The Blood Sugar Balance Guide for Holistic Practitioners

No matter the presenting symptoms, blood sugar balance is essential to consider when addressing any health concern. In fact, blood sugar balance is so critical, it’s what I call a Non-Negotiable. The other two Non-Negotiables in my often taught Trifecta? Sleep and poop.

The students training to become Certified Functional Nutrition Counselors (CFNCs) in Full Body Systems, are uniquely prepared to help patients struggling with the pesky symptoms of blood sugar imbalance with personalized dietary and lifestyle modifications. In this comprehensive guide to blood sugar balance, you’ll receive a taste of our signature Full Body Systems training.

Why is blood sugar balance so important?

Blood sugar plays a pivotal role in overall health and everyday wellbeing. With low blood sugar you may experience headaches, cravings, sluggishness, and mood swings. Conversely, when your blood sugar spikes you may experience increased appetite and lethargy.

Frequent fluctuations between those two extremes can cause common symptoms such as weight gain, chronic fatigue, insomnia, skin inflammation, hot flashes, and more. Worse, chronic blood sugar imbalance can lead to candida, diabetes, hypertension, and even cancer.

Supporting blood sugar balance with Functional Nutrition

The Functional Nutrition Alliance Carbohydrate Continuum was designed to help you educate your clients on the importance of blood sugar balance, a dynamic equilibrium impacted largely by dietary and lifestyle factors. It’s a great place to start conversations about sugars and their effects on our bodies. It will help you help your clients understand what’s going on in there. This is one of the key tools I teach in Full Body Systems for patient-centered empowerment. 

When you help your clients better understand their body systems, and how dietary and lifestyle choices can support or compromise them, you close the Knowledge Gap — a critical part of client compliance.

Once your clients understand what’s going on, and why they need to make changes, then it’s time for you to recommend what those changes should be. I like to think of this as symbiosis. It’s where the modifiable diet and lifestyle factors meet physiology and shake hands. 

Despite what health and diet books, blogs and big shots would have you believe, one size never fits all – not in blood sugar balance, not in anything. Taking a Functional approach means paying heed to bioindividuality. It means assessing each person’s needs, and making recommendations based on a person’s unique situation, both biologically and situationally. Step by step, we track and pivot as necessary.

This is true with blood sugar balance as well as every other health issue.

The Functional guide to blood sugar balance

There is no single formula that works for all patients with a shared sign, symptom, or condition. There are key factors that help us determine what to recommend after we’ve done a proper assessment.

In fact, when you understand how each body system is connected to every other system in the body, and how food meets physiology, you also know where to start within the web of interactions. This approach helps you know what interventions to consider to make a difference in a person’s life and healing journey. It will also help you understand how to balance blood sugar naturally. 

Our Functional Guide to Blood Sugar Balance is an important set of recommendations because it highlights the top things to consider when addressing this Non-Negotiable!

Download your copy here.

As you work with our Functional Guide to Blood Sugar Balance, remember to follow the Functional Nutrition Protocol — Assess, Recommend, and Track. This and all the other guides available to Full Body Systems students are frameworks, not formulas. They’re things to consider throughout your therapeutic partnership with your patient or client.

Functional Nutrition always works to uncover the unique root causes of each client’s symptoms. That’s why it functions well for every client, no matter their signs, symptoms, or diagnosis.

Related Blog Posts

No carb, low carb, night carbs… what’s the deal?
Functional Nutrition Tool – Candida Questionnaire
The Importance of Blood Sugar
The truth about epigenetics (and root causes!)

By: Andrea Nakayama, FxNA Founder & Functional Medicine Nutritionist

Functional Nutrition Alliance provides the comprehensive online Functional Nutrition training in the Science & Art of the Functional Nutrition practice. Learn to address the roots of your clients’ suffering with client education, diet & lifestyle modifications.