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Nicole Huffman is a naturopathic doctor located in Colorado, she lives in a ranch surrounded by horses, chickens, and many more animals. For those of you that don’t know what a naturopathic doctor does, basically, they try to look for the root cause of whatever dysfunction the patient may have. She searches for the deeper reason behind the problem and tries to help the body to heal itself. Alongside Dr. Abby Kramer, they have a podcast, ‘Cofffe with the Docs’, where they talk about holistic health and lifestyle. Dr. Nicole has her own website where she writes articles and blogs gut and Metabolic health.
The start of her healthy lifestyle
Dr. Nicole was introduced to a healthy lifestyle at a very young age. For her, it all started with allergies, she was always in the emergency room because she was reactive to everything. As she was getting older, thyroid issues and hormone issues began to develop, and it was then that she decided to look into it all. Once she had that under control, she began strength training and became a personal trainer. She also learned all she could get her hands on regarding nutrition and healthy lifestyle research.
After this stage of life, she went back to medical school where she realized that there was so much that can be done to improve health in general. A lot of it, for her, had to do with changing what she was eating. Doing her homework by researching is a big part of healing and applying what was learned by changing your lifestyle, making sleep a priority and not running around like crazy all day.
When describing her job, Dr. Nicole says “it's like playing detective”. Her main objective is to treat the root cause of what’s going on with somebody. She is not that interested in masking symptoms with medication. She wants to understand what’s going on underneath the issue and imbalance in the body. The naturopathic practice always starts with the least invasive way of treatment. The firsts steps are always talking to the patient about what kind of lifestyle they follow: learning what they eat, if they are sleeping enough, exercising enough, if they are surrounded by a lot of stress, toxic relationships, etc. This helps her understand the starting point with the patient before moving to the body.
In her latest article about US metabolic health, she talks about how complex our metabolic system is and states the importance of our metabolic health when regulating our blood sugar. This affects our emotions, sleep, and energy levels throughout the day.
When we stabilize blood sugar levels we feel mentally better, calmer and we start responding to stress, instead of reacting to it. For this to happen, our sugar levels have to be underneath 100 in a glucose test, which would mean that we are in a good range. One of the best ways to stabilize our blood sugar is by the way we eat, that’s why she loves our Funky Fat Chocolates. They have good and healthy fats. So it’s important to look into what we eat because it can help a lot. Some symptoms of having sugar spikes & dips are:
- Craving more sugar.
- Feeling shaky and tired.
- Feeling hungry.
We all know that cutting sugar out of our diet can be very difficult. Everyone has a different experience. There are people who find it easier and therefore, can see the results faster, but for those who find it harder, Dr. Nicole advises to:
- Start swapping out bad options for better ones, like the dark chocolate with maltitol for chocolate that contains healthy fats and good nutritional values.
- It's important to know that craving sugar is just as addictive as many other drugs. If our blood sugar levers are very high you might start to feel cranky or more heightened.
- Going into ketosis is the best way to stabilize blood sugar and rewrite the metabolism.
Dr. Nicole has spoken in the past about muscle training and in fact, on the Instagram live, we asked her exactly what it was, and how important it is. She told us that symptoms are our body’s way of communicating with us.
If we have glucose in the system, the excess will be soaked up and it will raise different neurotransmitters like dopamine which impact mental health, when in excess, negatively. If you have adrenal fatigue, are exhausted, sleep bad, don’t manage stress well, exercise can be great mentally, but not a ton of it. Exercise is a stress on the system, but if the body is too stressed out already, there isn’t much you can do that can have a positive benefit so we invite people to see how they feel after and understand what level of intensity for them.
Latest Biohack
Last, but not least, we couldn’t have an interview with Dr. Nicole without asker her about her latest biohack. She recently purchased a mat that sends out electromagnetic frequencies which mimic the earth’s electromagnetic. It helps her calm down her nervous system frequencies after a full day on the ranch and also, helps her fall asleep quicker.
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