Make Healthy Food Choices with Austin Functional Nutrition

by Thrival Nutrition Nutritionist in Austin, TX

Functional nutrition is the practice of taking care of every aspect of one’s health, diet, and overall lifestyle when providing them nutrition recommendations. In this way, functional medicine follows a systems approach to healthcare that takes into consideration how interrelated every part of the human body is. This method seeks to look at the big picture of health by restoring physiological functioning.

With Austin Functional Nutrition, symptoms are seen as clues for diagnosing your primary health issues, whether they are related to your diet, illnesses, medications, lifestyle factors, exposure to toxins, antibiotic use, or other factors.

While standard healthcare will try to suppress these symptoms with medication, functional nutrition rather sees them as hints for understanding the underlying problems within your body. By considering the impacts of seemingly unrelated factors on your health, functional nutritionists will put together a holistic health plan that takes every aspect of your health into consideration.

For these reasons, functional nutrition is never one-size-fits-all. Rather, it is a highly customized holistic health perspective that takes your unique specifications into account to trigger healing from the cellular level.

While the terms ‘functional medicine’ and ‘functional nutrition’ are often used interchangeably, they aren’t in fact the same. Functional medicine is a broad medical approach that treats health issues as a part of a system breakdown in your body. In contrast, functional nutrition takes this perspective one step further by featuring the ways that food is a fundamental component of health and the cause of many physical problems.

In most cases, a functional nutrition approach requires dieticians to follow a sequence of steps to know what dietary changes their client will best benefit from. While these steps tend to vary significantly, they generally include comprehensive evaluation of previous medical history, review of organ systems, review of medication and supplement history, review of present diet and lifestyle habits, review of previous medical testing and results, nutrient test to check potential deficiencies.

From these results, the functional nutritionist works to develop a customizable program that targets the cause of these health problems. Program options may include suggestions for eliminating processed foods or entire food groups like gluten or dairy. Sometimes its recommended to take a supplement to improve digestion process or encourage the establishment of beneficial bacteria. Other times they will teach their client how to control lifestyle factors, like learning how to handle stress or better manage their nervous system impulses.

Functional nutrition practitioners aren’t in place to diagnose, prescribe for, or treat their patients for particular conditions. Instead, their role is to look at all health problems holistically, educate patients about the ways their behavior is impeding their optimal health, and offer suggestions for improvement.

There is no single functional nutrition diet. Instead, the right dietary strategy for you is the one that’s designed to address your particular health concerns.

Austin Functional Nutrition lets you treat food as a medicine to set your body up for better health. So, realign your relationship with nutritional diet with an experienced nutritionist in Austin.