So, you’re thinking of hiring a nutritionist… You’re looking to move the needle on your health in some way shape or form and you want to invest the time to gain the knowledge to make some real, positive, sustainable changes. YEAH YOU. I’m going to help you out, because the last thing I want to see is people throwing money at a wellness practitioner only to be given advice that is, in a word, unhelpful. > A good nutritionist should make you have some “a-ha” moments. > A good nutritionist should give you more than a meal plan; they should give you an education. > A good nutritionist should have the passion and the knowledge to actually improve your understanding of how food works.
This is the stuff that everybody already knows. Do not pay money for this type of advice. Make these well-known improvements BEFORE you invest in a nutritionist. Get the obvious things out of the way.
Reduce/eliminate processed foods. Foods in a box, foods with ingredients. You know the drill: shop around the outer edges of the grocery store where the whole foods lives.
Reduce/eliminate refined carbohydrates. This is your typical white-flour-baked-goods stuff. Pastries, buns, white bread, pizza crusts. This is not news to you.
Reduce/eliminate sugary foods. Candy. Milk chocolate. Cookies. Your mind is blown, right?
Reduce/eliminate sugary drinks. I’m talking about cans of pop, bottles of Gatorade; heck, even orange juice if you have a fierce OJ habit. Booze falls into this category too. Wine is sugary. Beer is a refined carby and refined carbohydrates = sugar. People sometimes forget to include their beverages when they think about the bad foods they’re eating, so while this advice is somewhat solid, it’s still not worth paying for.
Reduce/eliminate junk food snacks. Chips, Cheezies, nachos, dry ribs; pub grub, party nosh and movie snacks. These are treats and they are not nutritious, and I’ll bet you probably already knew that.
Increase your water intake. Water is healthy. Drink more of it. (It doesn’t have to be 8-10 glasses day.)
Eat more vegetables. Make veggies half your plate at each meal. They are high in fibre which is good for your intestines and your appetite, and they are packed full of all the micronutrient and phytochemicals that you need to be a badass. Hey! Vegetables are really good for you! You already knew that.
If you do these things, you should see an uptick in your health and happiness. And you already know this, and you didn’t have to go to school and get a diploma like I did (or a degree like a dietician did). And you certainly shouldn’t have to pay one red cent for this kind of advice. If you don’t achieve the wellness result you were hoping for after making all of those changes, you may need to dial in a little more specifically. THAT is when you should hire a nutritionist. When all else fails. When your poor health, stubborn weight, whatever-it-may-be is perplexing you to the point of being really frustrating. When you’re doing everything "right" and it’s still not working. Because that points to an issue that goes deeper than food, and probably lives somewhere in your body - a sluggish organ, a malfunctioning metabolic process, a toxic overload, a deficiency, an allergy… There are ways to use food to reverse the cause of unwellness symptoms. This is Functional Nutrition. It’s a specialized approach based upon your biochemical uniqueness. A generic program won’t help you uncover this solution. You need to be taken through a deep intake process that asks a lot - and I mean A LOT - of questions about your symptoms, how they present, what you suspect causes them, what seems to relieve them. You want to fell better? You want to ditch the extra weight you’ve been carrying around? Then do the things that you already know you need to do. And if that doesn’t work: hire a nutritionist.