Medical Nutrition Therapy
Karen Louise Intuitive Eating Coach
Rediscover the Pleasures of Eating…
Free Yourself from Chronic Dieting Forever…
Medical Nutrition Therapy for…
- $Digestive Issues: restoring gut health, SIBO, Celiac, IBS, etc.
- $Heart Disease prevention: High cholesterol, Hypertension (high blood pressure), etc.
- $Metabolic syndrome
- $Diabetes care and prevention
- $PCOS- polycystic ovarian syndrome
- $Mental Health: ADHD (neurodivergent folks are welcome!), depression, anxiety, bipolar, and other mood related disorders
Perhaps you’ve also been given a new health diagnosis. While your doctor has expressed concern, their primary recommendations seem to always focus on dieting and weight loss.
Talking to your doctor about your health challenges leaves you feeling frustrated and maybe even embarrassed, especially since you’re unsure how to improve your health without focusing on dieting.
You feel like you’ve tried every diet imaginable, but nothing seems to work.
You want to live a healthy lifestyle but are exhausted by the constant pressure to lose weight and the feeling of failure when it doesn’t happen. You’re tired of dealing with judgmental doctors who don’t seem to understand your struggles with food and your body. When you open up about your challenges, their advice often leads back to yet another weight loss diet.
You want help addressing the root cause of your symptoms or why your labs are out of ‘normal’ range. You don’t want to be told to cut carbs and sugar (again). You want help that actually works to empower you and improve your health.
Most of us care about our health and want to improve it for a variety of reasons beyond the number on the scale. Perhaps you want to avoid getting diabetes because it took the life of one of your relatives too soon. Perhaps you want to live long enough to see your Grandchildren.
Are you ready for a different approach that doesn’t solely focus on weight?
Whatever the reasons, you care deeply about finding a way that will help you to live your best and healthiest life possible.
Health diagnoses such as pre-diabetes/diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, can feel quite scary and overwhelming. Given that our dominant culture continues to only provide weight loss as the solution, it can feel even more frustrating and hopeless.
Did you know that there is a different way to approach these health conditions that don’t involve having to follow restrictive diets? Restrictive diets often lead to feelings of deprivation and even more weight gain (known as weight cycling).
Are you ready to look at behaviors and underlying root causes to improve your health for the long term?
If you’re ready to get support for your health—whether due to a recent diagnosis, changes in your lab results, or concerns about conditions that run in your family—but you’re exhausted by endless diets, excessive exercise, and the relentless pursuit of weight loss, we’re here to guide you.
What is Medical Nutrition Therapy?
Medical nutrition therapy (MNT) is the use of evidence-based nutrition interventions to help manage, treat, or prevent certain health conditions. In medical nutrition therapy, registered dietitians use dietary interventions to improve a client’s condition. The goal of medical nutrition therapy is to manage and prevent certain health conditions by making dietary changes to optimize your health.
MNT is recommended for certain conditions including diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension/high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome, polycystic ovarian syndrome, as well as gastrointestinal disorders like celiac disease and irritable bowel syndrome.
What is a non-diet approach?
Many medical nutrition therapy (MNT) interventions focus on weight loss as a way to improve specific health conditions. The traditional medical approach often bypasses this inconvenient truth: that efforts to lose weight via intentional weight loss diets often worsen health conditions over time rather than improve them. For most people, weight loss and dieting are not effective long-term solutions.This high failure rate of dieting is normal and to be expected.
Diet culture markets dieting and weight loss as the ultimate solution to health problems but fails to address the reality that diets are unsustainable. While diets may yield temporary results, they are not designed to support the management of lifelong chronic health conditions. Instead, the cycle of yo-yo dieting leads to weight cycling—significant fluctuations in weight—that only worsens health issues.
As non-diet or anti-diet dietitians, we acknowledge the harmful effects of diet culture and weight stigma in our traditional healthcare system. It’s been our experience in working with these health conditions over the past 19 years, that dieting not only fails to resolve many health problems but can often make them worse. Ironically, the very solutions often recommended by doctors and dietitians, such as dieting and weight loss, are frequently the underlying causes of the health problems traditionally blamed on weight.
Non-diet medical nutrition therapy will help you shift the focus off your weight, and towards your behaviors and relationship to food and your body. We will not promote intentional weight loss as the only solution to improve your health. Non-diet MNT values Health at Every Size (this is a link) frameworks that believe size and weight do not solely determine your health.
Non-diet medical nutrition therapy helps you develop a nutrition plan that you’ll actually be able to maintain. Our main goal is to support you in making peace with food and your body while honoring your health, your goals, and supporting your overall well-being in a way that is sustainable for your lifestyle.
Non-diet Medical Nutrition Therapy Support
Initial assessment is 90 minutes and covers the following:
- $You will receive an individualized plan based on a thorough health and dieting history; bring any labs to this appointment for review.
- $Your nutrition plan is based on your personal preferences, your cultural foodways and the latest evidence based medicine and functional nutrition recommendations.
- $Together we identify what your main health goals are and how to prioritize them so you can make baby steps and begin to feel successful.
- $Create a meal plan that targets your specific health condition.
- $Review of supplements and recommendations if relevant.
- $Coordinate care with your medical team, order any labs if needed.
- $Access to our software system to track food, moods, hunger/fullness levels as well as any other symptoms.
- $You also receive unlimited access and support in between sessions to answer any questions you have throughout this process.
Follow-up nutrition therapy sessions are 50 minutes and cover a variety of areas:
- $Assess progress and identify areas to improve or make tweaks to the treatment plan.
- $Education on the basics of good evidence based nutrition interventions specific to your health condition and ways to integrate these choices into your life.
- $Practicing Health-at-every-size and operating under the belief that weight is not the sole determinant of health.
- $Introduce the principles of mindful and intuitive eating.
- $Discuss how to connect internally with hunger, fullness and satisfaction with eating. A variety of tools are given to help integrate the intuitive eating principles.
- $Address body image if this comes up with a variety of decoding methods to unhook from the old stories and beliefs you may have around weight and worth and other harmful messages learned from diet culture.
Throughout this process you will feel a deep sense of validation and support.
- $You become the expert of your own body and your relationship to food will improve over time.
- $Our sessions are a safe space where you can put words to your fears without feeling like you will be lectured or judged in any way. We are on the same team!
- $We hold the belief that weight is not the sole determinant of health. Your health and your body have a story and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to your unique needs and goals.
- $There are many layers to your health and finding a provider who understands the nuance of health and weight will help you to really find a sustainable and pleasurable solution.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
~Anais Nin ~
Do you still have questions?
Do you take insurance?
We are an out-of-network provider and do not participate on insurance panels or communicate directly with insurance. If you have out-of-network insurance benefits, these may apply to nutrition services. If so, you would pay us directly and then we provide you with a superbill receipt that you can submit to your insurance company. Depending on your benefits, you may be able to receive full or partial reimbursement for your nutrition counseling sessions.
If you have out-of-network benefits we recommend that you call your insurance company directly to learn about coverage. They can inform you of whether you will receive any reimbursement for our services, or whether the cost can be applied towards any deductible.
