What is Functional Wellness?
If you are new to the idea of functional wellness, welcome! If you are seeking to avoid disease, get off medications, age well, and live a vibrant, unlimited life you are in the right place.
As a Functional Wellness Practitioner, I have the pleasure of sharing new ways to test your overall health, educating you about optimal body and brain function, and joining you in your journey into an ever expanding state of fabulous health. This is is the place to be if you want to feel better not older!
Medicine vs Wellness
Let me explain the concepts behind functional wellness for you and define some related fields:
Conventional medicine is tasked with the job of identifying diseases and life-threatening dysfunction within the body. Conventional doctors perform amazing surgeries and save lives. Many conventional doctors seek to identify the combination of test results and symptoms that identify your disease and then treat with pharmaceutical medications.
Functional medicine grew with a focus on identifying the root cause of your symptoms and issues. Functional medicine doctors will seek tirelessly and test widely to find the source of the dysfunction within your body. If the journey is long and complicated, they will see it through with you. Some have found that feeling good along the way is not always the primary focus.
Integrative medicine expands beyond functional medicine to include improving the journey – how you feel right now – in addition to seeking the root cause of your symptoms. Integrative medicine doctors will bring in wellness tools that will make your life better in the short term so that you do not have to wait longer than necessary to feel better.
Functional Wellness supports the body’s natural ability to heal itself by removing whatever is holding you back. Functional wellness practitioners work to head disease off at the pass with the intention of avoiding problems completely! In functional wellness, we look for tiny changes in your health state and for trends in your health that indicate you are headed in the direction of greater dysfunction so we can reverse your course. The tools used are non-invasive, lifestyle oriented, and support greater health and wellness in both short term and long term.
Functional Wellness Basics
Functional wellness practitioners like me believe the body’s innate ability to heal is powerful. We also know that the body’s desire to keep you alive is even stronger. Your body will do whatever it takes to keep you alive right now given what it has to work with. The more your body has to find work-arounds for missing ingredients or roadblocks, the more your body will want to shut down relevant functions and the farther you get from a state of optimal health.
Functional wellness practitioners do not identify or treat diseases. We do not treat or hide symptoms, but we do use symptom changes as guideposts for our work together.
We instead seek to understand why the body is doing what it is and how we can help it work better. We educate you about how your body is designed to work and how you can facilitate your own improved wellness state.
In functional wellness, we focus on the foundations of health:
- Hydration
- Breathing
- Diet
- Elimination
- Movement
- Nervous System Regulation
- Digestion and Assimilation
Functional wellness looks for:
- missing nutrients required by the body
- compensations the body has chosen in order to keep you alive!
- sub-optimal functioning of important processes
- lifestyle choices that sabotage your wellness
- your personal story that has brought you to where you are now
If these ideas spark your interest, let’s talk more!
How Does a Functional Wellness Practitioner Work?
Every functional wellness client has unique needs but we begin the same way – by you telling your story to me, Zoa Conner, in many different ways so I can make recommendations for your steps towards greater wellness. The ways you may share your story include:
- A full Personal Nutrition Analysis including a 3 day food log, a Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire, a supplement evaluation, and diet recommendations
- Existing blood test results for a Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis
- A small hair sample for a Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis
- An intro consultation either in person at my La Plata, Maryland wellness studio or virtual
- more depending on your needs!
With all this data, I can see the nutritional content of what you eating, how you are digesting, which minerals are getting into your cells and which are unable to be used, and which minerals/vitamins are low or high in your blood. When I bring your feelings, symptoms, and history, the basics of a plan forms.
Any functional wellness oriented plan will address multiple aspects of your lifestyle including but not limited to:
- Diet and Eating Patterns
- Stress Management
- Sleep Hygiene
- Daily Movement/Exercise
- Digestion
- Elimination
- Exposure and Elimination of Toxins
- Thinking patterns
To get the details flushed out, we need to bring in your lifestyle and preferences. There is absolutely no point in me making a Functional Wellness Roadmap or Wellness Action Plan for you that you can not or will not follow. There are always choices and together we will find the ones that you will enjoy and that help you in your goal to feel better not older or sicker!
I am a PhD scientist by training and a Functional Wellness Practitioner by choice. My love of learning drives me to seek out new ideas and information to share with my clients. My education and experience has honed my skills at bringing together disparate bits of information and creating a unified framework that explains and solves a problem. Because each of us is unique and always changing, so must my advice and your Wellness Lifestyle!
Working with me is easy – we can meet virtually or in person at my Southern Maryland wellness studio (located in La Plata, MD).
My Blog Posts about Functional Wellness
