How to start a dietary/nutrition practice business

Nutrition has a great effect on physical appearance. Body builders have to eat more of proteins or proteinous meals before or during their training processes, you might wonder how I got to know, yes I've been there! Lol... People suffer obesity because of their diets, people suffer kidney infection from diets. Kwashiokor is an end result of malnutrition whiles pile is obviously a condition caused by excessive consumption of meat and proteinous consumables. Nutrition must be watched, maintained and carefully selected to sustain proper growth and development of body functions. Why do you think we have meal timetables at the boarding schools? You thought right! To ensure kids get their diets balanced all week round. Inasmuch as in Nigeria, this idea is not usually adhered to OR considered with importance for these kids, the whites do take it very serious.

Would you like to start a nutrition or dietary business
in Nigeria? This is a good idea. This simply means your job is to place people on diets and to provide them with related meals as to suit nutrition requirements for some given durations or for a long period of time, whatever the case may be,  here's your piece!

1... Understand your role as a dietitian
Understanding your role means you comprehending that your services are meant to see physical  reactions and changes with people's body, this would help you
to be more serious and commited to what you're doing. If you give the wrong diets, results would not be seen and people would loose interest in your practice or worse still, conditions might escalate and you'll be in serious trouble. If your results are good, your expertise is very much valued. So understand your role, it's more sensitive like a doctor's role since they all have to do with health.


2... Identify Diet problems
Diet problems are effects of mal-nourishment and
malnutrition. Some problems caused by improper diets are obesity, overweight, underweight, thinning, dry skin, paleness, sleeplessness etc. Knowing these would help you offer best services to people. Also, you need to learn and retain ideas of best diets for people of diversified occupations. For instance, an athlete has a peculiar diet which is restricted to his kind, whiles a boxer or wrestler also has particular meal types which goes best for their professions, a manual labourer has a meal type or dietary function entirely different from what a hypertensive patient needs. These are just a few instances foreshadowing
what must be known to you before placing people on diets. You'll need to do some professional courses on this. Yes!


3... Practically determine how long it'll take for changes to suffice

This is about how long would it take for a someone being placed on a specific diet to begin to see changes with his system or structure and recuperate as desired? 3 days?  2 weeks?  One month? Oh.. It's
no magic! There are two ways to go about this. Research and practice/experience. Research is a good way while practice is a more better way. However, you cannot be able to practice privately with all diets you have to propose so you would better be having a combination of research and practice.


4... Target the right audience

It could be embarrassing approaching someome already looking very healthy and well structured to
tell them how they need your services. However,  it would make good sense approaching an extremely fat lady trying to convince her that she could actually grow lean and become more appealing within a couple of days with your dietary placement, that's if she doesn't already fancy the way she looks. Remember you're starting up and you need intensive advertising to create awareness for your brand and possibly you do not have enough resources for that so the remedy is targeting a few persons and working on them, the positive effects your diets would have on them is just more than enough marketing for you and
you'd be surprised how much more people would be turning in.


5... Liaise with clinics and other private dietitians
The reason for liaising with clinic would be for referring patients who need to be placed on some specific diets. While some clinics do not have resident dietitians there would be need for you to assist these persons or patients attended to in such clinics to gradual recovery. However, for you to be able to fill this need, it is paramount and mandatory that you must be professionally and legally certified, this is just why you need to attend some courses on dietary and nutritions after which you'll obtain the necessary certificates and licensing for your practice.