Functional Nutrition uses the guiding principles of Functional Medicine to take a step back and see how the food we eat is dynamically interacting with and impacting our physiology.
Functional Nutrition also understands that the food we eat is only as potent and powerful as what our individual bodies are able to absorb. Again, this is a patient-centered approach. The questions asked and the guidance sought is based on the dance of insight and discovery into one’s very unique story, or bioindividuality. This is one of the paradigm shifts that approaching nutrition functionally, or holistically, brings.
A goal, within this framework, is then to bring about a better understanding of one’s own body and symptoms. The client is active and engaged in the healing process, above all learning the ways in which the body is communicating and offering feedback. This process is not about quick fixes or magic pills. It is not for someone who just wants to be told what to do. It is a healing process meant to be sustainable because it’s really about the client’s own self-discovery of his or her own healing path (or optimal wellness path.)
The practitioner is in partnership with the client, sometimes guiding or educating, sometimes helping to connect dots, sometimes asking questions, but all the while listening for the understandings of “what’s going on in the body” based on what one’s story/physiology/lifestyle are revealing. The practitioner does not pretend to know all the answers. Rather, the “therapeutic” aspect of the partnership is that both are engaged in the process of unearthing what needs to be done and, in this way, discovering where one’s healing/wellness path is leading.
