Meet the Nurse: Kate Doubler
“You have to get rid of what’s fueling the fire. I always say colostrum and bone broth are my go-tos.”
Kate Doubler is a Registered Nurse turned Certified Health Coach through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition (IIN). Now raising her family of five kids with her husband in Wisconsin, Kate shares her fervor for holistic health through her blog, Real Food RN. Get her talking about infrared saunas and you just may find yourself adding one to your backyard (read on to see why). Kate became an early fan of WonderCow, so naturally, we wanted to hear her story. And share with you why someone with letters and health certifications vouches for us, of course!
Learn More: realfoodrn.com
WonderCow: What is your background?
Kate Doubler: So I’m a mom first and a wife, and I started out working as a nurse. I was always very holistic-minded, went into nursing,and found that it was all about protocols and doctors orders. I went back to school for nutrition and started a blog about health and wellness to get to the root cause of illness. My blog eventually surpassed my income as a nurse, and I was able to leave my hospital job to be home with my five babies. When I first started the blog, I was just doing it just as an outlet. And now… I’m able to reach so many more people!
WonderCow: Which aspects of holistic health were important for you to share?
Kate Doubler: Well, the first book that I read on healing naturally was Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil. I read it in high school and I was so intrigued by the body’s ability to heal. I started putting out recipes just to get people to just try stuff. My first recipe was applesauce. I wanted people to see that they don’t have to buy the stuff at the store that’s been sitting on the shelves for 10 months and is lifeless and pasteurized. You can make your own!
It was so basic, but I wanted to try to give people skills to make their own food and be healthier.
And then I went down the rabbit hole. Then I got into biohacking, infrared saunas, cold water immersion, all this crazy stuff.
WonderCow: What is your mission in what you do?
Kate Doubler: It’s so hard to pin it down to one thing. I really want to help people get healthier across the spectrum. I’ve seen so much chronic disease that is fixable with lifestyle change.
I want to teach people and show them how our body can heal itself.
All you have to do is put out the fires and give it what it needs. Also, heal your children. I want moms to focus on nutrition, because if you can give your kids a good gut microbiome and a strong immune system, it will give them so much life – literally life! After having kids, that got tacked onto my mission of healing people.
WonderCow: What are your thoughts on healing the body naturally? How do supplements play a role in that?
Kate Doubler: I’m a really big supplement fan. A lot of people say you can only get nutrients from food, but I don’t think so. I mean, we didn’t take supplements 10,000 years ago, but we did eat wild growing plants. I see supplements as filling holes in nutrition. I also think our world is so hard on our bodies that our guts are ravaged from all of the stuff that we consume. Antibiotics, vaccines, medications – it destroys our gut flora.
Taking supplemental things help our bodies to heal. So I’m a huge proponent of supplements – the food-based real ones.
WonderCow: What keeps you motivated in what you do to help people?
Kate Doubler: The stories I hear from people. I get emails and DMs saying ‘We did this and my husband came off these meds!’ or ‘We bought a sauna and now this went away and I’m sleeping better!’ I’ve had people say ‘You saved my husband’s life’, which gives me chills, makes me cry, and I know it wasn’t my doing. But if something I pointed out helped them, that means everything to me to know that people are actually listening and healing themselves.
WonderCow: What’s one story that stands out to you?
Kate Doubler: I think of this one woman: Her husband was very sick and thought they were going towards terminal illness. She bought him a sauna and started trying new things like the coffee enemas and juicing supplements. They turned the ship around! She went out there, researched, and found stuff to change! So I read that and sobbed.
WonderCow: What was your process of moving from being a nurse to becoming a registered dietitian?
Kate Doubler: I went back to school in New York. It’s called the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. It was the most comprehensive school at the time, in 2007. We went over every major dietary theory. We got to learn from Doctor Oz, Andrew Weil, Sally Fallon, Robb Wolfe, and David Wolfe. It was so interesting to hear all the different theories and then they taught us how to be health coaches. I started seeing clients, which was a lot of work and time. With five kids, I didn’t have the time to dedicate to it, so I started the blog instead.
WonderCow: How do people find your content?
Kate Doubler: I started the blog back in 2013, before social media was super popular. And then Facebook became a thing, then Instagram. Now I have a newsletter, where I do hear back often from readers. Lately though, everybody lives on Instagram stories – that’s where I communicate with a ton of people, which is great, I love it.
WonderCow: What does interacting with your audiences look like?
Kate Doubler: I’m very dedicated to answering comments and questions on social media. Even though it’s a tremendous amount of time, it’s super important to me to connect with people reaching out. I want to answer their questions and be available. It’s been really great connecting with so many people.
WonderCow: What’s your approach when it comes to longevity?
Kate Doubler: Biohacking. For one thing, sleep optimization is massive. I’m 43, so sleep is super important to me. Things like sleep optimization, infrared saunas, and detoxification through things like coffee enemas, castor oil packs, and gallbladder flushes. I’m doing a flush this weekend. I focus on methods to keep organs functioning well, and always recommend getting adequate sleep so that organs can clean themselves at night and regenerate.
WonderCow: Your skin is just glowing, so that speaks for itself!
Kate Doubler: I work hard on skin. I like eating well and healthy because it reflects on the outside. What’s going on inside, reflects on the outside. So I work really hard on that.
WonderCow: How would you define ‘biohacking’ to someone who has never heard the term?
Kate Doubler: Biohacking is basically going in and being like ‘I’m gonna give my body these tools and see how it works’. Almost like taking a shortcut! It’s giving your body what it needs to do what it’s supposed to do. We don’t even understand the full capabilities of our bodies at all in science.
Our bodies are so intelligent, if we would get rid of the fires and give it the fuel and nutrients that it needs.
It’s amazing how your body can heal.
WonderCow: What brought you to colostrum and to trying WonderCow?
Kate Doubler: We had a really stressful year. We moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin with our five kids. It was the most stressful year of my life. My gut was ravaged from stress. I decided I had to dial in and do some serious gut healing. So when we got to our new home, I made a plan to start with some serious probiotics, colostrum, and bone broth and really get to work on healing my gut. I loved that you guys had a very clean company!
WonderCow: What was your experience with colostrum?
Kate Doubler: It was great! I felt like my gut completely rebounded!
WonderCow: How do you attribute that colostrum specifically is a benefit?
Kate Doubler: You have to get to the root cause of what’s causing it. I knew mine was stress – so that’s what I worked on. You have to get rid of what’s fueling the fire. I always say colostrum and bone broth are my go-tos. Colostrum and bone broth are so natural that you don’t have to worry about any sort of side effects, that I’ve ever heard of.
WonderCow: Some people say that colostrum feels like a detox to them – do you think it’s correlated?
Kate Doubler: When healing your gut, you definitely could detox.
We live in a toxic world where any new thing we adopt is going to make the body budge a little on the healthier side, and a detox can happen.
There is what’s called the “Herxheimer’s Reaction”, where you herx out and detox. That is why I’m such a huge proponent for detoxing, because you need to do it all the time.
WonderCow: In your terms, can you describe what colostrum does for your gut?
Kate Doubler: It’s so nourishing. It’s made to heal and seal the baby cow’s gut from birth. I made colostrum for five babies and I know it was so important to get it to them. It’s full of IgG antibodies to give them strong immune support and give their gut a solid barrier lining. It’s a superfood!
WonderCow: Any closing words?
Kate Doubler: I just wish I could heal the whole world. If people want to follow along and dive into what I’m talking about, I share the most on my Instagram stories. I love connecting with people!
Connect with Kate:
- Instagram: @realfoodrn
- Blog: realfoodrn.com