In my last blog post, I mentioned that we specialize in therapeutic cooking. Today, I want to spend a bit of time explaining what therapeutic cooking is and what we do.
What is therapeutic cooking?
Therapeutic cooking is the art and science of preparing meals designed to meet specific guidelines to support your health. Usually, these guidelines are set by the doctors and nutritionists that we work with and it is our job to make delicious food that meets these requirements. As you might already know, we specialize in dairy free, gluten free and sugar free cooking. However, we support all kinds of special diets ranging from vegan to paleo and everything in between. We also support therapeutic diets such as GAPS, low FODMAP, SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet), candida, low carbohydrate diets appropriate for type 2 diabetes, and many others.
Who are our clients?
We work with anyone who needs help! Most of our clients are people who have a health condition that requires a specific diet such as digestive issues, autoimmune problems, type 2 diabetes, food sensitivities or allergies and many others. We also work with new parents to provide meals after birth, people trying to lose weight and those who need help recovering after a surgery. We also have clients who simply appreciate a wonderful home-cooked meal made from scratch with organic ingredients and want to eat well.
While we are very committed to nurturing long-term relationships with our clients (we have clients that we have been cooking for on a regular basis for over two years!), we also realize that often people need assistance for a short time in order to get oriented to a new diet and way of eating. We specialize in helping people through the process of starting or sticking to a new diet or regimen. Recently, we were contacted by a client who just went through back surgery and was recovering with very limited mobility. Her primary caretaker was going away on a business trip for a week. Due to the fact that we cook in bulk, our services were perfect for her needs. Here was her feedback about our services: “Thank you again, I’m so glad Erin introduced me to you and your business. You were just what I needed, when I needed it most. I’ll be calling again. :)”
What types of health conditions do we support?
As I mentioned above, we work with clients who have a wide range of health conditions.
One of the most common types of issues we work with are digestive issues including gluten sensitivity, candida, IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth), GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease) and similar conditions. Many of our clients are referred by naturopaths who have put them on a very specific diet or have performed food sensitivity tests. Most basic elimination diets include removing dairy, gluten and sugar and seeing how the person feels after a few weeks. It sounds pretty simple, but most people get very nervous when told that they can’t eat anything with gluten, dairy or sugar. Due to the prevalence of these ingredients in almost everything we eat, we get many phone calls asking “What do I do now?”.
In many cases, our clients have had food sensitivity tests done and have a specific list of foods they can and can’t eat. If you would like to see what an example of one of these tests looks like, I have one below. As you can see, the foods that are ok to eat are in green, whereas foods in yellow should be eaten sparingly if at all, whereas foods in red cause a lot of inflammation and should be avoided for about six months to give the body time to heal.
Food sensitivity test
The test above is a pretty simple case, although avoiding garlic and onions and everything in the tomato family is not a lot of fun for six months. Often, we get tests that have many more restrictions that the client has to navigate, which makes life quite difficult. This is where we really get to have fun and get our creative juices flowing! We are experts in substitutions and often develop new and interesting recipes for our clients.
If you are interested in our services, please don’t hesitate to contact me. If you want more information about therapeutic cooking, please visit our FAQ, which contains a brief summary of some of the most common health conditions we work with and other information.
