When healing takes longer than expected, staying on a therapeutic diet can feel more like punishment than the medical nutrition therapy intended.
Ditching efforts to remain compliant before real progress has taken place can cause the healing process to halt, and even regress. Many experience this after abandoning a prescribed program only to suffer a raging return of symptoms.
Unfortunately, the symptoms can feel worse than before. Why?
The body remembers insults. Particularly after achieving a level of wellness not experienced before. The bar on wellness has been raised—the reference point has changed, and for the better. This is interpreted as progress, not just a heightened sensitivity to bodily insults.
For many, the impact isn’t only physical, but mental/emotional too. Mood is altered when we experience physiological insults. Symptoms such as depression, emotional lability, brain fog, and short-attention-span may ensue.
My patients who most often have a successful health outcome are those who fully embrace a therapeutic diet as soothing self-nurture and high-level self-care, not a sentence to terminal food deprivation. The therapeutic diet isn’t experienced as punishment, but rather, a road to real healing. Not just a short-term, pharmaceutical symptom-fix that comes with a laundry list of side-effects scarier than the illness itself!
The message is this: There has to be a critical shift in perception and approach to succeed with a therapeutic diet. Medical nutrition therapy’s purpose is to help heal, not deprive.
Embracing your therapeutic diet in this way will ensure your compliance efforts are rewarded with restored health.
To your health!
Leyla Muedin, MS, RD, CDN
Updated December 2018
