What is Food Therapy?

Food therapy is the process of using food as medicine to contribute to a patient’s health and wellness. At Gainesville Holistic Healthcare, we believe that food can either make us healthy or it can make us sick, depending on what we are eating. As part of our food treatment strategy, each patient is given a food evaluation and prescribed specific foods that will be helpful for treating his or her particular diagnosis and maximizing his or her overall wellness. We also offer prescribed diets for weight loss, candida and fungal elimination, inflammation, digestive disorders, and anxiety and depression.

Making huge changes to your diet can seem daunting and difficult. It is best to start slowly and add new foods as replacements for the foods you are eliminating. We understand that food is often linked to many emotional factors and we will help you change not only your eating habits, but the thoughts that go along with the way you eat. Once you begin to see food as medicine and as nourishment rather than as comfort, distraction, or reward, you will experience increased health and wellness. We are here to support an overall transformation in the way you relate to food.

One big shift we can all make is to move away from the idea that food should be fast, cheap, and easy. It shouldn’t be those things at all. In our convenience-driven culture, we’ve moved away from what is important, like slow-cooked, nutritious meals, prepared with love in our own kitchens with wholesome ingredients. When we eat, we’re not only feeding ourselves the nutritional value of the foods, we’re also ingesting the energy that went into the meal preparation. This is one reason why choosing humanely raised animal products is so important. When we eat meat from animals that have been kept in torturous conditions, with every bite we are literally taking in the stress hormones that were circulating in these animals’ bodies.

Similarly, when we eat packaged, processed foods, we are taking in preservatives and chemicals that have been proven to be harmful to our bodies. One of the greatest acts of self-love and love for others is to prepare, eat, and share high quality, nutritious foods. This sends a strong message to our bodies that we value ourselves enough to eat foods that nourish us rather than foods that hurt us. This is a powerful statement to make to ourselves and one that very directly leads to increased health and wellness.

There are a number of documentaries that explore the food industry, many of which are available on Netflix. Our favorite is Michael Pollen’s four-part Netflix series called “Cooked.”

 

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”  ~Hippocrates