I did start my first trip, but COVID hit and we had to cancel that one. Then my kids went off to college, and I officially started my company. I do wellness adventure based on tenets of lifestyle medicine. All of my trips have movement, healthy eating, we build community, and we have moments of relaxation in these amazing locations all over the globe.
Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us about the benefits of travel and how that intersects with some of the things that we do as physicians.
Stacey Funt: Yeah, so, I mean, everybody experiences different benefits of travel, and it all depends on how you like to travel. For so many people, the number one thing they want to do in their free time is travel. It can be fun, exciting, or educational. It can be so many things, but I focus more on the wellness aspects and the health benefits. I used to have friends come back from trips and they would, you know, need to go on a diet or start moving. They would just feel so gluttonous or bad when they came back.
So, you know, health takes place not just in the doctor’s office. Of course, it takes place in how we live. When you go on wellness adventure travel, you continue to do the things that you love and feel good as you go on these amazing adventures and experience new cultures. For some people, and I put myself in this camp, actually, it is even easier to be healthy when you have a trip planned. Because when you know you have a trek or a hike coming up, it is a lot easier to be motivated to get to that gym and train for it. So it can be very goal-oriented.
As I mentioned in the article, I think there are three components that travel can affect. Of course, there is our physical health when we are moving and relaxing and eating well. Then our emotional health when we are together in community, connecting with other people, and seeing we are part of a global community. Finally, there is the spiritual level. All of my trips involve going to these amazing natural places, whether it is the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, the Inca Trail, or the Val d’Orci in Tuscany. We are in these beautiful natural settings where we really get to spend some time walking in nature and just kind of reevaluating our place in this world.
Kevin Pho: So tell us about how you incorporate wellness during these trips. Like you said, a lot of times when we go on vacation, you always need a vacation from the vacation because you are so busy or gluttonous and just need to recover from that. But how do you incorporate wellness when you are in all these exotic locations?
Stacey Funt: Thank you. I try to balance out the itinerary the best I can. Every trip involves a cooking lesson or a food tour, or in Guatemala we do farm-to-table restaurants, and I always have vegetarian options. It is not solely vegetarian; you can do what you want, but I provide an easy opportunity for staying with the kind of eating that a lot of people like to enjoy or want to include for themselves.
So there is a focus on food and also on movement. All of my trips involve hiking. I have different-level guides, and it is moderate hiking—nothing too extreme. We also do e-bikes. You can turn the assist up or down in Tuscany if you want. We are getting out and moving; it is not just being sedentary on a bus or anything like that. All of my trips will include yoga classes. Often we stay in a spa or go to a spa, so it can be pretty adventurous and high-energy, but then we bring it down and have moments for that. Most of my trips are for women. I do have a couples’ trip coming up, but most of mine are women-only. We have all of our dinners together, and I am a trained coach, so I facilitate some conversation. One of the big goals is really building community and feeling the bonds and benefits of being in a community together. That is a really big part of the experience as well.
Kevin Pho: And in terms of your clientele, are they mostly in the health care field, mostly physicians and clinicians?
Stacey Funt: Yeah, I would say at this point probably about a quarter to a third are physicians, because I am connected to so many of them. One physician turned 50 and brought two of her sisters. But this is not just for physicians. I do have options for CME if physicians want it, but there are no lectures at all. This is fully immersive and experiential. So it is a mix of physicians and nonphysicians at this point.
Kevin Pho: Now, do you ever have that conversation—because you always hear about things like clinician burnout and how stressful the job is—and do you ever hear some of those complaints come out during these sessions when you have a group of physicians along on the trip?
Stacey Funt: You know, I would not say complaints; I would say dialogue. Of course, women share that. I mean, I think physicians are all going through a lot of the same things right now, and I just recently had a trip in Guatemala. Not just medicine but other fields as well can be high-pressure, but there are some unique situations for physicians. On one trip I had, a woman shared very, very vulnerably about her feelings about a malpractice case that was coming up. I think she found it really healing and supportive to have the feedback that she did and just a place to be witnessed and seen. It is a wonderful experience.
Kevin Pho: In terms of wellness, there are a lot of retreats within the United States that are certainly geared toward the health care field, but there is something about traveling to an exotic locale that makes it a little bit different. What makes traveling specifically a little different from, say, a retreat locally?
Stacey Funt: Retreats are wonderful, also. My adventures are not retreats; they are definitely travel. I think there is a big difference. A few different things. First, adventure travel is really focused on having an experience of another location. It is not meant to teach you something or be focused in a particular way. It is wide open to whatever the experience may be. You ever go away on a trip, and five days feels like three weeks? Sometimes time expands when you travel. I think it is because we are so mindful and present when we travel; so many of the positive emotions are ignited—like awe and wonder. It is like a moving meditation, where we are so awake to everything around us because we are seeing things we have never seen or experienced before. It can really bring on extremely strong emotions as we go on this ever-changing landscape throughout the adventure.
So there is no clear intention other than for you to have this wonderful experience—whatever that experience is going to be.
Kevin Pho: And of course, traveling within a group through unknown locales and exotic adventures bonds the group closer together as well, right?
Stacey Funt: Yes, very, very much. Now, I do not have a “Join now” button on my website at this point. I individually Zoom with everyone who is interested in going because these are active adventures, and I want to make sure it is the right fit for them—that expectations are correct and it is the right experience. So I Zoom with everyone. It is a very close-knit group, and we spend a lot of time together. It has worked out really well so far. It has been really great.
Kevin Pho: One of the things you mentioned earlier was the spiritual component, spiritual well-being. How does going to sometimes awe-inspiring natural locales contribute to that sense of spiritual well-being?
Stacey Funt: I think that is such a personal answer, but when we are in the desert, we spend a night in a luxury camp in the Sahara Desert of Morocco. After the campfire, we go out to the dunes and lie under the stars. It is one of those rare moments when you see the whole Milky Way—everything. I think for each of us as human beings, when we are in some of these really magnificent experiences, it puts us in a different place. It makes us see our lives and the world in a bit of a different perspective in that moment. To me, that is what spirituality is: to be able to step outside yourself and have a different perspective on your life and your place in it, and your connection to it.
Kevin Pho: Tell us how you got started with this. You went from being a physician to now organizing adventure travel. Tell us how you got interested in the first place and why you made that connection—why you switched from being a physician.
Stacey Funt: Well, I am still a physician. I am still practicing part-time. I had thought about this for a very long time. I planned one trip, but COVID hit and we canceled. My kids left for college, and a month before they left, my father-in-law died. A month after they left for college, my father died. I was about to turn the age that my mother died. My mother died young, so it was really a profound sense of loss for me at the time.
I am very grateful for my medical career. I work with wonderful colleagues, and I enjoy many things about it, but it does not fulfill all aspects of my being. I was feeling so much loss for the first time in my life, I really started to question whether the best was behind me. I am usually a very positive person—I have a lot of energy—and I was really wondering if I had just passed my best moments. I have always been a traveler, and I just knew I had to go trekking in Nepal. I felt called to Nepal. My husband and I went on this beautiful journey. It was a moderate trek; we did not do the full Annapurna Circuit, but we went through the Annapurna region. Just walking in the mountains, being surrounded by such beauty, and then learning about the Hindu culture, going to the crematorium, and seeing their perspectives on death and dying—it was such a transformative, healing journey. On the very long flight back from Kathmandu, at the end of that trip, I just knew it was absolutely time to do this. That was going to be what I would pour my passion and creativity into, now that my active mothering role had changed. That was going to be my next step.
I came home from that trip knowing I would start with Morocco, and I was just going to give it my best shot. If it worked, it worked; if it did not, at least I knew I gave it my best.
Kevin Pho: I hear that a lot from physicians, where medicine does not completely fill up their cup. They need something else; there is a little bit empty if it is just medicine. A lot of physicians do not have a passion, of course, like you are expressing here. What advice do you have for doctors who may be listening to you now, for whom medicine by itself is not enough?
Stacey Funt: I would really say do what makes you feel more energy. If something energizes you, that is usually something positive for you to be doing. I did not realize I was going to make a travel business. I have been a passionate traveler my entire life, having no idea I would ever make this into a business. I am very grateful for medicine, and we are lucky to have a field where some of us can work part-time, and you can split and do multiple things. But just keep trying new things and exploring, and see what makes you feel excited. Then follow that energy. There may be all different sorts of ways to turn that into a business or something that replenishes your cup when the day drags you down.
Kevin Pho: Now, where do you see this going forward? Do you see, in the foreseeable future, that continuing blend between clinical medicine and your adventure travel business?
Stacey Funt: We will see what happens. I mean, I am getting a little bit older, and I have been doing medicine for a long time. This is a great next phase, eventually, for me. We will see how it all goes. Right now, I am leading all of my trips. I will be sending private groups if there are groups of people already who want to go, and I will have other people host for me. I will just take it one day at a time and see what happens.
Kevin Pho: So how many trips do you lead in a typical year?
Stacey Funt: Right now, I am leading four a year.
Kevin Pho: And how long are these trips typically?
Stacey Funt: It depends. I have an upcoming trip to Morocco in October that is 10 days long. I have a trip to Peru that is eight days, a trip to Tuscany that is seven days, and a trip to Guatemala that is six days. Right now, when I plan a new trip, some people who plan trips use companies from that country and have the company organize it. I like to go there myself, so I do a research trip in advance. I scout out everything, meet my local outfitters, and design what I think goes with my brand and the experience I want to create for my guests.
I just came back a few weeks ago from Andalusia, Spain, for a new trip that I am planning for September 2026. So I will see.
Kevin Pho: And tell us, how big are the groups that you lead, and what is the age spectrum?
Stacey Funt: So in general, my trips have mainly been for people in their 40s through 60s. I do not exclude anyone; a 20-year-old may not enjoy hiking with me, but you never know. It all depends on someone’s activity and comfort level. In general, they are people in their 40s through 60s, and group sizes are usually a maximum of 10 or 12. I will do my first couples’ trip next year to Guatemala, because it is such a wonderful trip. I will have a women’s trip and a couples’ trip that year because that is such an easy one—that is the only one where we stay in one place the entire time at this beautiful hotel. So if one partner does not want the activity level, the other partner may have it. For instance, we kayak and hike a volcano, all that. That one has the most flexibility. Usually it is small groups of 12 to 14 at most, because we want to keep that community feel. We have our meals together, and we want to be able to have personal conversations.
Kevin Pho: We are talking to Stacey Funt. She is a physician, and her KevinMD article is “The healing power of travel: how adventure transforms mind, body, and spirit.” Stacey, how would you like to end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?
Stacey Funt: I would just say follow whatever adventure excites you, and do not stop.
Kevin Pho: Stacey, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.
