I Never Set Out to Start a Health Company
But as the rules changed in my own mid-life body, I needed better answers. Not bandaids. Not fads and gimmicks. Not another restrictive diet or another doctor telling me my labs are normal and it’s all in my head.
That journey opened my eyes to so much that midlife and perimenopausal women weren’t being told (and most doctors were never taught).
You clicked “About” for a reason.
Probably because you’ve been burned before. You’ve bought the programs, read the books, listened to the podcasts – and you learned to check who’s actually behind a health company before you trust them with your body.
Good. You should. I would too.
So let me skip the polished company bio and just tell you the truth:
Wholist exists because I hit the same wall you may be hitting right now. A body that stopped responding to everything that used to work. Advice that didn’t fit or was too confusing and overwhelming.
I went looking for something deeper and clearer, based on science – and when I couldn’t find it, I built it.
Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Hammerstedt
I’ve been an Emergency Medicine doc for over 18 years. More recently, I’ve also become a board-certified Lifestyle Medicine physician, with additional certifications in menopause medicine, integrative nutrition, weight management, culinary medicine, and sexual medicine.
Why did I get all those additional certifications?
Because none of my traditional medical training to become an ER doc protected me from midlife.
I was a lifelong athlete. A doctor. A mama. And…
- The weight crept up.
- My clothes stopped fitting.
- My energy was gone by mid-afternoon.
- My body was changing in ways nothing in my medical training had prepared me for.
I remember standing in my closet thinking: really? This shouldn’t be this hard, should it?
I almost gave up. And then I got mad.
So I did the thing I knew how to do:
I went to the research.
Not the headlines. The actual studies – more than 900 hours of nutrition science, hormone biology, and behavior change research, vetted one study at a time. Then I experimented on myself and physician colleagues, kept what worked, and threw out what didn’t.
What I found changed everything:
I didn’t need another diet, the “right” food, or the next supplement. I needed to understand what my midlife body was actually doing – hormonally, metabolically, psychologically – and work with it instead of against it.
It worked. For good.
It sent me deeper: into menopause medicine, into lifestyle medicine board certification, into the specific science of what happens to women like us in perimenopause and beyond. Science most women are never told, and most doctors were never taught.
I never set out to start a health company. I set out to answer a question my own body was asking.
Wholist is what happened when I realized how many women were asking the same question – and how badly the system was failing to answer it.
The problem I couldn’t unsee
Once I’d lived it, I saw it everywhere – in my ER, among my colleagues, in my friends.
Smart, capable midlife women – women who have built careers and raised families and figured out everything else – suddenly can’t get their own bodies to respond.
The weight won’t move. The energy is gone. The labs are drifting. And when they ask for help, they get wasn’t what they wanted:
- a prescription and a pat on the head
- a dismissal of what they are experiencing
- a wellness feed full of hype, gimmicks, and contradictory advice from people they’re not sure they can trust
Almost nobody accounts for how completely midlife changes a woman’s physiology. Or how unique and personal it is for each woman.
So you conclude the only thing left to conclude:
“Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m broken.”
You blame your body. Your cravings. Your “weakness.” Because when we’ve done everything right and it still isn’t working, we think we’re the only thing left to blame.
I’m not going to stand here and tell you everything that’s broken in the diet industry. You’ve lived it – you don’t need the lecture.
I’d rather tell you what’s not broken:
You.
You’re not broken. Your biology changed. You were never told the new rules.
That’s not a “you” problem. You’re missing the whole, personalized picture.
That’s the gap I built Wholist to fill.
Because the rules changed.
Insulin. Hormonal shifts. Hunger signals scrambled by decades of diets. A brain wired to reach for food under stress. None of that is a character flaw, and none of it responds to willpower – because willpower was never the right tool. Willpower runs out. Skills don’t.
Every program, every membership, every partnership…
Everything we do at Wholist is built on the same three convictions:
Understand the why
The real mechanics of your midlife body (hormones, metabolism, hunger, cravings, stress, sleep) taught in plain language at a depth that respects your intelligence.
Not “your hormones are changing.” You know that. Which hormones, doing what, and what to do about it.
(This is where we get a little nerdy together. It’s my favorite part.)
Build SkillPower, not willpower
Real skills – reading your hunger, decoding cravings, catching the thought before it becomes the snack, coaching yourself through a hard week – practiced until they’re yours.
This is the work that makes change stick when every diet before it didn’t.
Own it yourself
You don’t follow our plan forever. You learn to author your own.
Because you finally understand enough to make your own empowered choices that work best for your biology, psychology, and life. Instead of endless tracking, endless apps, endless restriction.
One woman put it best:
“Other programs told me what to do. This one told me why. That’s the difference.”
How Wholist grew…
by listening.
Wholist started in 2018 with one program: Weight Wellness, the 12-week program I built from all that research – the one I’d needed myself.
Since then, hundreds of women have gone through it and come out the other side feeling like themselves again. We call them Wholistas, and they say it better than I can:
“The why, based in biology more than psychology, is the most helpful – and freeing – for me.”
“For the first time ever, I feel that it is possible for me to live life at a healthy weight and not feel tortured and deprived.”
“Wholist gets to the root of the problem as well as giving us the knowledge to understand it all. I am forever grateful that I found Wholist.”
“It is no longer a panic-inducing emergency to be hungry.”
While they left the program with all the skills they needed, they missed the community and coaches, and wanted to go further into other areas of their life. That became the Total Health Mastery membership.
Physicians were attracted to our deep understanding of the biology, psychology, and lifestyle medicine, and so we started dedicated Weight Wellness groups just for them.
Physicians then wanted to share this with their own patients, but under their brand, so we started a clinic partnership program.
And for going deeper into perimenopausal clinical care, Dr. Heather Hammerstedt started a separate virtual clinic at WholistRX.
What I believe
You are not broken.
Your biology changed, and you can learn the new rules. I’ve watched this one sentence lift years of shame off women’s shoulders, and I will keep saying it as long as I need to.
Foundation first, that supports your existing health team.
Medication, hormones, and other clinical interventions are not the enemy. They are not the whole answer either. HRT, GLP-1s, thyroid medication – these are tools you and your doctor decide on together. We build the health and SkillPower foundation to support your goals both on or off them, or when you want to transition away from them.
Respect your intelligence.
You’re a smart adult. I’ll show you the why behind everything. No dumbed-down handouts. No “just trust the process.”
No shame, no hype.
No before-and-after theatrics. No tracking, counting, or banned foods. No miracle promises. If it sounds like a gimmick, it isn’t ours.
Real humans.
Every Wholist coach has a clinical background, has lived the midlife experience herself, and has personally completed the program before ever delivering it. I built that standard on purpose.
The long game.
I’m not interested in your next thirty days. I’m interested in your next thirty years – strong, clear, energized, and fully yourself, even at 60, 70, and 80. Navigating your body’s changing rules, including perimenopause, menopause, and to enjoy your golden years beyond.
Where your story goes from here
I built all of this for the woman who has always been smart and capable, whose body seemed to change overnight, who has tried everything sensible and is tired of trying alone.
If that’s you:
Learning the new rules is very, very doable – and I’d love to show you.
After all that trying to make the old rules and new gimmicks work… you now have a clean slate.
Ready to talk it through?
A real conversation with a real human about where you are and what fits.