Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) – What’s that?
Do you feel like you are at your best, or do you feel kind of lousy?
I get it … you need to push hard to get your work done, meet your goals, and be present for your family. But that takes its toll eventually. What if I told you that you could feel better while doing it, and it wasn’t that complicated?
As a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), I work with clients who feel lousy to help them feel better. Please understand that you don’t need to feel stressed, exhausted, hangry, depleted, and starved all the time while working to accomplish your goals. And you can achieve so much more of what’s worthwhile when you feel well: calm, rested, steady, energetic, and well-fed. I am now a certified NTP, and I’d like to share with you how I can help.
Five foundations of health and wellness are the areas of practice for Nutritional Therapy Practitioners: stress response management, sleep quality and quantity, blood sugar regulation, effective digestion, and nutrient-dense whole food. Let’s consider each one of those in turn.
Stress Response Management
Stress – Life comes at us fast, and we’re not going to change that. What we can change is how we respond to stress. Our built-in stress response was designed for physical dangers in our immediate space, so that we could fight, run away, or hide. Challenges and threats today come in the form of emails, deadlines, and social media perceptions. Thankfully, we can use a host of today’s options as solutions to respond to stress effectively. We can mindfully track our body’s immediate reactions, get away from our desks for refreshing movement, establish boundaries in our social and professional lives, and we can lean into sleep and food in productive ways. There are no more saber-tooth tigers to fight, but the paper tigers continue to grow in number.
Sleep Quality and Quantity
Sleep – If sleep is the last thing on your mind, then don’t expect it to happen the minute you drop your head on the pillow. We need sleep more than we often realize. Sleep literally clears the clutter from our brains. Fortunately, there are many strategies to create the ideal conditions to fall asleep smoothly, get high-quality sleep, and sleep through the night. Our bodies have natural daily rhythms and gradually cycle between sleep and wakefulness. We wind down towards sleep with the right cues from light, sounds, activity, and eating, just as we wind up towards full wakefulness. When we work with our natural patterns instead of working against them, we can finally get some well-deserved and refreshing rest.
Blood Sugar Regulation
Blood Sugar – Some cute commercials point out how we get “hangry,” but it’s no joke that when our blood sugar is low, we make mistakes, snap at people that we love, disrespect our colleagues, and generally fall off a productivity cliff. If you’re battling to keep yourself together during the day, you may not even realize the havoc that your eating and drinking habits are wreaking on your body through blood sugar spikes and crashes. Managing blood sugar is critical, and the good news is that there are straightforward ways to do so, based not only on what we eat, but also when we eat, and even the order in which we eat different kinds of food. It’s hard to overstate how crucial steady blood sugar regulation is to not only our overall health, but also our daily functioning. Happily, we have many tools to keep our blood sugar steady.
Effective Digestion
Digestion – We can only hope to benefit if our bodies can absorb the good things we put into them, and clear out the rest. Digestion is the process by which our bodies absorb all the critical nutrients, vitamins and minerals it needs to function, and eliminate the waste products and toxins that it doesn’t need. When digestion goes wrong, we experience bloating, aches, reflux and pain. Every person and every body is different, and we respond differently to foods and eating patterns, so it is helpful to be thoughtful and deliberate about the foods we eat, the ingredients we avoid, the supplements we use, and the gradual fine-tuning of it all. If you feel gross, take heart … there are many strategies to try out, to make you feel better.
Nutrient-Dense Whole Food
Food – It all comes down to food. Perhaps we are all obsessed with food in some version of a love-hate relationship. Many foods today are highly engineered: torn apart, stripped of their essence, recombined with chemicals and additives and flavorings, packaged to be eaten for momentary pleasure but not for joy or lasting satisfaction. Instead, food can and should be beautiful, whole, nutrient-dense, and enjoyed with love and reverence and family. Our bodies, minds, and spirits benefit most from food that is thoughtfully and carefully prepared, eaten, and shared. It is not too late. We can still grow, find, buy, prepare and enjoy fresh, nutritious whole foods together with our families. And it can still be quick and easy.
Taken together, these five foundations of health and wellness – stress response management, sleep quality and quantity, blood sugar regulation, effective digestion, and nutrient-dense whole food – are the means by which NTPs like myself consider, evaluate and recommend improvements for our clients.
If you’re tired of being tired and done with being done, please, reach out to me, and let’s talk about how we might work together to get you back on track and feeling better.
