What is Functional Nutrition?
“I wish we had more than just 5 minutes,” and “I just wish my doctor would hear me out.”
These are common complaints I hear from clients who are frustrated with the current healthcare model. They’ve just been readmitted to the hospital for the third time this year. They just received yet another chronic diagnosis and were given yet another prescription. They don’t understand why they’re always feeling run down and why they seem to catch every little bug that goes around.
The traditional model of care does not leave a lot of time for patient education or individualized care, which are required to prevent these scenarios. That, and the nutritional guidelines being practiced in most hospitals and clinics are based on outdated scientific research and are largely ineffective.
Presenting symptoms are often warning signs of impending disease, but often doctors don’t have time to dig deeper and instead prescribe a pill to alleviate the symptoms.
This is where functional medicine comes in. This is a growing field of clinical practice that seeks to find the root cause of your symptoms and bring the body back to a state of optimal function. Functional medicine is a more comprehensive and integrated approach to discovering the cause behind the illness, rather than just grouping symptoms to name a disease and matching the corresponding drugs to that name.
Much of functional medicine is built upon gut health and proper digestion, and as such nutrition is a foundational pillar to the functional model. The foods that we eat, along with other environmental and lifestyle factors, help to either feed disease or fight it. Food is not just calories that our bodies burn for fuel. Food is the very information that our cells use to signal thousands of complex biochemical processes every single second!
Functional medicine practitioners often order different types of testing than you are probably familiar with. There is so much about the function of the body that can be better understood with in-depth stool analysis, urinary, saliva, and functional blood tests. Learning how to utilize the information gained from these tests and what dietary and lifestyle modifications to implement based on these results is just where I come in.
“Test, don’t guess,” has become one of my new favorite mottos. We can save so much time and effort by starting with some baseline testing, which allows me to build my action plan for you based on hard science rather than educated guesses.
Functional nutrition often involves the use of certain nutritional supplements, nutraceuticals, and herbs. If we are not careful, it is easy to want to slip back into that “pill-for-every-ill” mentality just like we would with prescription medications in a traditional sense. My goal for you is to make food your medicine first and foremost, because supplements are only as good as the diet they are supplementing.
Nutrition is never one size fits all, and this is not about the next fad diet or 30-day cleanse. Functional nutrition is meant to be a forever lifestyle change and as such I want to inspire you to put in the work to really make these changes stick. Some people are all or nothing, “let’s do this cold turkey” types. Others need to take incremental baby steps. Knowing this about yourself is one of the first things I want you to figure out before we start, and whichever type you relate to, I’m here for you. Both types can be equally successful in sustaining meaningful lifestyle changes with the right tools and the right coach cheering you on.
That’s why I’m here. Let’s do this.