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Functional Nutrition 101

BY: Andrea Nakayama

DATE: 2014-02-20

Today I’d love to introduce the concept of nutritional dogma vs. dharma.
Which do you prescribe to?

In Friday’s Functional Nutrition 101 Seminar I’ll spotlight the key practice that we use within the Replenish PDX counseling system to enroll clients and ensure that we’re meeting their unique health needs.

I’m not talking about sales strategies or pitches. I am talking about the true principles of functional medicine and bioindividuality.

I confess that it’s been a tremendous year of business growth spurts and hurts for Replenish.

In the interest of evolution, and with my continuing education in functional medicine and nutrition, as well as my commitment to effectively serving individual’s health needs as an agent for making significant shifts in our healthcare system as a whole, I’ve been able to refine and enhance our procedures for bringing clients into our fold of care.
These procedures not only help our clients, but also help us to help them.

It’s a win, win situation. Ultimately its our goal to walk clients ~ even those with the most challenging health conditions ~ toward a path of healing. We need to develop all our skills to enable us to do so.

This is what I want to share with you in Functional Nutrition 101.

It’s time for you to step into your true potential as a healer.

And these procedures that we’ve adopted within our clinical practice are also the ones that bring us back to our ability, as holistic health practitioners, to our commitment to either nutrition dogma or dharma.

Nutrition Dogma vs. Dharma

Dogma refers to an authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, that are considered to be absolutely true.

The Greek word from which it’s derived means “that which one thinks to be true”.

Much of how the medical system has evolved falls into the realm of dogma. It neglects to consider the individual’s needs, but instead sides with symptoms or clinical diagnosis as the guiding principle for treatment.

In dogma, we lose the unique qualities, attributes and history of the person seeking our support in favor of a set of ideas or principles.

This too can happen in nutrition.

When we endorse a specific way of eating because it’s worked for us or the majority of people we choose to associate with, we’re siding with dogma.

Dogma is not the principle of functional nutrition or bioindividuality.

So what is?
This is where dharma comes in.

Dharma refers to our essential quality or character.

Dharma, in the context that I’m choosing to use it, refers to the bioindividuality of each of our clients. In order for us to tap into their dharmic potential to heal and thrive, we also need to hone our skills of perception on constitutional, physiological and clinical levels.
Dharma is not about knowing all the answers. Dharma is about knowing how to be curious and ask the right questions.

This is exactly what we will begin to explore in Functional Nutrition 101.

Join me this Friday for this free seminar to support the pursuit of not just your clients’ right to the path of dhama, but yours as well: