Module 4: Unit 6: Core Content: Diet
Choosing how to nourish the body is a daily opportunity. There’s a lot of information in the world about what to eat and what to avoid, and one of your roles is to advise your clients in a way that cuts through the confusion, and allows them to understand how to meet THEIR unique needs and nutrition.
My goal is to offer you guidance and resources that will help you help your clients make mealtime a pleasure, give them lots of options, and provide them with peak nourishment that’s filling and satisfying without excess calories, fat, or sugar.
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Teach Clients Healthy Eating Habits
Diet is such an important factor in your clients’ health, yet it is all too often overlooked in the western medicine approach to health. When you become proficient at identifying imbalances and toxicity in your clients’ diets, and offering ways to nourish themselves while enjoying their foods, you will be successful at guiding your clients to health restoration.
The content here is intended to help you implement healthy beverages and basic healthy food guidelines with your client. Modules 5 – 8 go into detail about a variety of in-depth strategies for optimizing your clients’ diets, based on nutrient needs and body system imbalances while providing guidelines for reducing inflammation and toxicity and identifying food sensitivities.
Hydration
Lack of proper hydration and health-depleting beverages are big problems that may be impacting your client’s health.
In fact, adequate hydration is one of the most frequently overlooked habits that makes the most impact on health. Drinking water is just not as “sexy” as taking the latest new supplement or powdered drink mix. Yet without proper hydration, the body just can’t be healthy.
Start all clients with instructions to hydrate, using the resources on this page as guidelines.
Dehydration can manifest in a myriad of diseases and symptoms. Most of your clients are dehydrated, and they don’t even realize it.
There’s a fascinating book called You’re Not Sick, You’re Thirsty by Dr. F. Batmanghelidj, M.D. In it he talks about the mechanisms by which dehydration triggers such things as asthma, allergies, heartburn, fatigue, hypertension and many others illnesses your clients may have.
To be properly hydrated your client needs to drink approximately 1/2 their weight in fluid ounces of water. If they are exercising heavily, they’ll need more.
Use this document to support your client in creating a hydration schedule. In module 5 you’ll learn more about hydration, healthy beverage options, and healthy beverage swaps for beverages that deplete health and actually dehydrate.
Basic Food Principles
Processed foods deplete the body of B-vitamins needed to turn glucose into energy. The majority of foods that most people eat are processed or refined in some way.
These foods put a strain on the body to digest and provide little nourishment. In Module 5 we’ll go deeper with specific foods that support health, and provide recipes, videos and menu planning guidelines to help you to guide your clients to optimize their diets.
Most people do best with a whole foods, plant-centered diet. Some do best with primarily raw foods, due to their high nutrient density.
Others, due to impaired digestion or specific food sensitivities, do better with more lightly cooked vegetables, as opposed to raw. Some require lower fat, while others thrive on high fat diets.
Most do best to avoid oils, as they are not whole foods. Instead they may opt to get their fats from whole-foods, plant-based sources, like avocados, coconut, seeds, nuts, and olives. Others do best with a small amount of clean animal foods, sourced from organic farms, or from deep in the ocean.
As a practitioner, your goal is to use the resources in Module 3 to do a thorough evaluation and work with your clients to design a diet that’s best for them. This takes time, and trial and error, and may vary from season to season, and change as they evolve in their healing process.
The internal environment of the body is maintained at a pH just above 7.0. The blood pH must be maintained within a very narrow range, or serious illness and death can result.
This means that the body’s internal environment is slightly alkaline.
Enzymatic, immunologic, and repair mechanisms all function their best in an alkaline environment. Metabolic processes (the processes of living, tissue repair, and the metabolism of food) produce a great deal of acid.
Maintaining the appropriate pH of the blood is vital for good health and daily detoxification. Cancer cells, mouth bacteria, and parasites all grow in an acid cellular environment.
Module 5 contains content to guide you to help your client alkalize, and provides resources for you to use to teach them recipe design and meal planning.
Module 6 explores food allergies and will teach you how to guide clients through an elimination/provocation diet.
In Module 7 you will learn how to create diet plans according to nutrient needs and in Module 8, you’ll learn about the effects of specific foods on individual body systems.
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