Fresh Meadows Nutritional Counseling

Healing Touch Nutritional Counseling

Nutrition counseling is defined as a process by which a health professional with special training in nutrition helps people make healthy food choices and form healthy eating habits.

At Healing Touch, we work with you to assess your usual dietary intake and identify areas where change is needed. We then provide you with the tools, information, support, and follow-up to help you make and maintain the needed dietary changes.

Our Purpose

The goal of nutrition counseling is to help you make and maintain proper dietary changes that will lead to a healthier life. To achieve this end, we will assist you in making healthy food choices and form healthy eating habits. We work together with you to assess your current dietary intake patterns and identify areas where change is needed.

Assessing of Your Dietary Habits

We begin with an interview in which we will ask you questions about your typical food intake. For example, we may ask you to recall what foods you ate or what beverages you drank the previous week. A food frequency questionnaire can provide an accurate picture of a person's typical eating patterns. We will ask you how often you consume certain food groups. For example, how many servings of dairy products, fruits, vegetables, grains and cereals, meats, or fats you consume in a typical week.

Daily food records are useful in assessing food intake. We encourage you to keep a written record of the amounts of all foods and beverages consumed over a week’s time. We can then use the food records to analyze actual energy and nutrient intake. Three-day food records kept over two weekdays and one weekend day are often used.

Assessing of Your Body

We assess your body weight by comparing it to various weight-for-height tables. A rough rule of thumb for determining a woman's ideal body weight is to allow 100 lb (45 kg) for the first 5 ft (1.5 m) of height plus 5 lb (2.3 kg) for every additional inch. A man is allowed 106 lb (48 kg) for the first 5 ft (1.5 m) of height plus 6 lb (2.7 kg) for every additional inch. However, this guide does not take into account a person's frame size.

Body mass index, or BMI, is another indicator used to assess body weight. BMI is calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A BMI of 20 to 25 is considered normal weight, a BMI of less than 20 is considered underweight, and a BMI of greater than 25 is considered overweight.

Identifying Changes Needed

The initial dietary assessment and interview will provide us with the basis for identifying which behaviors need to be changed. Sometimes a person already has a good idea of what dietary changes are needed, but may require help making the changes. Other times we can help educate you on the health effects of different dietary choices. We will work together to identify areas where change is needed, prioritize changes, and problem-solve as to how to make the changes.

Making dietary change is a gradual process. We may start with one or two easier dietary changes the first few weeks and gradually make additional or more difficult changes over several weeks or months. For example, an easy change for a person might be switching from 2% to skim milk, or taking time for a quick yogurt or granola bar in the morning instead of skipping breakfast. More difficult changes might be learning to replace high-fat meat choices with leaner ones, or including more servings of vegetables daily.

In making dietary changes, each individuals situation and background must be carefully considered. Factors that affect food decisions include an individuals ethnic background, religion, group affiliation, socioeconomic status, and worldview.

Identifying Barriers to Change

Once the needed changes have been identified, we will think through potential problems that may arise. For example, changing eating behaviors may mean involving others, purchasing different foods, planning ahead for social events, or bringing special foods to work. Some common barriers to changing eating habits include:

inconvenience
social gatherings
food preferences
lack of knowledge or time
cost

Setting Goals

We will help you set behavior-oriented goals. Goals should focus on the behaviors needed to achieve the desired dietary change, not on an absolute value, such as achieving a certain body weight. For a person working to prevent weight gain associated with certain medications, for example, his or her goals might be to increase the amount of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains consumed each day. Such changes would help prevent weight gain while placing the emphasis on needed behaviors rather than on actual weight.

Finding Support

We may encourage other family members to attend nutrition counseling sessions with you, especially if they share responsibility for food selection and preparation. Although the individual must make food choices and take responsibility for dietary changes, having the support and understanding of family and friends makes success more likely.

Maintaining Changes

Your greatest challenge lies not in making the initial dietary changes, but in maintaining them over the long term. Self-monitoring, realistic expectations, and continued follow-up can help you maintain dietary changes.

Self-monitoring involves regularly checking eating habits against desired goals and keeping track of eating behaviors. Keeping a food diary on a daily or periodic basis helps the individual be more aware of his or her eating behaviors and provides a ready tool to analyze eating habits. Sometimes a simplified checklist to assure adequate intake of different food groups may be used.

The reality is that we should not expect perfect dietary compliance; slips will inevitably occur. The goal is to keep small slips, such as eating a few extra cookies, from becoming big slips, like total abandonment of dietary change. We will help you identify situations that may lead to relapse and plan ways to handle the situations ahead of time.

In follow-up nutrition counseling sessions, we will analyze food records with you and problem-solve behaviors that are especially difficult to change. Follow-up counseling also allows the opportunity to reevaluate goals and strategies for achieving those goals.

Making an Appointment

Sessions are conducted in the office, however, for qualified individuals, we offer "nutritional counseling house calls.” This unique experience affords us with the opportunity to observe your “natural habitat.” We will examine your kitchen and pantry, which gives us insight into some of the obstacles you may face, and helps us come up with solutions to your unique situation.

Call today for an appointment!