We recently connected with Amanda Hinman and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the best advice you ever gave to a client? How did they benefit / what was the result? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

In my work partnering with women over 40 to improve their hormone, mood and gut health a big part of the health transformation happens when they replenish key nutrients that their body was lacking. For my client Margaret the problem wasn’t that she was eating unhealthy, highly processed foods. Rather the biggest challenge was that she was engaging drive-by meal planning that was crippling her health.

She knew it would be beneficial to eat a regular breakfast and consistent fresh foods meals more often. She even bought the recipe books, went to the grocery store, and purchased the ingredients. However, the problem was that she did not love to cook and didn’t believe she had the time to prepare foods consistently. This is what I call drive-by meal planning you have the best intentions to start a new, healthier way of eating – you find new recipes and buy the ingredients – but then run out of steam with meal prep after a couple of weeks. The mindset shift required to turn this around is to start with the end in mind. Many women I have supported feel they ‘should’ do things differently when it comes to their nourishment, but they don’t know detailed reasons why. Having vague intentions to ‘eat healthier’ is not nearly as effective as being aware of your body’s specific need to boost vitamin D (to calm the immune system), increase magnesium (to support cellular energy levels), and increase zinc (to help with thyroid hormone balance).

After looking over the essential nutrients guidelines and doing a review of her labwork, Margaret discovered that her body had suboptimal levels of fat-soluble vitamins A and E, low total protein levels and inadequate fiber. She also learned how these nutrients specifically were impacting her high blood pressure, anxiety and daily aches and pains.

Now, Margaret was in a position to make a meal plan successfully and stick with it. She came up with three breakfast options that were quick, nourishing, and could be prepared in batches. She started saving money by skipping her morning coffee and bagel at the office coffee shop and instead hired a retired neighbor who loved to cook to prepare three healthy dinners each week. Once Margaret was committed to finding a different way of nourishing consistently, a new opportunity became available.

After three and a half months of being very intentional with her nutrition to increase her protein, fiber and essential fatty acids intake, Margaret was able to wean off the daily Advil she had been taking for shoulder and knee pain, released six pounds, reduced her blood pressure medication and was sleeping through the night!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

At the age of thirty-three, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. I felt perpetually exhausted and anxious. My hair was thinning, I had acne on my chin, and my doctor informed me that my poor thyroid health could be detrimental to my fourth pregnancy. This came as a total shock because I had always considered myself very healthy. I ate salads five days a week, didn’t consume meat very often, and was a group fitness instructor and sports performance trainer. At that time, I started the recommended levothyroxine medication to support thyroid function and was told I would need to remain on medication indefinitely.

Twenty months later, I found myself feeling completely hopeless, gripping the plastic visitor’s chair with my stone-cold fingers in a hospital room, listening to a pediatric neurologist explain that my eight-year-old daughter needed to take anti-seizure medication for life.

This was in the aftermath of her fourth seizure in the past twelve hours. I didn’t understand what had happened to my seemingly healthy daughter. She had always been sensitive and struggled with anxiety, but nothing debilitating yet. I was terrified. The most challenging thing in my life to date was to witness my daughter’s body convulsing, with no certainty of if and when it would end. I felt completely helpless.

She started having as many as ten to fifteen seizures a day in the weeks following. I remember lying in bed at night next to my daughter, shaking and distraught, tracking the rhythm of her breaths because I knew she usually started convulsing within the first fifteen minutes of waking. Eventually, after numerous appointments with neurologists, she was put on four different benzodiazepine medications (twelve pills a day!) just to make it through a twenty-four-hour period episode-free.

The doctors we worked with were kind, empathetic, and knowledgeable on various treatment options to manage her seizures. I wasn’t skeptical at first—I was hopeful that they would have all of the answers. But when I asked them what was causing this, and what the medication was doing in her body, they could not articulate the answers in a way that made sense to me. That’s when my skepticism came in.

And something deep inside of me knew there was more to the story of why my daughter started having seizures.

There had to be a root cause we were missing.

I cared so much that I was unwilling to settle at the first prognosis we were given, that she would remain on medication for life and likely never be able to drive a car. I had to dig deeper and couldn’t solely rely on doctors trained in the traditional medical model to figure out what was causing her body to crash like this; they simply weren’t trained through the lens of interconnectedness across different bodily systems. I knew I had to figure out how to get her well, and so that’s what I decided to do.

At this point, I had been exposed to integrative medicine through the journey of improving my Hashimoto’s diagnosis. Integrative medicine is a form of medical therapy that combines conventional Western medical treatments with alternative medicine (such as homeopathy, chiropractic, and herbalism).

In my own treatment working with an integrative medicine doctor, I utilized supplements, acupuncture, and gluten and dairy elimination and found minimal improvement in my thyroid function. I was able to sleep better and my skin improved, although I still had very high thyroid antibodies, anxiety, and thinning hair.

Small improvements were not going to be enough for my daughter’s health crisis. She needed radical healing in order to stop her daily seizures.

I went back to school to study over one hundred different dietary theories at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and functional medicine science at the School of Applied Functional Medicine. Functional medicine is an individualized, patient-centric, science-based approach to healthcare that looks beyond symptom resolution to identify why illness occurs, address those root causes, and restore health. The other essential part of sustainable healing includes nervous system rebalancing and neuroplasticity (brain rewiring), and I invested significant money and time in learning the key technologies to help my little girl.

I supported my daughter with a root cause functional medicine approach combined with nervous system mindset technologies (boosting key nutrients, detoxifying stress hormones and neurotransmitter metabolites, reframing her fearful and judgmental thoughts, and removing environmental toxins). Within nine months, she was able to balance her hormones and went from being on twelve pills a day to zero and has never had a seizure since. She is thriving and went on to dance competitively through high school and drive, even though doctors said that she would not be able to. She’s now in the US Air Force ROTC and enjoying a full academic college scholarship at the University of Notre Dame.

Through this process, I gained a new understanding of what was possible for my Hashimoto’s. I saw firsthand the power of our bodies to heal and transform into a new normal.

I applied the same functional medicine science and nervous system mindset technologies to my thyroid disease. Within six months, my anxiety was gone, my thyroid function was back on track, my sleep and bowel movements were great, my energy charged up, and I felt amazing! Not only that, but my husband healed from his panic attacks and lifelong allergies. My entire family was transformed.

I am now obsessed with the journey of becoming empowered around your health and can’t wait for you to feel this fire too! Since my family’s transformational experience, I’ve supported hundreds of women to transform their hormone health and heal their bodies from:

Hashimoto’s

Hypothyroidism

Hypertension

Insulin resistance

Anxiety

Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)

Pituitary tumors

Many more hormone imbalances

If feeling more empowered about your hormone health is something you are seeking, I’m confident I can help you get there. I have supported women in over 150 cities in my Thyroid & Hormone Solution Program to utilize a combination of customized functional assessment and proven brain science to help you create sustainable habits to rebuild health.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

I believe active practice and development of faith is the most helpful decision for succeeding in my field of health transformation. This includes cultivate a faith that life is happening for me rather than to me. There is a force or energy that is responsible for creation of life and this same force is benevolent.

Practicing faith in a benevolent God of my understanding has allowed me to access a place of curiosity during my personal health challenges and invite clients to look for the deeper lesson when their health journey takes an unexpected turn.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy for growing my clientele has been to prioritize delivering great results to my clients. This has allowed me to receive referrals, to be invited to speak and share information with larger audiences, and to serve more women.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hinmanholistic.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hinmanamanda/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hinmanholistic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hinmanholistichealthinstit5216