Nutrition in Invisible Illnesses

Making food easier in invisible illnesses
Our focus is to help you to be able to have a fulfilling, nourishing experience with food. We pride ourselves on being ahead of the game when it comes to understanding the difficulties that people with invisible illnesses face when it comes to eating, drinking and staying adequately nourished; and knowing what to do about it.

Whether it be from challenges with gut symptoms, reactions with certain foods or food components, with fatigue or pain being a barrier to getting enough food in, with your relationship with food, or with needing to make adjustments to what you eat to help with particular medical conditions; we support each of our patients with an individualised approach - as no two people are the same - to help them make sustainable, realistic and achievable changes which will move them closer to where they want to be, both within their nutrition and overall health.

What specific challenges can you help with?
Depending on your presentation and what we uncover in your initial session, some of the tools, education points, and strategies that we might go through could be:

• Understanding the impact of the nervous system on our gastrointestinal tract, from entry to exit - most prominently within dysautonomia, but this understanding can be helpful for others who experience gastrointestinal symptoms as well; including people with significant sensitisation, those with IBS; other food intolerances or MCAS.
• Tangible practices that you can engage in to improve this function; that are more about the HOW you eat foods than WHAT foods you eat.
• Adequate hydration for your age, activity level and illnesses.
• Appetite regulation and eating routines - restoring appetite when it has been altered for a long period of time (or just lost in general); or helping to reign-in eating that is not serving you any longer, for example, consuming much of your food very late at night.
• Fatigue-friendly food strategies.
• The pillars of nutrition for fatigue, or pain.
• Identifying foods that you may be intolerant to / reacting to in some way, and working toward finding adequate alternatives or increasing your tolerance to these foods again.
• Working on your relationship with food, to help you stop seeing food as the 'enemy', and start seeing it and experiencing it as the life-promoting substance that it is.
• Answering questions around food and nutrition related things, or invisible illness things, that you might have sat with for awhile or 'asked google' about; but you want some trusted advice with. There is SO much information out there about food and nutrition but it's often very negative and very slanted with extreme restriction; one of our favourite things to do as dietitians at AHC is to give our patients rational advice without fear mongering; we like to call it nutrition myth busting!
• Supplement advice

We also have great partnerships with different allied health professionals and medical specialists who know these invisible illnesses and share our values; we can help identify non-diet therapies that will compliment dietary therapy; as well as provide you with some resources if appropriate that might not be actioned in session with us, but will help with some of your nutrition / gastrointestinal-related concerns.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and depending on the individual there might be one or two topics, or 8-10 topics that we deem relevant and helpful for you. Now of course you get to be a part of this process to, and all of our decision making as to what we go through in session will be informed most importantly by your goals, but also your prior knowledge and capacity.

Sounds great! Where do I get more info / How do I book in?
See our Dietetics page to find out more about what to expect from our dietitians, and some of the more administrative info about the service. Or, if you're ready to book, please give our amazing admin team a call!