Why FUNCTIONAL Nutrition?
“Practicing functional nutrition mirrors the functional medicine approach where “food is medicine.” Food has the power to heal or harm, and the practice of functional nutrition centers around the individual.”
What I’ve come to realize from the past six years of working with a functional medicine doctor and the past twelve years of studying nutrition through the lens of functional medicine, is that the ideologies we’ve been taught about food, disease, weight loss, and mental health are misleading and oftentimes, completely inaccurate. I know, that is a bold statement to make. Believe me, it’s a hard “pill” to swallow when you realize you have to unlearn what you were taught growing up, losing trust in mainstream media and then realizing how opposite it is from the theories and practices I’m currently using to help people truly heal and achieve their goals.
I’ve seen a middle aged woman be defined by a neurological disease with little hope, then months after changing her diet and adding therapeutic supplements, she put her wheelchair in storage, moved out of her parents house, and started riding her bike in the summers. Her doctors told her there was no hope. They never cared about what food she was putting into her body. It turns out that food was causing her body to attack itself.
I’ve seen a teenager reverse his IBS and anxiety, where he once avoided social settings and is now a college graduate teaching middle school.
I’ve seen a man in his 60’s reverse his type ll diabetes and lose 80 lbs in 6 months.
I’ve seen a mom of four balance her hormones, reverse her chronic fatigue and brain fog, lose 30 lbs and feel more vibrant than ever.
Of course everyone’s healing journey is different, but all of these cases and their successes were achieved with similar foundations and principles. The most important one being, food is either medicine or poison. Even further, there is no ideal diet for everybody, no one size fits all. Which is why the Food Pyramid and MyPlate has always been a scam and is dangerous to the health of our society.
The truth is, there are lies everywhere. In the grocery store on your food labels, on your tv, on your social media platforms, in your magazines, and in your doctors offices.
If you have been told your blood test results are normal, guess what, they’ve just compared you to the unhealthy norms of society. Functional medicine lab ranges are much narrower than standard lab ranges. They consider the optimal lab values, meaning anything outside of those optimal values can show patterns and markers that spot trends toward disease. By catching these markers early on, functional medicine practitioners have a chance at reversing or stopping disease progression altogether.
