How Nutrition Counseling Supports Overall Wellness in Chronic Condition Management
- Overwhelming is the experience we have with aligning our lives around guidelines for chronic condition management.
- Confusing is the experience we have in reading terminology we aren’t yet familiar with.
- Conflicting are the varying recommendations provided by a multi-team member approach to care.
- Impersonal are our interactions with our well-intentioned healthcare team members, as we sit in their office spaces, listening to their recommendations that don’t factor in our life circumstances and values, our financial, occupational, spiritual, social, familial, environmental, emotional capacities, and so much more.
Have you experienced this?
Nutrition counseling can be something different, a space for clarity and empowerment, where nutrition counselors [or clinicians] support their clients in care that is, instead, relational and supportive of one’s overall wellness.
Role of Nutrition Counseling
Nutrition counseling spaces offer clients the space to explore and transform their relationship with food. Clinicians help to guide clients in setting sustainable goals by focusing on gentle, maintainable behavior change. Nutritious Thoughts’ clinicians specifically aim to prioritize getting to know their clients as a whole person, aiming to recognize similarities and honor differences, striving to create an authentic human experience through connection, offering the space in sessions to be one where positive relationships with food, body and movement can be built.
Nutrition Counseling in Chronic Condition Management
Autonomy and choice may not be as readily available for patients or clients within our traditional healthcare system model, unfortunately making experiences within these spaces non-relational, and for the guidance provided to not be sustainably impactful. There’s safety and empowerment in giving clients or patients choice especially when providing care for conditions that feel scary, unpredictable and uncontrollable. In the nutrition counseling space, care around chronic conditions often looks like offering choice in education and discussion in looking ahead to identify some of the progressive complications associated with a faced condition, while alternatively offering day by day, meal by meal proactive support, as a shorter look ahead window for individuals to provide themselves with support could feel less scary, daunting and be ultimately more helpful. Decision fatigue can be real and being supported in, “let’s set a goal [or focus] for this month, this week, today, or for this next meal…,” etc. might be what individuals could value most.
Nuances to Language
So much goes into the labeling and defining of symptoms or occurrences. Diseases are defined as much on pathophysiology as they are on social and cultural norms. What are “chronic conditions”? Chronic diseases can also be identified as chronic conditions. According to the University of Michigan’s Center for Managing Chronic Disease, “chronic diseases are long-lasting conditions that usually can be controlled [or managed] but not cured.” However, not all conditions are considered “diseases.” Conditions are states of being.
Some conditions include – asthma, type 2 diabetes, depression, dementia, hypertension, inflammatory arthropathies, low back pain, irritable bowel syndrome, progressive neurological disorders, autoimmune-related conditions, and so much more.
Diseases typically entail identifying a causative agent or process with a fairly high degree or certainty. Chronic diseases, according to the CDC, are broadly defined as, “conditions that last 1 year or more and require ongoing medical attention or limit activities of daily living or both.”
Syndromes typically entail recognizable complex symptoms and physical findings that indicate a specific condition. Syndromes indicate a specific condition for which a direct cause may not be necessarily understood. Until their causal mechanisms are clearly identified can we say clinical signs and symptoms constitute a disease.
Ultimately, terminology can guide reimbursement, accommodations, and the framework provided for explaining one’s experience and in guiding treatment. Nonetheless, nutrition counseling spaces can be ones where validation of the complexity of what’s occurring for the individual can be provided, in addition to clarity and choice in how support can be offered, from the clinician to the client, and also client to themselves.
Considerations for Overall Wellness
How would you define wellness? Do you notice it means something different for you than health? According to the National Institute of Health, “wellness is a holistic integration of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, fueling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit.” When applied to an individual, one might take wellness as striving for a “personal harmony,” harmony between our different areas of life, and in relationship to whom we interact with. Wellness is about doing good for ourselves, for those we care about and for who care about us. It’s about aligning what you do and how you live to your values, to your own priorities and in honoring your aspirations. It’s about not taking your uniqueness, individuality, and right for choice out of the equation. Wellness is about respecting your many parts of yourself. In your work with clinicians who respect your individuality and aspirations for wellness, the care you receive is meant to align to who you are, what you value, the goal to NOT forego other wellness areas to ONLY help you to access improvements in physical health. Instead, this form of relational, wellness-aligned care is structured to help you to find greater balance, with physical health/wellness being one part of the many piece puzzle of helping you to find harmony within your interdependent dimensions of wellness.
Offering a New Perspective
The social determinants of health show us how much nutrition and exercise make up just one miniscule part of impacting our health overall. Nutrition counselors offer support in assisting clients in building a routine around planning for, and having access to nourishing food and choice for partaking in joyful movement as a means to reduce any burden food or movement could play in negatively impacting our other dimensions of wellness. In doing so, nutrition counselors acknowledge the impact our social determinants of health have on being able to attain a more balanced state of wellness when faced with one or many chronic conditions.
According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion’s Healthy People 2030, our social determinates of health can be grouped into 5 domains and, “…are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and the quality-of-life outcomes and risks.”
They are –
- Neighborhood and built environment
- Social and community context
- Economic stability
- Healthcare access and quality
- Education access and quality
This can look like…
- Safe housing, transportation and neighborhoods
- Education, job opportunities and income
- Access to nourishing foods and safe, joyful movement opportunities
- Discrimination and violence
- Polluted air and water
- Language and literacy barriers
And then there’s (1) our genetics and biology, (2) social circumstances, (3) our physical environment, (4) access to medical care, and (5) our individual behavior. Check out goinvo.com to see a worthwhile breakdown of determinants of health, offering a perspective on health and something more than just medical care. Access and availability isn’t equal. Meeting one where they’re at is crucial.
A Collaborative Approach to Finding Balance
Nutrition counseling supports individuals in their right to choice. These spaces offer clarity for individuals faced with the inundation of messages such as, “what we’re doing isn’t good enough.” These spaces offer room for validating lived experience with overwhelm and chronic condition management burnout, with the cost of the effort to self manage an ever evolving chronic condition, or might it be multiple. Nutrition counselors support their clients in finding greater balance within their dimensions of wellness –
- Social – recognizing the impact chronic conditions have on a sense of connectedness, belonging, inclusion, community; finding circles to share lived experience could be helpful.
- Intellectual – offering space for greater understanding of condition management, building new skills to expand upon capacity and symptom management.
- Environmental – offering a space for being heard with validation; ideas for making your personal space more accommodating to needs, while considering access.
- Emotional/mental – offering support in developing stress-management skills, and in navigating burnout related to condition management; coordinating care with your team, such as a therapist and any others.
- Spiritual – supporting you in aligning self management plans to your beliefs, values, and ethics.
- Financial – respecting current, future financial situations, and access needs.
- Occupational/vocational – tailoring recommendations and supporting you in building a plan to accommodate your work.
- Physical – offering space to understand your body’s experience in likely future chronic condition presentations to support you in current and future self care planning around supporting your physical body, health and safety – additive nutrition approaches, joyful movement, self care plans, and emphasis around an appropriate amount of rest are all crucial considerations.
Empowerment with Self-Management
These spaces offer clients the opportunity to learn skills to self manage their chronic conditions from a self care lens versus a controlling lens. This looks like workshoping additive approaches for supportive meals and snacks to shifting our self talk towards taking a more curious and compassionate mindfulness approach to noticing current behaviors, patterns, experiences in our body and in our self talk.
Nutrition counselors or clinicians take a gentle step by step approach to help individuals build supportive habits over time, reducing the multifaceted load of being tasked with “doing better,” “doing more.” Many professional spaces offer an approach to chronic condition management that puts too much emphasis on aligning approaches to support physical wellness so much so, where it burdens our other wellness areas as a result.
Nutrition counselors acknowledge the burden of foregoing other areas of wellness when not factoring them in, in an attempt to further support physical wellness and chronic condition management.
We’re Here to Partner
We at Nutritious Thoughts’ are here to provide you with care that is relational, compassion-centered, personalized and here to support you in chronic condition management that is considerate of your overall wellness.
Is Nutritional Counseling in Raleigh, NC the Next Step in managing Chronic Conditions?
If you’ve been newly diagnosed with a chronic condition, you may be wondering if there’s another way. Nutritional counseling in Raleigh, NC offers a compassionate, flexible approach that supports your overall wellness. At Nutritious Thoughts, we help you find a way of eating that works for your body and your life—without the guilt, shame, or rigid restrictions. Our registered dietitians work alongside you to create a plan that’s sustainable, satisfying, and rooted in your values.
- Contact us at (828) 333-0096 or email info@nutritious-thoughts.com
- Tell us more about yourself
- You deserve care that supports your whole self.