Dr. Iris Crawford, ND

How I Became an Expert in Hormone Balancing and Weight Loss

After the most difficult struggle of my life up to that point—15 years of college, including 5 and a half years of medical school—I was burned out and 20 pounds overweight. Even as a health expert I couldn’t seem to get my own health turned around. I had discovered firsthand the powerful impact that stress has, especially on women.

Now, after years of research and medical practice seeing hundreds of women successfully lose weight and get their energy back, I’ve learned a few things:

• High-achieving women aren’t getting the help they need to stay healthy and happy
• Our culture shames women if they aren’t perfect and perpetuates the inaccurate, simplified view of weight loss. 
• Weight loss is not just about calories in and calories out
• Treating adrenal burnout and repairing the metabolism is often the missing link to successful and sustained weight loss.

I know what it’s like to have big dreams and want to make an impact on the world. This starts with taking care of ourselves. Growing up with just me, my mom, and my sister and not being able to help them before their health deteriorated is what inspires me to help my patients today. I’m passionate about helping women resolve the underlying issues that cause daily health and weight struggles so that they can feel fit and healthy and continue shaping this amazing world we live in.

History

I grew up in a very poor family, and we always struggled to survive. My mom was so bad off after my dad left unexpectedly that she became very ill when I was 4 years old, and my sister and I were sent to a foster home. We went from one home to the next until finally we were reunited. But things weren’t really any better.

I remember the house we lived in, in West Seattle that my grandmother built, it was a single story cinder block house with a flat roof. Every winter we had to get up at night to change out all the overflowing buckets (at least 8 of them) that were catching water from the leaking ceiling. The floorboards were rough and exposed and in terrible disrepair and the walls were unfinished too. I also remember my mom crying every single month when she got the electric bill. The best day of the month was when food stamps came and we got to go shopping and fill the kitchen with food.

One particularly painful memory is when, every day I got dropped off by the school bus right in front of my house, instead of going home I would walk up the street, so the other kids wouldn’t know I lived there. From a very young age, I knew this wasn’t the life I wanted. I hated watching my family struggle and suffer for so many years. I became determined to do better and be somebody. But being born into a family like this, I felt that I was set up for failure with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The lack of support and value placed on education in my family led to me failing 7th grade and no matter what I did to try to get back into school, some bureaucratic red-tape got in the way until I eventually gave up trying. At 15 years old, I got my own apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle and worked two jobs downtown. It was during this time that I met my friend Angie who showed me that I could get my GED and go to college, because that was what she was doing, and she also introduced me to health. Angie was a vegetarian and went to see a naturopath.

This concept of health lit me up inside because I realized that poverty and poor health go hand-in-hand and that the way out was through better health. My new dream was that one day I would be able to go see a naturopath!

Imagine how thrilled I was when, a couple years later, halfway into my community college education, I came across Bastyr University and the idea exploded in my brain that maybe I could BE a naturopath! After that, there was no turning back.

Finally, after 15 years of college, I walked across a stage, my beautiful, toothless mother crying, “that’s my daughter!”, as they called Dr. Iris Kay Crawford. The first in my immediate family to surpass high school.