Women In Wellness: Carrie E Levine of Whole Woman Health On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

Spend time outside. Spending time outside exposes us to vitamin D which supports mood, energy, and cancer prevention. It connects us to the natural world and potentially inspires awe, a known remedy for many mood disorders.

As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Carrie Levine.

As a Certified Nurse Midwife and certified functional medicine practitioner with over 20 years of combined clinical experience, Carrie has worked with thousands of women.

Her process is centered around nutrition and lifestyle, understanding the biochemistry of physiological imbalances, recognizing symptom patterns, honoring each individual, and allowing space for mystery.

Carrie addresses health issues at every stage of a woman’s life: From teenage hormone imbalances to pre- and post-pregnancy challenges, menopause, digestive issues, depression, and everything in between.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

Of course! I started my college career at the University of Maine in Orono. I got a job at the student health center as a peer counselor in the women’s clinic. My work as a peer counselor was my first engagement with women within a health care system. It was 1988 AIDS was on the rise and fear was rampant on the college campus. I provided a lot of contraceptive counseling. My supervisor, Ruth, was the kindest, smartest, most impassioned and level-headed woman I had ever met.

Ruth was part of a group of women starting a feminist health clinic in Bangor called The Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center. Initially, there was no actual building. The collective provided a day-long health conference called “Health in Our Hands.” At this conference I learned about Chinese medicine, herbal healing, and why women crave chocolate pre-menstrually. Dr. Christiane Northrup, a founding mother of Women to Women Health Care Center which was located in Yarmouth, Maine and author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom shared the keynote with Deb Soule, founder of Avena Botanicals, an herbal apothecary in West Rockport, Maine. Seeing them stand together and listening to them speak was my ‘ah-ha’ moment. In that moment, I understood good health care is not either medicine or alternative care, but the best of what each has to offer depending on the circumstances and the individual.

A few years later, when I graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Public Relations and Women’s Studies, I returned to Bangor to consult with Ruth. I knew I wanted to work with women and in health care. I chose the conventional health care system because that is where I felt I could affect the most change. Ruth probed gently, “How long do you want to be in school? How much debt do you want to incur?” She suggested I consider becoming a nurse practitioner.

In the state of Maine, nurse practitioners are licensed to practice independently. We do not need physician supervision like a Physician’s Assistant. We can prescribe some medications. Our services are reimbursed by insurance companies. Most nurse practitioner programs take two years to complete if you’re already a nurse. There are programs around the country for people who have a bachelor’s degree in something other than nursing. In these programs, admission is directly into the nurse practitioner program after completing the nursing requirements.

I started in the Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner program at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and ultimately complete my nurse midwifery education through what is now Frontier Nursing University. I quickly realized I wanted to be a nurse midwife as opposed to a women’s health nurse practitioner. Women’s health nurse practitioners take care of women throughout the lifespan except during the childbearing year. Nurse midwives care for women throughout the lifespan including the childbearing year. I didn’t want to miss taking care of women during any life stage. And being in the labor room was a lot like helping women do other physically challenging things like rock climbing and mountaineering — jobs I’d had during high school and college.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

A few years into practicing midwifery I took care of a woman whose baby died in utero at term. She labored and birthed that baby. It was unlike anything I’d ever been a part of. It’s one thing to labor and birth a baby. It’s another thing to labor and birth a baby who has passed.

That woman taught me volumes about faith, grace, and resiliency.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Early in my career at Women to Women I did a pelvic exam for a woman and I had no idea what I was looking at. I sought a colleague who followed my exam and informed me I was looking at a prolapsed uterus. A prolapsed uterus is when the uterus drops into the vagina. This is considered a gynecologic emergency.

I learned many lessons from that experience. Not only do I now know what a uterus looks like in the vagina and that it is an emergency, but I also learned to say “I don’t know,” and to ask for help when needed.

Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

I recently published Whole Woman Health: A Guide to Creating Wellness for Any Age and Stage which is an introductory guide to functional medicine for women. My intention in writing the book is to introduce women world-wide to functional medicine and to empower women to do what they can to take care of themselves. My hope is that more women will become aware of systems biology and ask “why?” are they experiencing a particular health issue instead of “what?” medication can they take to relieve their symptoms.

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

1. Eat vegetables. This is one of the most significant things we can do for our health. Vegetables provide fiber that fuel the over 100 trillion organisms, known collectively as the microbiome, living in our intestines. These organisms largely determine our health. Vegetables are also rich in phyto-nutrients, plant-based nutrients that are essential for optimal health.
2. Manage stress in healthy ways. Stress has a profound effect on our physiology. It’s easy to disregard because we all have it, but stress contributes to insulin resistance, hormone imbalance, inflammation, and a myriad of other issues. When our stress level is high, our primary stress hormone cortisol is high. When cortisol is high, insulin levels are high contributing to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
3. Move. Move for at least 30 minutes every day. It is impossible to get the health benefits of movement from a supplement or medication. We simply have to do it ourselves.
4. Rest. Rest and recovery are essential for our physiologic systems to function optimally. Our culture does not prioritize, let alone value, the health benefits of rest.
5. Spend time outside. Spending time outside exposes us to vitamin D which supports mood, energy, and cancer prevention. It connects us to the natural world and potentially inspires awe, a known remedy for many mood disorders.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I’m in it — functional medicine or systems biology. Getting to the root cause of illness and disease and balancing physiology restores wellness in earnest as opposed to medicating symptoms away.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

I wish someone told me it’s not actually possible to do it all — at least not at the same time. I was part of a generation of women who were told that we could have families and careers, which I do think is possible, but extraordinarily challenging to excel at both simultaneously.

I wish someone told me how difficult it is to be a healthy, integrity-filled person and work in conventional health care. I have colleagues who do it and I admire the heck out of them. As a ‘mid-level practitioner,’ I was repeatedly asked to work more hours for the same, or less, income.

I wish someone told me life is truly messy. There’s good and there’s hard and most of us, if we’re lucky, have nearly equal amounts of both. I am grateful for a loving partner, a thriving son, a meaningful career, enough to eat, and a roof over my head — and I feel the physical absence of my 15-year-old daughter who passed in 2018 every day.

I wish someone told me things are not as they seem — people, relationships, jobs, homes, etc. When you spend time with people, time spent truly listening, you begin to understand the complexities of life. Understanding the complexities of someone’s life is a privilege. .

I wish someone told me you don’t have to be perfect to be whole. I’m still working on this one.

Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

Mental health, and the delivery of mental health care, are dearest to me because of the number of women who are diagnosed with anxiety, are started on medication, and are not educated about the connection between mental health and physiology. This is an enormous disservice to women.

So many women experience trauma from their encounter with the mental health system. I have heard countless stories by women of feeling misdiagnosed, voiceless, overmedicated, and uneducated as to what they might do to support themselves.

What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?

Sign up for my mailing list @ carrielevine.com

Follow me on IG @ carrielevine.cnm or Facebook @ CarrieLevineCNM

Purchase Whole Woman Health: A Guide to Creating Wellness at Any Age and Stage at your favorite on-line bookseller.

Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.