There was a time when Yedda Stancil smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, drank every night, and consumed a fair amount of fast food on a regular basis. “I was not raised in a nurturing, home-schooled granola house,” Stancil says.

In the span of three years, however, she endured the death of her brother from a brain tumor and then the death of her father from a heart attack. “For each one of them,” she says, “it was their lifestyle. … and I thought, ‘I don’t want this to happen to me.'”

She didn't want it to happen to others, either.

Today, Stancil says health is a matter of finding a personal medium. “It's really just a journey towards balance,” she says of the approach she takes with all areas of wellness — not just the body, but also the mind.

While involved in numerous initiatives promoting better health, such as her corporate fitness program, Fantastically Fit!, her primary means of guiding others toward an equilibrium is through the Center of Integrative Medicine, which she co-founded.

The practice combines traditional medicine with fitness, nutrition, behavioral modification and prevention, creating a business model that is quickly being envied by larger health care systems.

Stancil also serves as executive director for the Virginia Center of Healthy Communities and helped develop the Virginia Health Department obesity-prevention plan, Champion.