Today we’d like to introduce you to Kari.
Hi Kari, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’ll start by telling the part of my story where my life changed. I was living in Petersburg, Alaska, a small fishing community with a deep connection to the land. For a variety of reasons, I moved back to my home state of Minnesota, away from a place and a lifestyle that made me feel grounded. Shortly after that I had my son.
Everything in my body changed. I felt like I was moving underwater all day long. I was exhausted, I had horrible brain fog, and my hair falling out in handfuls. I assumed that this is what it was to be a new mother who wasn’t sleeping throughout the night, and adjusting to caring for a newborn.
I finally went to a therapist and told him how depleted and invisible I felt. I tried sharing how hard it was to take care of a colicky baby. He asked if I’d tried “that swaddling thing” to calm the baby. That was honestly all the help I got.
Five months later I insisted my doctor run labs. My TSH came back at 85. I had Hashimoto’s, and nobody had connected my hair loss, my exhaustion, my cognitive fog to what was actually happening in my body. It had all been chalked up to new-mom exhaustion.
Medication addressed part of it, but I still didn’t feel well. What followed were years of gut dysfunction, mold exposure, autoimmunity, and the accumulated cost of chronic stress, and I learned that I’d removed myself from everything that felt aligned, and my body kept score of that.
That’s what I bring into the work that I do with women now. Our nervous systems hold the story of our lives, and that story shows up in the body. I work through the gut-brain axis, gut health, nervous system regulation, and mineral status, because those are the building blocks everything else depends on. The gut, brain, and heart function as one connected system, and dysfunction anywhere in that loop usually traces back to something out of alignment in how someone is living.
I started my practice because a 15-minute visit with a doctor in conventional care wasn’t built to see that whole picture, and I didn’t want another woman’s body dismissed as just the cost of motherhood or midlife or a myriad of other reasons women get dismissed in healthcare.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Entrepreneurship hasn’t been a smooth road, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be.
I see entrepreneurship as one of the greatest avenues for personal growth there is. Building this practice has taken more than clinical expertise. It’s taken strategy, resilience, leadership, and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty without abandoning what I’m building. I teach nervous system regulation in my clinical work, but I’ve had to practice it constantly as a business owner too.
I moved to the Portland area right before COVID and built a local practice without an established support system. I’ve also built most of this business while carrying the majority of day-to-day parenting, often during long stretches when my husband was working away from home.
I’m proud of what I’ve created. I’ve built a team, reached women across Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, and built a practice where women with complicated health histories get thoughtful, connected care. Building that while raising my son is something I don’t take lightly.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m an integrative and functional dietitian who helps women in midlife make sense of complex, overlapping symptoms that too often get dismissed as normal aging, stress, or hormones.
Most of my clients are dealing with several things at once: bloating, constipation, reflux, SIBO, Hashimoto’s, fatigue, poor sleep, anxiety, weight changes, perimenopausal symptoms. These aren’t separate problems. Gut health, hormones, thyroid, immune function, minerals, metabolism, sleep, and the nervous system are all talking to each other constantly. I think of it like being a mechanic. Most people have a toolbox full of things that could help, supplements, diets, advice from the internet, but no idea which tool to use, when, or in what order. That’s what I do. I run the diagnostics and know the sequence.
One client came to me after years of pushing through fatigue, bloating after every meal, and exhaustion that started before her day even did. She saw a functional doctor, ran seventeen vials of blood, did the full protocol: thirty supplements a day, low FODMAP, no alcohol. It worked for six weeks, then all of it came back. She hadn’t failed the protocol. The protocol failed her, because nobody had looked at her minerals, her mold exposure, or what it costs a body to be the woman holding everything together for everyone else. We rebuilt from there, in the right order, and she came out the other side able to trust her body again instead of managing it.
What I’m most proud of is the trust my clients place in me. Most arrive feeling defeated and disconnected from their bodies after years of being told everything looks normal. Watching a woman start to understand her own body again, get her energy back, and feel capable of caring for herself is the entire reason I do this.
What sets me apart is that I don’t treat symptoms as failures or proof the body is broken. I treat them as information, as the story of someone’s life showing up in their physiology. My job is to listen carefully, connect what everyone else has looked at in isolation, and build a roadmap her body and her actual life can hold.
What makes you happy?
Being in nature makes me happy. I love studying herbalism and making my own herbal medicine. I love watching my son play basketball. I love traveling, paddleboarding, gardening, walking my dog, getting lost in a good book, and cooking for the people I love.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gutbrainrd.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gutbrainrd
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gutbrainrd
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kari-natwick-b4526040/
