FOUNDER, MIDLIFE METABOLIC MEDICINE
Denise Erland, FNP-C
Board-Certified Nurse Practitioner | Metabolic & Hormonal Medicine
Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner · Functional Metabolic Weight Management · Advanced Hormone Dynamics in Women · BS Kinesiology (Exercise Science) · 18 Years Clinical Experience
I build Midlife Metabolic Medicine around one clinical question:
what is actually driving this patient’s weight loss resistance — and what must shift, and in what order, for results to become physiologically sustainable?
That question is not answered in a 15-minute primary care visit — or even asked by telehealth platforms prescribing GLP-1s off of an intake form. My practice exists to ask it properly — and to build your care around the answer.
CLINICAL BACKGROUND
WHY I CHOSE THIS WORK
BY DESIGN, NOT DEFAULT
Twelve years in critical care. An early career in exercise science.
I am a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner with 18 years of clinical experience — twelve of them in critical care, where you learn to read complex, multi-system physiology: the pattern only surfaces when you evaluate the whole picture at once. That discipline is how I practice today: I read your labs, hormone panels, symptoms, and history to find the disruption most upstream of the others — so we pull the lever that moves everything else.
My first training was in kinesiology, and I still build my patients' strength programs myself — protecting muscle is half the outcome in midlife weight loss. My training spans Bryn Mawr College, Indiana University, Rush University, Northwestern Medicine, and St. Luke's Health System. I am licensed for telehealth across Oregon and Idaho.
I have spent my entire life resisting systems that fail women.
I was raised in a fundamentalist, authoritarian religious community where a woman's value was measured in submission and domestic servitude — where her access to education, healthcare, even her own identity, was gated by male authority. I left that community while still in high school and put myself through college on scholarships and full-time work.
I learned the cost of misogyny early, as a girl being told what she was permitted to become — and that education left me with a deep intolerance for systems that erase, silence, or ultimately subjugate any human being.
I built this practice at a moment when women's rights and equitable healthcare access are being systematically dismantled in this county — and when too many of the institutions delivering that care have aligned themselves with the dismantling, either by policy or by silence. So I built a practice outside of those institutions: a metabolic and hormonal medical home that centers women instead. A practice that prioritizes patients whose access, economic security, and civil rights are under attack is both an act of service and an act of resistance. I do not separate the two.
A solo telehealth practice.
This care is longitudinal and data-driven — telehealth does it exceptionally well. A solo practice with a defined panel means I know your full history, and that I am the same provider at your first appointment and your fiftieth.
Midlife Metabolic Medicine is woman- and LGBTQ+-owned: an inclusive, affirming, trauma-informed environment welcoming patients across the full spectrum of gender and sexual identity — because resolving metabolic resistance requires a foundation of safety.
If you are ready to address your health with the same rigor you bring to the rest of your life, I built this practice for you.
Ready for a different kind of care?
A Discovery Visit is a no-charge, 15-minute telehealth conversation — ask questions, describe what you are experiencing, and find out whether this is the right clinical fit.