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 pressure
- Heart disease
- Allergies
- Diabetes and pre-diabetic conditions
- Obesity or overweight
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Pregnancy
- Celiac disease
- Eating disorders