EP 472: Functional Medicine Explained With Practical Next Steps

What makes Katie Garrett with VivaWise Functional Wellness a good neighbor?

If you’ve ever left a quick doctor’s visit thinking, “I still don’t know why I feel like this,” you’re not alone. We sit down with Katie Garrett of VivaWise Functional Wellness to talk about a different approach—one that looks beyond symptoms and focuses on understanding the root cause of what your body is trying to tell you.

Katie explains functional medicine in a way that’s clear and practical: combining evidence-based research with a whole-person view that connects mental, emotional, and physical health. Her passion for this work is personal. From growing up with a mom navigating fibromyalgia to facing her own IBS and autoimmune challenges in college, Katie understands what it’s like to search for answers—and not settle for surface-level solutions.

We also walk through what she sees most often with clients: gut health struggles, inflammation, hormone imbalances, and chronic conditions that don’t fully resolve with conventional approaches. Katie shares the core foundations she always returns to—nutrition (and timing), sleep and circadian rhythm, movement, and stress recovery—before diving into more advanced tools like in-depth lab testing and targeted supplementation for things like bacterial overgrowth, toxins, and infections.

You’ll also hear what makes her approach different from the very first visit, including a 90-minute intake designed to truly understand your health story instead of rushing through it.

If you’re looking for functional medicine, root-cause healing, or a more complete understanding of your health, this conversation will give you clarity—and a better set of questions to ask. Subscribe, share it with a friend who’s tired of guessing, and leave a review with the topic you want us to explore next.

To learn more about VivaWise Functional Wellness go to:
 https://vivawisefw.com/katie/

 VivaWise Functional Wellness

(817) 864-8898

Transcript

Welcome To Good Neighbor Podcast

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Sophia Yvette.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of a functional wellness practice? Well, one may be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Katie Garrett, with VivaWise Functional Wellness. Katie, it is so lovely to have you on this morning. Now we are so excited to learn all about you and your business. Please start off by telling our listeners just a little bit more about your company.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. We are a functional medicine practice. So functional medicine is the bridge between conventional and holistic. So it is conventional in that it is evidence-based. All of our recommendations come from the scientific literature, but it's also holistic in that we consider mental, emotional, and physical aspects and how everything in the body is connected. So I like to think of it as bringing together the best of both worlds so that we can address the root causes of someone's health issues rather than just trying to cover up the symptoms.

Katie’s Health Story And Why

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Wow, Katie, I love that you're sharing that with us today. Now, getting into your background a little bit, you know, what phase was it that you went through where you're like, hey, I'm gonna start a functional wellness practice?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Yeah, I started getting interested in health as a young child because my mother had fibromyalgia. And this is a chronic health condition that people especially did not know much about in the early 90s. And so, as the middle child who keeps everyone happy in my family, I started reading medical encyclopedias and health books to try to figure out her health issues so that we could, you know, function better as a family. And I learned from that process that there was a lot of things that could help people heal that were not being talked about with her doctor's appointments. And I then had my own health issues in college that I was not able to get resolved with conventional medicine. I developed IBS and autoimmune disease. I saw all the doctors, took all the medications they prescribed, and was not better. And so I had to start learning even deeper to apply functional medicine to myself. And through that process, I was able to heal. And it was such an eye-opening moment of wow, there's a whole nother way of getting healthy again and overcoming symptoms and health conditions that most of us are not aware of. And so I went back to school for functional medicine.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Wow. And what is the easiest way to get over some of those symptoms that we're not aware of?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, the most important things are to address the foundations of wellness, which is what your body really needs in order to function optimally. So that would be nutrition, that's which what you're eating, when you're eating it, sleep, which includes not just how many hours you sleep, but also your whole circadian rhythm, your light exposure from morning to when you go to sleep and your quality that you're getting. It includes movement, which is physical activity and exercise, and it includes stress recovery. So I don't say stress management because who can really manage stress? It's kind of like things happen to us and we can't control that. But it's all about how do we respond and how quickly do we get back out of that stress state?

Who VivaWise Helps Most

SPEAKER_02 3:20

100%. Now, switching gears here, we do know that marketing is the heart of every business. And without any clients, you know, you wouldn't have a practice. So ideally, who are you looking to target and how are you attracting them?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Yeah. So we want patients that uh really want to understand their bodies and they want to get to the root causes of their health issues. They want to know why something's happening and they want to heal naturally, not use medications as their primary way to overcome their symptoms. So if people like to learn, they want to kind of understand the science of things and they want to, they're willing to make the harder lifestyle changes that have the huge long-term payoffs. Um, those are people that do really well and they're able to reach their goals, get off medications, and oftentimes even reverse their health conditions, whether it be diabetes or autoimmune disease or other issues.

What A First Visit Looks Like

SPEAKER_02 4:13

And Katie, what can a client expect, you know, their first time going to VivaWise functional wellness?

SPEAKER_01 4:21

So we have a very in-depth appointment. It is an hour and a half long. You're used to 15 minutes, maybe, with your practitioner. We're spending an hour and a half with you because we're getting to understand everything that you've been exposed to from birth until now that could cause your body to dysfunction and what you might be missing that's preventing your body from healing itself. So we're gonna go into history, lifestyle, symptoms, past labs, past stressors. And from that, we can oftentimes get a half dozen or a dozen root causes that we need to address so that your body can heal.

Labs Supplements And Complex Root Causes

SPEAKER_02 5:00

Wow. So once you address those root causes, what's the next step?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah, so we are doing lab testing. We're utilizing supplements in order to come alongside the interventions that we have. And sometimes for patients, we have to address things like bacterial or yeast overgrowth in their gut or heavy metal exposure or other toxins or systemic infections like Epstein-Barr virus or Lyme disease. So we do sometimes have to get really complex because the issues are really complex with the patients. And we always focus on those four foundations, but sometimes we're doing a little bit more work.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

And finally, where can our listeners go to learn more about Viva Wise functional wellness?

SPEAKER_01 5:45

We have so many free resources because we want functional medicine to be accessible to everyone. When I was growing up, we wish we had an integrative practitioner that we could have gone to, but we were a really low-income family. So my mom couldn't afford to get the healing that she needed. So that continues to be something that motivates the way we do our business now. And so we have a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog. We have so much free information available that is evidence-based that you can use in order to improve your health. So you can go to our website, which is vivawisefw.com, which stands for functional wellness. And from there you can access all of those resources.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

Wow. Well, Katie, I really appreciate you being on the show today. We wish you and your business the best moving forward. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpfrisco dot com. That's gnpfrisco dot com or call four six nine two two two two two two two two two two two two one nine three four four four four four five.