Functional nutrition is a personalized approach to health that focuses on understanding and addressing the root causes of health issues, rather than just managing the symptoms. It involves assessing an individual’s unique nutritional needs based on their lifestyle, environment, and genetic factors.

Functional nutrition aims to support overall well-being through dietary and lifestyle modifications, emphasizing whole, nutrient-dense foods, and taking into consideration how various factors impact bodily functions.

The functional nutrition approach is a means to shift an individual’s internal terrain, restoring balance and health to the body’s functions, making the environment inhospitable for symptoms and conditions to exist.

By empowering clients to make lifestyle behavior changes in six interconnected pillars—optimal nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, connectedness, and substance avoidance—lifestyle medicine aims to eliminate the root causes of a disease. Studies have shown that lifestyle medicine can impact up to 80% of chronic diseases.

Before making any recommendations, time is taken to truly understand you—your story, your health history, your daily habits, and the environment you live and work in. Together, we explore your lifestyle patterns, nutrition, stress load, past labs, and even your beliefs about health.

This process is like detective work: connecting dots others may have missed so we can uncover what’s driving your symptoms. From there, we co-create a personalized strategy that meets you where you are and moves you toward lasting change, based on your real life rhythms.

Most functional medicine practices recommend and often even require a full battery of traditional and functional lab tests before working with you. And then recommend supplement protocols based on the results.

I take a different approach. Because I’m able to help most of my clients reduce symptoms by an average of 50% or more based on symptoms and health history alone, I use functional testing sparingly and in times when more precision is warranted. While it’s certainly nice to see bloodwork and they can be great to get a baseline of health, I have also helped clients achieve full resolution of symptoms without them. That said, many of my clients are data-driven executives like myself, so I happily meet people where they are.

I take a conservative approach to supplements, reminding clients that any you ingest must be processed and filtered by the liver and kidneys. I prefer to use food and herbal remedies whenever possible, while acknowledging that our food does not always contain enough nutrients, necessitating supplementation in key areas.