Weekend Plans With Nurse Kate, America’s MAHA Mom

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in culture. 

This weekend, mother of four and professional nurse Kate Johnson chats with The Daily Wire in between homeschooling her little ones, debunking wellness myths, and offering her Instagram followers health hacks to level up any day of the week. Need a little motivation to get off the couch from someone who feels like a best friend? Kate’s got you. Having just launched her new podcast with her hubby — “The Benny & Kate Show”  — she’s hoping to inspire everyone to build strong families, deepen their faith, and thrive.

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“I never wear makeup,” Kate laughs. “My kids are always like, ‘What’s on your face?’ My daughter’s like, ‘You look weird.’” She’s strikingly beautiful with or without a little contour, but she knows nothing’s getting past her four-year-old. Busy raising a brood under the age of six, Kate assures me, “I guess I normally look like I’m about to get thrown up on.” No matter what, she’s ready for anything.

After a few minutes, I feel like I’ve known forever. She has the empathy of a best friend. It makes sense, considering how she found her true calling in empowering others to take charge of their health.

She spent her early career working in a life-saving trauma hospital in Washington, D.C., providing care for everything from “gunshot wounds to catastrophic heart attacks.” But she recalls, “I started to see really young people having these end-stage organ failures and massive cardiovascular events, strokes, heart attacks, or complications from years and years of hypertension.”

That’s when she left her bedside gig, hoping to incentivize preventative care at Blue Cross Blue Shield. But she was still working against the clock, just “checking boxes and making sure that people are taking their medications … Nobody gets healthy in the doctor’s office.”

“I thought working inside of the health care system would be how I would have an influence on people’s health and wellness,” she says. Like it did for so many people, the lockdown reshaped her vision of health. “I started to realize … if you want to impact real health, you have to be able to talk to them where they live. And that’s really my heart and mission.” She’s bringing her family along for the ride. 

For Kate, it’s all about the nutrition, sleep, and movement that boosts the numbers your doctor sees down the line. She cooks up healthy family meals with her kids as sous chefs, and you’ll see them on Instagram climbing into her lap or hanging over her shoulders during home gym workouts or confessionals in the car. 

Kate Johnson

Kate could probably nurse anyone back to health, but I laugh when she cites the Pew Research Center for this fun tidbit: “The number one thing that vexes women in their forties in their marriages is their husband’s lack of health.” (Don’t freak out — she thinks it works both ways in the best partnerships.) “I want you to find me attractive, I want to be healthy for you, I don’t want to become a burden for you because of the choices I’ve made,” she advises. “There are so many things that are out of our control when it comes to health. But the things that I can take control of, I want to do that.”

Get up and go

If you’ve ever heard Kate’s advice about moving your body, it should come as no surprise that she gets moving as soon as she can. She wakes up around 5:30 a.m. while the house is still quiet to grab a black coffee and tidy up.

“We have a little makeshift garage gym,” she explains, relishing the warm sunshine of her family’s new home base on the Gulf coast. “My husband and I get up in the morning and we go down there and sweat our faces off in the Florida humidity … get eaten by mosquitoes … No A/C.”

“We do a lot of walking. We do get at least a thousand steps a day,” she confirms. “I’ve been jogging since I was a teenager and my brain loves it. And then I lift heavy, for me, four days a week. I squat, lunge, push, pull, press. Just the basics. We’re normal people trying to be healthy.” The kids join in, too, if they’re not enrolled in gymnastics.

Kate Johnson

After that, breakfast serves as the biggest meal of the day (scrambled eggs and cheese, turkey sausage, avocado, or Greek yogurt). Then it’s homeschool on weekdays. Once a week, Kate bakes homemade sourdough, which always gets devoured in a day. 

If the gang’s not heading out to Steak ‘n Shake on a Friday night, dinnertime sets the stage for the kind of family gatherings the Johnsons are aiming for in the future. “We sit down to dinner as a family, but with little kids, the wheels are falling off,” Kate laughs. “I’m setting the expectation that one day I will enjoy this. But nobody enjoys dinnertime right now. Nobody.”

The miracle behind the 100-day Challenge

Kate chats with me on the first day of her latest online challenge — a baseline commitment to 100 days of activity supported by a community of roughly 30,000 people. She welcomes thousands of returning clients as part of her 15-Minute Movement. 

“Go for a 15 minute walk, start there, and realize that you can do this,” she says.

But Kate’s first client was herself. When a 20-week scan during her pregnancy with her daughter Juliet brought devastating news, she had to get moving. “They come in ashen-faced and they’re like, ‘She has a catastrophic heart defect’ … essentially telling me, ‘You should consider your options.’” After further testing, the family braced for the unknown. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. 

To cope, Kate did the only thing in her power to do. With roughly 100 days until her due date, Kate got in motion. “I started walking every single day, praying over her,” she remembers. “I made a commitment that I was going to walk 10,000 steps a day because that was the one thing that I could do to help her heart.”

“The research is there that the more physically active and cardiovascularly healthy mom is, that imparts to the baby. I used that time to pray over her.” She’s been a Christian all her life, but she leaned even more heavily on her faith. “It was a lot of fear and learning to hand over my fear to God and trust him with this baby’s life.”

They had a “cardiac team on standby,” but Juliet was born with a completely healthy heart. “There was no damage, there was nothing wrong with it, it was perfect,” Kate says. “I truly believe that it was a miracle.”

Offering free admission to a world of supportive teammates, Kate opens the door to healthier living by inviting everyone to take the first step. “The hundred day challenge is a way that I’ve given back over the last four years as a thank you to God for healing Juliet’s heart,” she says. Participants have reversed and even healed chronic hypertension and diabetes. 

“They realized from that starting place, they could change their life,” she says. “Moving is the one thing that’s in your control. You don’t need a policy, you don’t need government. You can’t change what pesticides farmers are putting on the food, but you can change if you’re sweating them out.

Balancing kids and marriage

You’ll never find Kate faking it for Instagram. She highlights the real highs and lows of parenting with a sense of lightness and joy — even though there was a time when she didn’t want kids. “I was really very much a career girl,” Kate admits. She was the black sheep among her 11 siblings, getting married at the ripe old age of 28. Not even her mom thought she would ever have a family. 

“I thought I understood what having kids was all about. I really liked my career, and I liked the freedom of having two incomes and no real responsibilities,” she said. After casually “trying” while flying high on that jet-set DINK energy, she got pregnant and things instantly changed. “I had my first daughter, and I was like, well, I know nothing. Like, what was I doing? Why did I believe all that? I fell in love with being a mom.”

Kate Johnson

“Now I’m on a mission to tell other women: have a career, do something that’s valuable and adds value to other people’s lives, but don’t sacrifice being a mom because you think that that’s a greater good.”

She was 32 by the time she had her first child, and she got plenty of warnings about how tough it is to raise young kids. One of her strategies for staying plugged in to her marriage involved skipping the couch rot session in front of the TV. “We made a commitment that we were not going to be on our screens or watching TV on our phones,” she says. 

Instead, Kate and her husband carve out time together after tucking the kids in bed. “We sit out on our back porch most nights with a cup of tea,” she says. It’s a few precious moments, but the commitment has strengthened her reserves as a wife and mother. “Good luck trying to have a conversation with your kids around. I haven’t finished a thought in six years.”

Earlier this year, Kate announced her fifth pregnancy, which ended in a heartbreaking miscarriage shortly after. It gave her a new perspective. “I felt burned out having four little kids. My whole life is defined by changing diapers and getting sippy cups right and sitting down to breastfeed and this demand on me to care for them,” she remembers. “It made me stop and say thank you Lord for the blessing of this season when it is hard and demanding. It makes you realize how much of a blessing it is to have healthy, vibrant children.”

Of course, when she needs a quiet moment to herself, she has her me-time down to a T. “I have noise-canceling headphones that are Bluetooth, and I will never give them up,” she laughs. “I put those on, and I tell my husband I’m going for a run. I don’t even listen to anything. I just want silence.” She prefers a sweat over a bubble bath, adding, “Everything feels easier after you do something hard.”

A divine compass

Kate appreciates the small pleasures in life like crawling into bed by 9 o’clock or getting dinner on the table by 4:30 p.m. “The more grandma, the better,” she jokes. “They were onto something. That 5 o’clock dinner, that 9 o’clock bedtime … That’s why they live to be a hundred.” 

But she also feels the gravity in what’s at stake for a society set on bashing marriage and family. “We are probably better when we acknowledge that we fight spiritual wars,” Kate posits. When I ask for the life hack getting her through the day, she shares a Bible verse she knows by heart. “‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct your path,’” she says. “That is my motto. That is the scripture that I have really clung to. When he opens a door, walk through it and trust that that is the path that he has you on.”

She never wanted a public platform, but knows it’s God’s calling for this chapter of her life. “I’d be happy to never post again on social media. That is not where my value is,” she says. “But if it can help change somebody’s life, or they can see Jesus in me, that’s why I do it.”