Proper Portions

September is Fruits and Veggies More Matters month. According to their website, More than 90% of Americans do not eat enough fruits and vegetables. Not good news, since this food group plays a major role in reducing the risk of certain diseases. In fact, the dietary guideline for Americans recommends eating more fruits and vegetables than any other food group. The specialists at Total Nutrition and Therapeutics in Lady Lake explain how important it is to get the right balance of nutrients from your food.

I practice functional or integrative medicine, and my goal truly is to pull conventional medicine because there's a time and a place for medications and prescriptions, but holistic care, pulling them in the middle and integrating that for a person. And so we call ourselves functional or integrative practitioners. I get a lot of referrals from gastrointestinal doctors to help people begin to understand what diets they particularly need to follow for disease states such as celiac, Crohn's disease, those type of things. And so specialty nutritional counseling is right up our alley. So we offer multiple different services that go well beyond just counseling.

I think a lot of people just don't understand what the right foods are, and I think our clinic helps them and guides them to the right foods. Typically, some of the patients that come in and they're not eating healthy, they are more fatigued, they don't have any energy to go out and go for a walk. If you're eating the wrong foods, your levels are going to be out of whack, out of range. And the thing is, Lori likes to do like a baseline in the beginning. And a lot of patients, they need that visual to see those numbers. And once they see those numbers and realize, oh, my gosh, I definitely need to change. And then after retesting, after eating the proper foods and following a plan, we retest them. And when those numbers come down, the patients are amazed. You know, just because they changed what.

They ate, they have the answers, they have the results. But now what do you do with it? So they learn how to do those things. They learn how to eat right. They learn how to set goals and prepare for a healthy lifestyle. There's no finish line. It's a lifestyle. So they need to know how to shop for their new changes and just how to deal with it in general.

When people hang in there and they do what is fundamentally right, eat whole foods, it's not rocket science. It's just getting rid of all the crap and really getting down to the basics of what's really, really right. And part of the reason I do it Number one is loyalty, but number two is because I get an opportunity to meet people in the conventional system that are looking for change and don't know where to go get it.

Be sure to join TNT at their new location in Liddy Lake for an open house on Thursday Octo from 5:30 to 7:00pm you'll have a chance to meet their staff, tour their offices, plus they'll have special prizes and giveaways. We'll have highlights in our November episode of Hometown Health. You'll find contact information for TNT under the Proper Portion Story link icon on our homepage YourHometownHealth.com.