Evolutionary Personalized Functional Medicine that works with you
LIFESTYLE EFFECTS ON HEALTH
Functional medicine uses basic lifestyle principles to restore and rebuild your health. After Dr. Ballehr analyzes and stabilizes your body’s chemistry and organ functions at a cellular level, she’ll develop a unique-to-you treatment plan that focuses on five areas:
- Sleep
- Exercise and movement
- Nutrition
- Relaxation and stress management
- Relationships
These areas are the emphasis of functional medicine because they are powerful. Even if you were born with a genetic deficiency, properly managing these five areas can prevent its negative effects.
“When you get each of these elements working properly together, they exponentially improve your health,” Dr. Ballehr says.
Your plan will be different from anyone else’s plan because your biochemistry, upbringing, genes, experiences, and life choices are yours and yours alone.
Sleep
Good, quality sleep is one of the most effective and crucial parts of optimizing your health. While you sleep, your body rids itself of toxins. Your immune system ramps up to fight infections.
Getting too little sleep places a huge stress on your body and hinders your organs from operating properly. Insufficient sleep reduces your ability to recover from illness and makes you susceptible to chronic disease. It can also affect your mood, food cravings, thyroid function, blood sugar, and sex hormone function.
Dr. Ballehr will help you determine how much sleep you need to function at your best and what you can do to ensure your sleep is of the highest quality.
Learn more about Maximizing Sleep – Click Here
Exercise and Movement
Our bodies are designed to move, and it’s not just your muscles that benefit. Moving reduces inflammation and improves your mood. It reduces symptoms of anxiety, diabetes, hypertension, many forms of cancer, and much more.
You don’t have to run a marathon or become a champion weightlifter. Small changes can reap huge benefits: Get off of the couch to turn on the TV instead of using the remote. Go to the kitchen to get a glass of water instead of asking someone to bring it to you. Toss in an extra walk up and down the stairs.
Exercise can be social, too. Join a walking group or convince your coffee shop pals to meet a couple blocks away and walk the rest of the way. This accomplishes two goals: increasing movement and staying connected with friends.
Learn more about Building Muscle and Exercise — Click Here
Nutrition
Search the internet and you’ll find ample – and conflicting – advice on the right diet, from paleo to Mediterranean. Which should you choose? It depends. What’s proper for your best friend may be very wrong for you. You need a diet plan optimized for your health issues, unique body chemistry and lifestyle. That’s what we provide.
Functional medicine principles suggest general guidelines for healthy nutrition. For most people, 25% of your daily calories should come from proteins; 30% from healthy fats; and 45% from carbohydrates. These are known as macronutrients. Dr. Ballehr will work with you to fine tune the plan that’s right for you.
Relaxation and Stress Management
Stress is a leading cause of major disease and illness. Our culture tends to focus on stress created by major life events, but all the little stresses we encounter every day add up. More than 1,400 chemical reactions take place in our bodies as a result of stress. Properly managing and processing those reactions make us resilient to the negative health effects of stress.
Dr. Ballehr will help you recognize and build practices to become resilient to stress, allowing your body the time to heal and increasing your overall quality of life.
This could include relaxing with friends and family, meditation, yoga or other forms of de-stressing that work for you.
Learn more about Combating Stress — Click Here
Relationships
As human beings we thrive on social connections – the sense of community and belonging. This is rarely mentioned in medical journals, though.
In functional medicine, we understand that the quality of your social network relates to your overall health. We will address ways to improve social connectedness in your personal treatment plan.