Medical Weight Loss in Roswell, GA

The research base here keeps growing, and it shows up across the nutrition and dietary science journals. Much of it supports what naturopathic practice has argued for a long time about food.

Plenty of conditions respond to food and nutritional supplements as well as they respond to anything else, and usually with fewer complications and side effects along the way.

Naturopathic physicians receive more than 140 classroom hours in clinical nutrition. Most medical doctors receive fewer than 20 hours.

We build individual, medically managed weight loss strategies that are evidence-based, safe and realistic to live with. Every plan we write rests on four components:

• A personalized diet
• Referral to a medical fitness program
• Behavioral strategies
• Medical expertise

Changing how you eat is hard, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not tried it recently. Small changes hold better than dramatic ones. Diet changes matter even more if you are living with something that food can aggravate, and the list is longer than most people expect. Kidney disease, lactose intolerance and celiac disease all respond to what is on the plate. What follows are practical suggestions worth trying. Keep your doctor in the loop as you go, so someone who knows your history can see how you are doing.

Things To Do

Start by finding the strong and weak points in how you currently eat. A few honest questions:

If you answered yes to both, you are already most of the way there. Keep going. If not, that is where to start adding rather than restricting. Writing down what you eat and drink for a week is unglamorous and surprisingly revealing, because almost nobody remembers their own week accurately. A nutritionist can help you build a routine you will actually keep, which matters more if you are managing a health condition alongside it.

Optimal Health Plan

Changing what you eat and adding movement does more for your health than either does alone, and the combination is what makes weight loss hold. At Natural Medical Solutions Wellness Center, Dr. Gail Ravello works with patients on exactly this, teaching the reasoning rather than handing over a diet sheet. As a Certified Nutritional Consultant (CNC), she helps people managing health problems make changes they can sustain. Call us at ☎ (770) 674-6311 to make an appointment.

• Do you get 4 to 5 cups of fruit and vegetables most days?
• Do you choose whole-grain, high-fiber foods?

Weight management gets more advertising than almost any other health topic, which is part of the problem. The research pattern is consistent: most plans produce reasonable weight loss at six months to a year, and then, one to two years later, much of that weight is back. What is usually missing is ongoing management, and without it people cycle through the next trend instead. Healthy weight loss runs about one to two pounds a week. Setting a target of four to eight pounds a month is both realistic and worth doing.

Regular Exercise

An active life is what gets weight loss moving. Adding 30 minutes of activity a day burns additional calories and lifts your metabolism, and you need both to shift the energy balance. The specific activity matters far less than whether you will keep doing it, so pick what you enjoy. Walking, tennis, cycling, yoga, aerobics, all of it counts.

Managing Stress

Managing stress is not a side note in weight control. High stress raises cortisol, and consistently elevated cortisol is linked to more abdominal fat as well as increased appetite and food intake. Stress is also one of the most reliable triggers for eating when you are not actually hungry. The useful part is that this responds to ordinary interventions. Yoga, walking and meditation all help.

Treatment for Weight Gain/Loss

Natural Medical Solutions Wellness Center offers individual, alternative care for weight loss that is evidence-based, safe and effective. A plan usually combines several pieces: personalized diet and nutrition, food allergy testing , candida testing where it is warranted, thyroid testing and behavioral strategies. We work with the Ketogenic diet as well. To talk through a weight management plan with Dr. Ravello, call ☎ (770) 674-6311 .

Most weight loss programs fail for two reasons. They never address what is actually causing the weight gain, and they are not built around the individual health needs of the person following them.

Conventional Weight Loss Treatment for Obesity & Overweight

Reasons Most Weight Loss Programs Fail

Natural Approaches for Permanent Weight Loss

Naturopathic and alternative medicine offers natural, safe and effective options for diet and lifestyle, and those are what make weight loss permanent and physical health worth having.

Try a New Approach to Weight Loss

Throw the scale out. Stop weighing yourself. Judge your progress by how your clothes fit and how your body feels instead.

Make balance the goal rather than a number. Balance your food, work, home, time for yourself, exercise, and how you react to life.

Work the program steadily for 24 to 36 months and expect small, consistent results. Losing 2 lb. a month adds up to 72 pounds over 36 months. This is a slow accumulation, not a crash program, and patience is part of the method.

Never give up. Living this way takes persistence and a fair amount of faith over a long stretch of time. It does get easier, but it asks for your life rather than a few months of it. You never quite arrive and then stop. It is closer to brushing your teeth, something that needs attention every day.

Stay consistent with your nutritional supplement program.

Spend time with people who back your health goals instead of quietly undermining them.

Do something regularly in your life that genuinely makes you happy.

Identify and Address Underlying Causes

Naturopathic physicians work on the things that block weight loss in the first place. That covers dietary counseling, improving digestion, restoring liver function, supporting proper thyroid metabolism, finding nutrient deficiencies, treating food allergies, addressing insulin resistance, detoxification of heavy metals and correcting intestinal imbalances.

Routine Exercise

Exercise helps with weight loss, and the research is fairly clear about which part matters most. How often you exercise counts for more than anything else. How long you exercise comes second. The benefits reach well past the scale:

Managing Stress

Where chronic stress has thrown your hormones off, managing that stress becomes part of the weight loss work rather than an optional extra.

That usually means taking an honest look at how you react to the mental and emotional pressures in your life, and working out which of those responses can be changed into something healthier.

Nutrition

Trouble losing weight often traces back to missing nutrients that metabolism depends on. If your body cannot break fats down properly, weight loss becomes difficult and sometimes impossible.

Nutrients such as B-vitamins, lipoic acid, iron, magnesium, manganese, chromium, L-carnitine and co-enzyme Q-10 are essential for proper processing of fats and carbohydrates.

The thyroid needs tyrosine, iodine, selenium, zinc and copper to work properly.

Nutrient deficiencies can be behind both food cravings and insulin resistance.

What's Your Next Step?

Call us to schedule an appointment ☎ (770) 674-6311

• Diet, usually a reduction in calories combined with a change in eating habits
• Exercise
• Behavioral therapy, which covers most commercial weight loss programs
• Drugs, including appetite suppressants and stimulants
• Surgery. The common operations, vertical banded gastroplasty and gastric bypass, sharply reduce stomach volume. A range of nutrient deficiencies can follow these procedures.
• Conventional doctors rarely have the appointment time for the dietary, nutritional and lifestyle counseling that permanent weight loss actually requires.
• Being unrealistic about how long this takes. Treat the dietary and exercise changes as lifelong habits rather than a phase. Reaching your ideal weight can reasonably take 24 to 36 months.
• Never identifying what is contributing to the weight gain
• Wrong dietary plan
• Not burning the total calories being consumed
• Water retention
• Constipation
• Poor digestion
• Poor liver function
• Poor carbohydrate metabolism
• Shortfalls in the nutrients normal metabolism depends on
• Food sensitivities
• Toxic metals stored in fat tissue
• Intestinal yeast imbalance
• Mental and emotional issues. What is going on in your life shapes your eating habits and your whole relationship with food. For a lot of people, permanent weight loss is not possible until this part gets addressed honestly.
• Builds lean body mass, which raises your metabolism automatically, since muscle burns more calories at rest than adipose (fat) tissue does.
• Lifts mood, improves sleep, sharpens balance and coordination, lowers blood sugar, improves insulin sensitivity, strengthens immune function, improves circulation, lowers blood pressure, lowers LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, raises HDL (“good”) cholesterol, and cuts overall heart disease risk substantially.
• Check with your physician before starting any exercise program.

Tired of watching everyone else jog on the beach looking healthy and fit? It can feel as though there is a secret that everybody else was told and you were not. Maybe you have tried every diet you could find and none of it stuck. Here is the part most plans skip. Your body is a bit like a vacuum cleaner, in that it needs emptying out every so often. Eating well is a good start, but cleaning things up on the inside is what makes the difference. Detoxifying is often what turns effort into results, because it changes the conditions your body is working under.

Fasting and cleansing are old practices, built into ritual and prayer long before anyone called it detox. Animals do the same thing instinctively, going without food through illness or a long winter. We do not get to sleep the season off in a cave. What has changed is the food itself. Most of us eat the same 10 or 20 foods in rotation, and over a lifetime the processing of those foods has grown steadily heavier on sugar, fat and preservatives. That combination is easy to overeat, which is a large part of how the weight arrives.

What Can You Do?

While you are running a detoxification program, the goal is to expose yourself to as few toxic compounds as you reasonably can. It is a sensible moment to look at organic food, natural cleaning products and natural personal care products, and to consider having your air and water tested. Your naturopathic physician can talk through whichever parts concern you most.

Foods to Stay Away From

Avoid non-organic meat and dairy. Those animals were typically given antibiotics and hormones across their whole lives. Buy organic where you can. Produce is the obvious place to start, but dairy, eggs and meat matter more, because they sit higher on the food chain and carry a heavier load of environmental toxins.

Skip processed food. In the grocery store that mostly means shopping the perimeter, where the fresh food lives, and treating the middle aisles with some suspicion. Avoid anything carrying artificial coloring, preservatives, additives, chemicals or artificial sweeteners. Read the ingredient list and keep it short. If you cannot recognize an ingredient as food, or you cannot pronounce it, you are almost certainly holding something processed.

Cut out sugar, caffeine and alcohol. Your liver has to process both alcohol and caffeine, and the whole point of this stretch is to lighten its load. Sugar does you no favors either, and while you are cleaning up everything else it makes sense to drop it too.

Avoid your food allergens. If you already know a food causes you problems, leave it out while you cleanse. People who are not sure often drop dairy and gluten for the duration, since those two account for the most common food allergy triggers.