Maria Paula Goncalves

ABOUT

About me

I am hugely passionate about food, health and the whole-person approach to well-being that leverages a person’s inner strengths and values. My aim is to be the bridge for your transformation as you learn about nourishing your body, mind, and emotions.

Functional Medicine My Reconnection - About Functional Medicine

The Functional Medicine model is an individualised, patient-centred, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness.

Nutritional Psychiatry My Reconnection - Nutritional Psychiatry

Abnormal levels of key nutrients can have an adverse effect on brain chemistry, mood and mental health. Nutritional psychiatry aims to help mitigate the effects of mental illnesses and disorders by providing the key ingredients for the brain to function effectively.

About me

Hi! My name is Dr Maria Paula Goncalves, and I’d like to welcome you to your reconnection journey.

Food and nutrition have always been huge areas of interest for me. I am a certified nutritionist with a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition and a Master’s degree and a PhD in Food Science, as well as a Functional Medicine Health Coach certification. I was trained by the Institute for Functional Medicine to apply the integrative approach in clinical practice, and am a certified aromatherapist. I’ve always loved researching food and its impact, but a few years ago I realised I wanted to help people make real changes in their lives with the knowledge that I had.

My primary focus is on Nutrition for Mental Health (Nutritional Psychiatry) - an area that I believe is crucial to address in today’s world.

My goal when I started the clinic was to promote health and well-being through education, motivation, and self-discovery, inviting our clients to reconnect with themselves, nature, and others. My aim is to be the bridge for your transformation as you learn about nourishing your body, mind, and emotions.

I am hugely passionate about food, health and the whole-person approach to wellbeing that leverages a person’s inner strengths and values. I love dedicating my time and expertise to helping people implement the fantastic tools of nutrition, healthy lifestyle and mind-body interventions for the prevention and support of physical and mental health problems.

The feedback I’ve received from clients has been extremely rewarding, and it’s only further motivated me to help others improve their quality of life. I’ve always wanted to make real change in people’s lives, and my clinic has helped me achieve this on a greater scale than I ever could’ve imagined!

Through one-to-one sessions, group sessions and workshops/seminars I help clients find a better connection with food and emotions and support them in improving many aspects of their lives. My integrative, personalised approach to health recognises that no two people are the same, and so their needs can’t be either. I work with my clients to form an individualised plan that’s right for them, based on nutrition, activity, sleep, rest and stress relief techniques — to achieve their well-being goals and needs that I help them to implement through follow-up sessions.

I look forward to helping you unlock your health and wellbeing to truly thrive.

Welcome to this Journey!

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Functional Medicine

The Functional Medicine approach treats us as holistic beings and looks for the root cause of a health issue, addressing the origin and the triggers of a problem instead of just silencing the symptoms. It treats the patient and not the disease.

The Functional Medicine model is an individualised, patient-centred, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness. It requires a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to develop a personalized treatment plan.

Functional Nutrition has the resources to recover body functions. It emphasises the importance of high-quality foods and phytonutrient diversity to address clinical imbalances and move individuals towards the healthiest version of themselves. Advanced nutrition assessment and a thorough Functional Medicine based history leads to a personalised therapeutic intervention created to promote optimal health and prevent diet- and lifestyle-related disease.

For more information about Functional Medicine, you can access https://www.ifm.org

The functional medicine tree

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Nutritional Psychiatry

The increasing number of chronic non-communicable diseases, also known as lifestyle diseases (including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory disorders) as well as behavioural disorders (anxiety, depression, panic disorder, mental agitation, disturbances in concentration, learning, and mood, among others) show that our eating habits need to be reoriented. And what all these physical and mental illnesses have in common is chronic, low-intensity inflammation and poor diet. We eat more and more and nourish ourselves less and less.

The brain is part of the body, so why can’t it also become inflamed? It's an organ that makes up only 2% of your total body weight, but consumes about 20% of the energy you ingest daily. It, therefore, needs nutrients to provide this energy and to perform its various functions.

Proper nutrition is essential for our physical, mental and emotional balance. Everything that forms our organism and what is necessary for its functioning is totally dependent on the nutrients that we obtain through our diet.

Nutrients are what perform antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antiallergic, detoxifying, and anticancer functions and help to modulate the immune system. They also provide raw materials for the formation of neurotransmitters, enzymes and hormones. It is a balanced diet that guarantees a healthy intestinal microbiota and, therefore, the proper functioning of the brain — essential for health and well-being. It’s vital to understand that gut and brain are connected and our gut directly influences the chemistry in our brain.

There are several dietary factors related to behavioural disorders. Among them:

Low nutrient intake
Malabsorption of nutrients
Eating Behaviour
Indigestion
Intestinal dysbiosis
Detoxification disorders
Food allergies and hypersensitivity
Change in intestinal permeability
Fungal Proliferation
Food additives
Heavy metal toxicity
Neurotoxins

Nutritional psychiatry is an area of science that considers nutrition as an essential tool, which cannot be neglected, in the recovery and maintenance of mental health. It studies the relationship between diet, eating behaviour, metabolic changes and the development of non- communicable chronic diseases. It shows that several nutritional imbalances are also strongly related to behavioural disorders, and considers that the nutrients present in food are the only natural source of raw material for the formation, maintenance and restructuring of our cells, thus guaranteeing the proper functioning of our organism.

If you already have an idea that food can influence the health of the heart, intestine or liver, for example, I invite you to learn about the action of nutrition on your mental and emotional health.

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