The Importance of Great Nutrition
Nutrition is the fuel that provides the energy to sustain all of life’s functions. It is the necessary fuel that comes from either plant or animal sources and or synthesized molecules. In other words, food supplies us with the nutrients that nourish the body so that it may continually provide key enzymatic activity to aid the body’s daily functions. There are 11 systems in our body performing different roles. To maintain balance and the proper co-ordination of these systems we need to provide them with fuel. The fuel is food. There is no such thing as junk food, just junk and food.
A medical nutritionist is a professional person that engages with people that feel they are either not well, are unbalanced, suffer from disorders or diseases. Disorders include mental health, infertility, women’s conditions such as PCOS, Endometriosis, Menopause, PMS, hormonal irregularities such as Metabolic syndrome, DM2, weight gain or extreme loss, Anorexia Nervosa and last but certainly not least, the emperor of all maladies “cancer “.
A nutritionist employs nutritionally dense foods and or supplements to ensure that you either maintain optimal health or address the underlying causes of the symptoms that you are currently presenting. The symptoms may be due to the fact that you are deficient in co factors, the vitamins and minerals that are integral to cellular, tissue, organ and ultimately the whole body’s function- ability.
Why do we need a Nutritionist?
Nutrition is a learned “discipline” that sets the beat for the basic rhythm of life. Before processed genetically modified, packaged foods, nutrition was something that we took for granted. Our lifestyle choices of our 21century living certainly has not helped. We are more stressed, fatter and unhealthier than ever. Nutritionists are called upon to address usually symptoms of disorder. On the continuum of disease, firstly comes dysfunction, then disorder and most probably disease. It is the role of a nutritionist to modify the symptoms, correct the dysfunction, and re-balance any imbalances to restore chaos for the health and wellbeing of a person.
It is our belief that food is medicine. Our health and our body is our life. We have one life, one body. Our bodies are like gardens. We prepare the soil, we plant the seeds, we nourish it with good nutrients so that it may grow and flourish. We provide water and sunlight enabling it to bear fruit or burst in to flower. If we do not tend to the weeds or provide it with too much or not enough it will slowly wither, attract harmful insects like aphids or accumulate mould that will end up destroying the plant. If we took more notice of how we feed our gardens and used the same philosophy in caring for ourselves we may be a great deal better off.
That’s why as a nutritionist it is my fundamental role to provide you with educated meal plans dietary guidance and lifestyle considerations that will not only eliminate symptoms but fix underlying causes that unchanged may be lead to disease. It requires work understanding and trust. Share with me and take on some changes that will be confronting and challenging as the hardest thing in life is change, yet it is inevitable. Embrace this basic but complex modality in healing and trust that perhaps our ancestors and the forefather of medicine had it right, nutritional medicine is food for allowing the body to naturally heal itself. Food for thought!