What is Nutritional Counseling?Nutritional Counseling

Nutritional counseling is a type of assessment or counseling in which you work with a professional to analyze various health needs in regard to diet and exercise. Nutritional counseling can help you set achievable goals and identify dietary and lifestyle changes as needed. These changes assist in providing personalized information to improve your overall health as well as various ways to maintain your goals long-term.

Who Can Benefit from a Consult?

The main goal of nutritional counseling is to help people create and maintain dietary changes. Some other benefits of receiving nutritional counseling include a complete diet overhaul, management of a medical condition or eating disorder, adjustment of  your food choices, help to control emotional eating, or healthy recipe inspiration.

Nutritional counseling is designed to help create a plan that works for you. Therefore, it is often recommended to get blood work done first in order to determine if you have any specific conditions that need to be addressed with nutrition, such as high cholesterol, blood pressure, or blood sugar.

What Can Nutrition Counseling Treat?

While many patients head into a nutrition consultation to learn more about how their food choice can affect their health, others do so at their doctor’s suggestion.

Some of the conditions that can benefit specifically from dietary interventions are:

  • High cholesterol
  • High blood pressurenutritional counseling
  • Heart disease
  • Allergies
  • Diabetes and pre-diabetic conditions
  • Obesity or overweight
  • Irritable bowel syndrome
  • Pregnancy
  • Celiac disease
  • Eating disorders

Why Is Nutrition Important?

Nutrition is a very important part of a maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Without proper nutrition, you will not have enough energy to make it through the day let alone maintain your health. This will only result in you become more susceptible to illness and disease, as many are caused by an unhealthy diet.

Whether it is due to the quantity of fat and calories that lead to obesity, the lack of nutrients required for a healthy immune system, or the amount of chemicals and trans fats that are included in processed foods, unhealthy eating can lead to major health problems.

However, with nutrition counseling, you can get to the root cause of your health concerns, rather than simply tackling the symptoms resulting from them. Once you figure out the perfect plan for you, nutritional counseling will teach you the tools to manage/maintain the changes. You will look and feel better, have increased energy, and finally be in control of your body. Often, feeling better leads to increased concentration, memory, immune function, improved complexion, and elevation of your overall mood.

Learning and practicing balanced nutrition is a process that everyone can benefit from, no matter the goal of the process. And don’t worry, you will not have to stop eating everything you love. Nutritional counseling will help you set and achieve your goals, starting with the changes that will have the most impact so you can once again be in charge of your health.