Introducing: The Vitality Blueprint

Functional medicine has a different definition depending on whatever practitioner you talk to. In my opinion, functional medicine is root cause medicine, lifestyle medicine, and preventative medicine. It treats the body as this beautifully designed intricate and complex web, filled with checks and balances. I think functional practitioners can act as western practitioners if you aren’t careful. Anyone can order lab work, treat the paper, and recommend supplements without diving deep. I really do look at the entire person, mind, body, and soul.

Precision Analytical Inc. DUTCH Complete, a dried urine test looking at sex hormones, various hormonal metabolic breakdown pathways, cortisol patterns, and various organic acid metabolites to give a snapshot into digestion, nutrient status, and oxidative stress.

Diagnostic Solutions Laboratory GI MAP, a stool test that looks at pathogens, viruses, fungi,  commensal/opportunistic intestinal flora, and various gut health markers.

Analytical Research Labs (ARL) HTMA, hair tissue mineral analysis that assesses mineral imbalances, heavy metals, and mineral ratios. 

There is research to suggest that prolonged fasting is beneficial. This is true, we know that when we push our eating window we allow the body to repair and recover, cleaning up dead cells, damaged proteins, mutations, etc. There is a fine line with fasting, especially with women, specifically menstruating women. When our body senses less food it’s a slippery slope, I often see the thyroid and metabolism take a huge hit, as well as sex hormones. Remember, fasting is a stressor! I recommend a “circadian fast” from Dr. Amy Shah. This is a 12 hour break from eating between the previous evening’s dinner and the next morning’s breakfast.

This is a LOADED question that I often receive. Everyone is so different, and certain foods that make one person feel great, can leave another feeling not great. This is also dependent on lifestyle factors like your environment, exercise habits, stress levels, etc. Overall, my recommendation to anyone is to eat real whole foods and cook at home as often as possible.

I do not recommend any specific diets. I also don’t subscribe to counting carbs, macros, or calories. Can these be educational? Yes. Are they sustainable? No.

Food sensitivities are the body reacting locally in the gut, but also systemically in the bloodstream to certain food particles that leaked out. This can be for a variety of reasons such as simply not chewing, low hydrochloric acid in the stomach, lactose intolerance, GMOs, gluten sensitivity, leaky gut dysfunction, low digestive enzymes, pesticides, etc. Our immune systems can go haywire. These are not root causes. Removing triggering foods can give relief, however, if we aren’t doing the work to heal the gut then the client will never see relief.

Another loaded question. Everyone is different! I’m not a huge fan of taking bulk supplements or even being on a supplement protocol for an extended period of time. When I recommend supplements it’s for a reason, and if someone loves a formula that works for them, then that’s great. Everyone can benefit from basic mineral supplementation since our soil is depleted of minerals thus our produce is as well. However, even that recommendation varies based on an HTMA result. Food first always!

I struggled with this for a while because I knew I had genetic variants that were closely tied to my brother (who was diagnosed celiac), and I never felt good eating gluten. I chose to continue eating it because I didn’t want to be “restrictive”. The reality is you need to live your life for you. I did functional lab work that showed me straight up, my immune system was attacking gluten proteins. It didn’t work for me, and my health drastically improved when I removed it. Test don’t guess. But hey if you know you feel awful when you eat gluten or dairy, give it a go! There is a lot of power in trial and error.