Tag Archives: nutritional therapy practitioner

  1. A Guide to Smarter Smoothies {Video}

    While smoothies have become a popular meal replacement, snack and all around trendy food, crafted incorrectly you can be consuming a sugar-loaded, blood sugar exploding cocktail. I am excited to share with you A Guide to Smarter Smoothies to hopefully help you understand how to better create the smoothies that are right for you.

    A Guide to Smarter Smoothies

    A Guide to Smarter Smoothies

    If you’ve been reading Tasty Yummies for some time, you probably know that the archives are LOADED with smoothie recipes. Smoothies used to play a much larger role in my daily diet routine, for the longest time it was always my favorite way to start my day. Interestingly at the height of my smoothie consumption, weight loss was definitely a struggle, as were energy crashes and sugar cravings. What I didn’t know back then, but I do know now as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, is that without the proper formulation, smoothies are a blood sugar explosion waiting to happen.

    Every time you consume any carbohydrates and sugar containing foods, it causes an increase in blood glucose. How much so is dependent on the food and the individual. Simple sugars more specifically (monosaccharides), those sugars ending in -ose, sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, maltose – these are metabolized especially quickly and can often cause a big surge in insulin.

    Our body’s innate intelligence continually monitors the amount of glucose in our bloodstream to maintain balance and homeostasis. When blood glucose levels increase, the pancreas releases the hormone insulin.  Insulin increases the uptake of glucose by our muscle and fat cells; increases the amount of glycogen in our muscle and liver; increases fatty acid synthesis from excessive carbohydrates; and decreases fat breakdown and mobilization from our fat tissue.

    A Guide to Smarter Smoothies

    How Bad Can a Fruit-Loaded Smoothie Be?

    With a spike in blood sugar, a release of insulin and the impending crash, no matter what food is the initial cause, this can lead to immediate hunger, mid-day cravings, energy crashes, lightheadedness, anxiety, etc. Even worse, if the rest of your day’s eating (and most days) continue on the carb and sugar path, you are absolutely creating a long term problem. Whether you are overweight, struggle with weight loss or notice blood sugar issues or not.

    Day in and day out this roller coaster can lead to a slew of health complications beyond obesity, lethargy and cravings. To simplify the worst of it, constant output of insulin is like the boy that cried wolf, your cells stop responding to the insulin that is constantly being produced and they become resistant, meaning without the insulin to transport the excess glucose to your cells for energy production, blood sugar levels remain high and this is can lead to chronic insulin resistance, pre-diabetes and eventually diabetes.

    These days, I personally prefer to opt for (and I recommend to my clients) the prioritizing of nutrient-dense whole foods, rather than drinkable meals, like smoothies or juice. Whole foods offer the opportunity for maximum nutrient absorption, which allows our digestion to work as intended, and assuming these whole foods aren’t loaded up with carbohydrates and sugar – it’s much easier on your blood sugar.

    That said, in the summer I do find myself with a much different appetite and my cravings differ quite significantly from the cooler months. I am not nearly as ravenous for more robust meals, especially on the hotter days. In the summer months I find myself wanting and craving more smoothies than any other time of the year. Knowing what I know now, my approach to creating them has drastically changed, so today I am going to share with you my Guide to Smarter Smoothies.

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  2. My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner – Months 2 & 3

    My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner - Month 1

    My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner – Months 2 & 3

    This post continues to share my journey of becoming a Nutritional Therapist with the Nutritional Therapy Association. To read more about how I came to selecting this program and to read about Month 1 of the program, see my first post.

    Months 2 & 3

    I am combining months 2 & 3 together, as month 2 (November) was a regular, in-session month but at start of month 3 we had our first intensive in-person workshop weekend, followed by our holiday break.

    The intensity and speed at which we were covering the first modules in month 1, has certainly calmed down a bit and with me finally catching up to my classmates (and our curriculum calendar), I am feeling much less pressure. I feel like I can breath and I can really let the content sit with me and permeate a bit more. For what it’s worth, the intensity I am speaking about, these are all things our instructors advised us of, going into the program. So I was certainly aware of this fact from the start and I wasn’t alone in feeling that way, I am sure. The content and reading materials are already starting to click quicker as new topics arise, pulling in previous content that we covered.

    Most exciting about these past two months, was our first in-person workshop weekend, where we had the opportunity to meet our fellow classmates, as well as go over the content in person and ask questions of our instructors. Additionally we further honed our skills of client interviewing, analyzing Nutritional Assessment Questionnaires and Food Journals and making nutritional recommendations based on all of these tools and we learned and practiced the hands-on functional evaluation skills, for the modules we had already covered.

    My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner – Months 2 & 3

    If you haven’t researched the NTA or if you’ve never worked with a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner you may not know what the terms Functional Evaluation and Lingual-Neuro Testing refer to:

    Functional Evaluations are one of the Nutritional Therapy Practitioner tools for assessing a client’s health. Using the innate connection between nerve endings at skin level and the body’s internal organs, NTP’s can determine where dysfunction is occurring. Reflex points connect to the neuro-vascular and neuro-lymphatic pathways which surround every organ system in the body. When an organ is in stress, these pathways accumulate fluid around them (called venous or lymphatic congestion) to support healing. This congestion results in tenderness of the reflex points. 

    Lingual-Neuro Testing (LNT) is a valuable biofeedback tool that enables a health care provider to determine the usefulness of a nutritional supplement before it is dispensed to the client. LNT accesses the body’s innate ability to discriminate between what it needs, and what it does not need, in order to correct a specific problem–a weak organ or a nutritional deficiency, for example. This simple and effective technique makes the difference between a generic nutritional therapy plan and a personalized one.

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  3. My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner – Month 1

    My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner - Month 1

    My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner

    When I started Tasty Yummies, I was never inclined to create a journal of my own personal health journey, so I often refrain from getting super personal with my healing protocols and health challenges. I have consciously avoided flooding these pages with every discovery in my own ever-evolving health and dietary challenges or with every personal plan of action. Without any certification or credentials I often found myself feeling restricted from sharing too much of the self-initiated research I was doing, as I am hyper-aware of the barrage of claims made by bloggers without credible research or science to back it up. Mostly, I have always wanted Tasty Yummies to simply be a safe space to celebrate delicious, nourishing real food, and hopefully, a place to provide inspiration to empower others to take control of their health and to be open to discovering new foods themselves, whatever their restrictions or personal path may be. I have always sought to create a place to share my personal stories when appropriate and to cultivate a virtual connection among a supportive community of open-minded souls.

    The fact remains however, that this website and my recipes wouldn’t exist without the many challenges I have experienced in my ongoing journey towards healing. Hidden within my own personal struggles emerged the desire to share, share, share! While none of my issues, in my mind, should be classified as “severe” or life threatening and while I don’t have epic before and after photos from an intense and acute health transformation, I would certainly still consider many of my health struggles to be chronic and some still unresolved. I am quite literally learning right along side many of you.

    The Challenges.

    As a child I dealt with a weakened immune system, allergies and asthma, migraines and troubled digestion. As life moved on, I discovered a severe gluten intolerance, and have now been gluten-free over 10 years – while this major dietary adjustment has certainly helped with some of these symptoms, I continued to suffer. In the early years of my adult life, even after going gluten-free, I struggled with weight gain and acne, chronic sinus infections, lack of energy and so much more, further adjusting of my diet has tackled much of this, but last year I was also diagnosed with IgA nephropathy, an autoimmune form of kidney disease. Consequently in the process of treating the kidney disease I also discovered through the help of my naturopathic doctor, that I was struggling with what we believe to be leaky gut, likely from the months of pharmaceuticals prescribed to me for the kidney disease. While I am still smack in the middle of this ongoing work to get my kidney disease in remission and my body to a point where I can feel good each and every day, I continue to share the recipes I am creating in my own kitchen, often part of my own healing path, in hopes that they may inspire some of you, within your own individual health journey, to feel less overwhelmed as you reconfigure your diets.

    Why I want to Know More.

    As a result of my own individual research and constant trials with nutrution, diet and supplementation, through my lens of seeing food as medicine and knowing that real food heals, I have come to the understanding that we are all bio-chemical individuals and there is no one protocol, diet or plan for all of us, there can’t be, we are all such beautiful and unique beings. I myself have always refrained from labeling my diet or pushing myself and this blog towards one specific label, as I find this to be ever-evolving process and for me, labeling my diet is not something I have ever felt called to. As with most everything in my life, my intuition instead constantly leads me towards balance and simplicity and learning to listen to my body’s innate cues, rather than adopting a static list of firm Do’s and Don’ts. I have found myself on a path of constant independent learning, research and exploration to find what works for me and through my search to help myself, I have oftentimes found I am able to help others as well, something I have learned I truly love and now feel called to do even more.

    I have come to realize that in sharing my recipes, through instructing yoga, hosting retreats and teaching cooking demos, these are all amazing ways I am able share my passions and hopefully empower others to take control of their own health and their well being. But, I have been feeling that when it concerns food and our health, that I wanted to make an even bigger impact, I want to be able to host cooking demos and speak with conviction and credibility about how we can deal with chronic comprised digestion, blood sugar regulation issues and I want to share the precise scientific reasons why certain ingredients are making an appearance in my recipes. I want to be able to better respond to folks seeking to make recipes fat free and explain to them in a concise way, why it is so important to include healthy fat in our diet and the list really just goes on and on. Finally, I have met so many incredible, yet desperate people over the years looking for answers, I have many family members and friends that struggle with their health daily and I want to help however I can, anyone who comes to me inquiring. I want to crush these old, antiquated myths surrounding eating and our diets and reveal the truth about food and it’s healing powers.

    All of this lead me to the Nutritional Therapy Association.

    My Path to Becoming a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner - Month 1

    Why the Nutritional Therapy Association?:

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