Unlocking Vitality: Functional Medicine Strategies for Weight Loss
Vitality: The state of being strong, active, and energized. Being overweight can make it hard to feel that way, especially if there are underlying causes contributing to your weight gain.
While many assume weight gain is all about diet choices, functional medicine recognizes the complex relationship between your body, lifestyle, hormones, and weight. While nutrition certainly plays a role in weight gain and weight loss, there are many other points to consider when unlocking the best approach to weight loss.
From a functional medicine mindset, we can see weight as an expression of our health and lifestyle. When something is out of balance, it can cause us to gain weight. By restoring harmony throughout the mind and body, and leading a life that reflects this balance, we can lose weight naturally and keep the extra pounds off.
Understanding Weight Loss and Its Complexities
Through the function medicine lens, weight loss is viewed as a multi-step approach, but that does not mean it is overly complicated. On the contrary, many patients find that functional medicine for weight loss gives them the understanding about their body that they’ve been longing for, allowing them to make better decisions for their unique metabolism and get the results they’ve so desperately longed for.
Functional medicine strives to understand the individual, not solely their symptoms. Although weight loss may be your goal, the functional medicine practitioner wants to understand how you gained weight in the first place, and why any attempts to lose it so far have not been as successful as you would have liked.
Vitality plays a large role in functional medicine. Particularly, the doctor wants to understand why you are not in your most active, energized state, and what underlying factors may be causing you to feel fatigued, unmotivated, unenergized, and even craving foods that are not healthy for you.
Food cravings in functional medicine can signal something far beyond the inability to make good dietary choices. A person might crave sugar because they have imbalances in their blood sugar levels; they might be drawn more toward high-fat foods because of a nutrient deficiency.
Even in small quantities, vitamin and nutrient deficiencies can disrupt the body’s natural process and cause a variety of symptoms — including overeating, weight gain, and chronic fatigue.
By untangling the complexities of your own health, a functional medicine doctor can begin creating a personalized treatment plan to help you move toward wellness and weight loss goals.
The Functional Medicine Approach to Weight Loss
The first thing a functional medicine doctor wants to do is learn more about your background and history with weight loss. Is your weight gain sudden, or has it been steadily rising for years? Have you tried to lose weight in the past? If so, how, and what were the results? Does anyone in your family have a history of being overweight or having weight fluctuations? What other health conditions did they have?
These types of questions help connect the dots of your medical history, allowing the doctor to better understand the role and influence of weight on your overall health. They will consider any other underlying conditions you have or have had in the past, as well as assess lifestyle factors such as your nutrition, exercise routine, and sleep patterns.
There are a variety of factors that can cause weight gain, including genetics, environmental influences, and lifestyle factors. Even your mental health can play a role in your weight. People who are struggling emotionally may seek comfort through food, or they might experience hormonal imbalances that cause them to crave certain foods more often.
Functional medicine aims to uncover the root cause of your weight gain, so you can receive personalized support to help you reach your goals. Losing weight is not the primary objective, however. The real goal of functional medicine for weight loss is to help you understand your body and achieve greater balance, so you can achieve a state of genuine well-being.
Nutrition and Optimal Weight
In functional medicine, nutrition is viewed as something wholly personal. Each person’s diet is influenced by factors such as their environment, lifestyle, budget, upbringing, culture, stress levels, and medical history.
Your nutrition can reveal valuable insights about your life, which a functional medicine doctor helps you understand better. By realizing how nutrition can help or hinder your current weight loss goals, the doctor creates space for positive change to take place.
Furthermore, the doctor performs an assessment to see if you currently have any nutritional deficiencies. If you are missing key vitamins in your diet, this can have a chain reaction throughout your body that increases inflammation, stress, and even induces certain food cravings more often.
By helping you learn how to eat a whole diet balanced for your body and lifestyle, functional medicine delivers a personalized weight loss solution. Every action a doctor takes is underscored by the belief that the best diet for weight loss is the one customized to your unique needs.
Lifestyle Modifications for Sustainable Weight Loss
Lifestyle modifications can help you lose weight naturally while restoring greater function and balance to your health. These modifications can include exercising more regularly, taking measures to improve your sleep quality, and eating a more balanced diet that gives your body the nutrients it needs.
Functional medicine takes every facet of your health into account. Dietary recommendations are made based on your unique metabolic function and nutritional needs.
There are no generic diets in this field of medicine. Every patient’s lifestyle modification plan is personalized to suit their needs, age, abilities, and even preferences.
Addressing Underlying Imbalances: Hormones and Gut Health
Your gut plays a vital role in regulating your hormones, which in turn impact your metabolism. Losing weight can be an uphill battle if you are working against hormonal imbalances.
Functional medicine examines your hormones from multiple vantage points, including your diet, lifestyle habits, mental health, and sleep patterns.
Simple blood work can help provide a foundation for your doctor to work from. Once they identify imbalances, they can work backward and uncover their source and contributors in your life.
Since your gut produces vital hormones like serotonin, gastrin, and cholecystokinin (CCK), resetting your gut and nourishing it with the foods it needs to restore its balance is also an important part of functional medicine treatment.
Conclusion
Traditional weight loss programs focus on measurements, ignoring all the potential causes of weight gain that can take place within someone’s body. Functional medicine takes a holistic approach to weight loss by examining both internal factors and external influences that can affect your weight.
With personalized treatment drawn from blood work, hormonal panels, and lifestyle assessments, functional medicine addresses every barrier to your weight loss and proposes meaningful solutions.
To learn more about functional medicine and how it could help you on your weight loss journey, please schedule a free consultation with us.