What Is Functional Nutritional Therapy?
In Functional Nutritional Therapy (FNT) we work to get to the root cause of what has caused your current health concerns. To understand more about our approach to Functional Nutritional Therapy consultations, see our process of what it's like to work together here.
FNT involves a deep dive into your health history (right back to how you were born) that you may never have had the opportunity to cover with any other practitioner!
Once we understand your history, then we put this together with your current lifestyle and eating habits to get a complete picture of your health journey so far and which systems in your body are out of balance.
Then we also pull information directly from your body using in-depth hands-on testing to determine exactly what YOUR body needs to rebalance, enabling you to feel great again.
When our bodies are working well, you won’t be aware of the thousands of complex functions and systems (like the organs and hormones that are constantly balancing your blood sugar levels) that are working hard behind the scenes to keep you alive and thriving, and that’s the way it should be!
And our bodies are incredibly resilient to tolerate certain imbalances that can happen when we do things like:
Eat sweet or highly processed foods
Don’t get enough sleep
Don’t consume and/or absorb enough minerals or vitamins from our food
Become exposed to viruses, bacteria or toxins which enter our body
Don’t drink enough water each day
You might not notice anything straightaway, but your body will be starting to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ behind the scenes to try and keep your various systems within the tight parameters your body always tries to maintain.
Going back to college/high school biology, the above trading situation is happening at a cellular level. We are made up of trillions of cells. What do cells run on? Yip, nutrients – vitamins and minerals. So it’s our cells that first become nutrient deficient and then cause various tissues, organs and eventually our whole body to become out of balance.
When our bodies are out of balance we start to get symptoms happening (e.g. digestive complaints, fatigue, hormone imbalances, weight gain etc), perhaps small things we pass off as normal to start with, then they can become more and more serious eventually leading to disease.
FNT is holistic, so we work together on your diet, sleep habits, finding supportive ways for you to move your body and better manage any stress in your life.
We also always meet you wherever you’re currently at. This means that you don’t already have to be eating a certain way and you might even feel like you’re at a very low point in terms of managing your health. That’s ok, we want any changes to be sustainable so we can take things slowly, and will always tailor recommendations to your individual needs.
Sometimes when a clients’ health needs are very complex or multi-dimensional and fall outside of my scope of practice, I will often collaborate with other practitioners (forming a care team), or even refer a client out to ensure they get the care that is required.