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Become an Elite Level Health Coach w/ Reed Davis of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition - Connecting Minds Podcast Ep 20
105 Plays4 years ago
On this episode of Connecting Minds I have a chat with Reed Davis, founder and CEO of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition - one of the most advanced health coaching certifications in the world.
We talk about what Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN) is, it’s philosophy and methodology, and how to use functional lab testing to identify hidden metabolic imbalances and health challenges that can lead to all kinds of health problems.
I can wholeheartedly say that learning and using FDN made a DRAMATIC improvement in my health... Join us to hear more about it!
Check out Functional Diagnostic Nutrition's website to learn more!
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SlGGC4JHu34
Website and links to other podcast providers:
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Transcript
Introduction to Functional Diagnostic Nutrition
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Connecting Minds podcast. My name is Christian Jourdanov and thank you so much for joining me today. On today's episode, I have a chat with Reid Davis, who is the founder and CEO of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, which is a certification that teaches you how to
00:00:20
Speaker
run and interpret functional lab tests in order to identify hidden health challenges, metabolic imbalances that can cause or contribute to a myriad of health problems. So this is one of
00:00:37
Speaker
the most life-changing things that I've done is taking this course. What's actually mind-blowing is that doctors are taking this course so they can learn stuff that wasn't taught to them in medical school, which is looking at causes of dysfunction rather than diagnosing diseases and treating the symptoms of those diseases with medications which are
00:01:02
Speaker
very often toxic and cause other problems. So even doctors are realizing that yes, there is a better way, the functional model, which is not new, it's not very popular yet, but yeah, the functional model
Christian's Journey with FDN
00:01:19
Speaker
looks at deeper in the person, what's going on deeper in the physiology of the body, what imbalances or healing opportunities exist there that can be addressed with natural means, so diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation.
00:01:38
Speaker
In order to remove those obstacles to health so that the body using its innate intelligence. That's hardwired into our DNA into our being to to restore function and.
00:01:53
Speaker
find equilibrium and the normal equilibrium of the body is health. That's our normal way of being. And in order to reach that level of health, you have to somewhat become a health detective and investigate what's going on there underneath that's contributing to less than optimal health.
00:02:19
Speaker
remove those obstacles to health, restore function, and eventually the body will get back to health.
Understanding Stress and Health Challenges
00:02:27
Speaker
So this is what the functional diagnostic nutrition course teaches you. Again, this is probably the most life-changing thing that I did. As part of the course, you run lab tests on yourself. So I started with a comprehensive hormone test
00:02:43
Speaker
where I saw my, you know, I remember I was when you fill out the form for the test, you say, what's the purpose? What are you trying to overcome by running this test? And I just wrote, I'm just looking to optimize my health. And when the test came back, my testosterone was super low. My estrogens were super low.
00:03:10
Speaker
Cortisol was pretty high so showing a lot of kind of stress and I was completely taken aback by how I felt. I felt pretty good. I thought I was in great health. I was eating really well, going to sleep early and all that stuff.
00:03:28
Speaker
and take a lot of supplements but it's that's the problem in a lot of us think we feel good and we don't know how good we can actually feel right so i have to that i kind of did a poop test or stool test,
00:03:45
Speaker
I identified some parasites that were probably contributing to the low hormones, to the high cortisol, to the kind of increased stress that was shown on the test. And stress doesn't necessarily have to be psychological. Stress can be biochemical, physiological, it can be inflammation, so it can be the immune system.
00:04:11
Speaker
being in overdrive so there's a lot of different types of stress that can contribute to dysfunction or less than optimal health and yeah so I found those parasites, yeast overgrowth, potentially pathogenic bacteria and yeah after doing these bacterial protocols herbs and probiotics and stuff I started feeling really good
00:04:36
Speaker
And I started doing hair tests on myself every three, four months. And I noticed that the levels of heavy metals in my hair started increasing every time I did a hair test, which is an indication that the body is now dumping all of these stored heavy metals after years of accumulation, which we all have that, you know.
00:04:58
Speaker
And then after months later, I was doing food sensitivities tests and just a number of different kinds of tests. And I always found something with which I could further improve my health.
00:05:13
Speaker
further optimize my health. And I started feeling amazing. See, that's the thing. I thought I was good, feeling good before, but I was drinking a lot of coffee, which can really mask energy problems. And if you're not sleeping well and stuff like that, if you use stimulants during the day, it can mask a lot of health issues or less than optimal health. And then if you use kind of sedatives in the evening,
00:05:39
Speaker
like wine or beer or whatever to calm you down and help you fall asleep. It can kind of mask sleep problems as well. So doing this FDN course absolutely changed my life and it has allowed me to help
The D.R.E.S.S. Principle for Health Success
00:05:55
Speaker
A lot of people and I'm hoping a ton more people in the coming years and decades, it gave me the foundation to spend almost a year of my life after I did the course to research and write a book on autism, which you may not know, I actually have a book published and it was all because I did this course, right?
00:06:18
Speaker
I was very honored to have Reid come on the podcast and tell us basically how he came up with the FDN methodology, what the philosophy is, what's it all about, what are the five
00:06:34
Speaker
principles. He calls dress for health success, so D-R-E-S-S, diet, rest, exercise, supplementation, and stress reduction. So this is what drives the protocols that help one restore health in their body. So he's a very cool guy.
00:06:55
Speaker
he's been around the block a few times he really knows his stuff and he has created basically he has created the highest quality most elite level health coaching certification out there.
00:07:11
Speaker
And I honestly have looked at a lot of other health coaching certifications now, and I don't feel like I need to do any other certification in order to be qualified, to be a very effective health coach. That's not to say that I think I know it all. Literally every single day I'm learning new things.
00:07:35
Speaker
And the more i learn the more i realize how much how complex nutrition is and and functional medicine and just the human body and the ways it can break down in the lab testing and there's just so many things to know about what this
00:07:51
Speaker
What you learn on the course is the foundations that allow you to, you basically learn how to learn more. And it just creates this, if you're really into it, it creates an insatiable thirst for knowledge. So that's why I keep buying books and listening to audio books and
00:08:08
Speaker
reading research papers and so on. So if you are yourself interested in some type of health coaching certification, I think the biggest factor that should drive this is if you have a desire to help other people.
00:08:25
Speaker
So if you really do have the desire, I would highly encourage you to listen, to read what he says and there's a link in the show notes to go check out the functional diagnostic nutrition website. If you're looking to get certified in this area, you will not go wrong with this certification, with this course.
00:08:49
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Reed. Let me know how you like it. If you have any questions about FDN and the process, feel free to reach out to me by email or social media.
The Call for Functional Health Education
00:09:03
Speaker
I'll help. I'll kind of
00:09:04
Speaker
answer any questions that you might have. It's so important that more people get into this industry because you probably know how rampant chronic disease is in our society and how little the conventional medical system is doing to actually properly address these chronic health problems.
00:09:27
Speaker
So we need more people out there educating others on how to how to take better care of themselves, how to sell, take control of their own health, become educated and equipped to to make the right choices to improve their health and stay healthy for life. This is what this is what you will learn on the functional diagnostic nutrition certification.
Reid's Transition to Health and Wellness
00:09:50
Speaker
So
00:09:50
Speaker
Thank you once again for joining me today and without further ado here is Reed Davis from Functional Diagnostic Nutrition.
00:10:09
Speaker
Connecting Minds is a space dedicated to honoring the amazing authors, researchers, clinicians, artists, and entrepreneurs who are contributing to our collective evolution or simply making the world a better place. These thought-provoking conversations are intended to expand our horizons, so come with an open mind and let us grow together. Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
00:10:40
Speaker
today on the Connecting Minds podcast. It's a great honor to have Reid Davis, the CEO of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. Reid, thank you so much for joining us today, man. Thank you so much for having me here. So I think let's start at the beginning. Can you tell folks what is your background and how did you come about to found functional diagnostic nutrition, please?
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, I always enjoy talking about that. In the 90s, I was saving the planet, airbirds, water, trees, bees. I worked in an environmental law area. And then I started noticing how bad it was. And these airbirds, water, trees, bees, they're dying. We're facing all kinds of
00:11:34
Speaker
destruction there. And I started wondering, well, what about people? And even me, I didn't want anything sneaking up on me. And I think we're all responsible for taking
00:11:46
Speaker
care of ourselves. We want to be in control of our own destiny. So again, I didn't want anything sneaking up on me. So I went to work in a wellness center and I was hired to run the business. But the owner, this is just such a stroke of good fortune, the owner was a chiropractor who was just starting her to get her diplomat in nutrition.
00:12:09
Speaker
And she said I could go along with her, more or less as an assistant, and then work on her patients in between my classes. And I couldn't pass that up. And that's when I fell in love with the clinical side of the business, just face to face. So I started helping all of her clients from a nutritional point of view. And what really
00:12:37
Speaker
really just blew my mind was that most patients coming in had chronic health conditions. They'd already seen four or eight or 10 or more practitioners and weren't better yet.
Foundations of FDN and Metabolic Chaos
00:12:51
Speaker
And again, remember, I came out of the law field, so I thought, as a consumer advocate, even as a planetary and conservationist, here's just one more area that I could be useful in. I thought they must be getting ripped off by
00:13:07
Speaker
What do you mean you've seen eight people and you're not better yet? So that began my running of the labs and investigating. I thought naively that I would be the last person they needed to see. That's the service I wanted to provide, to stop the cycle of trial and error. So I spent the next 10 years running thousands of labs on thousands of people and discovered some patterns that just work. What to look for?
00:13:37
Speaker
What are these constellation of healing opportunities? And that's a key phrase, right? They're healing opportunities. So anyone with a chronic health condition needs to look at these areas that we discovered, and then they need to not just take something for it. Like in my nutrition courses I was taking, it was mostly selling supplements, which
00:13:59
Speaker
not only didn't work, but there's no satisfaction in that. Just here, take this. So I really explored the lifestyle that's required to reverse chronic degenerative conditions in most cases. So after 10 years, thousands of cases, we had a lot of good fortune again. And you can't do that much work and not make some observations.
00:14:28
Speaker
So finally, you know, the observations I made and learned how to capitalize on those observations by teaching the people what to do became that that was the foundations of the functional diagnostic nutrition course, which I started teaching in 2008, a long time ago.
00:14:47
Speaker
Okay, that's a really great story and I love hearing it because like you said, if you work with thousands of clients or patients, depending on whether you're a doctor or not, you just can't help but make observations. So can you tell us what are some of the observations
00:15:07
Speaker
that you discovered and what are the core principles that you teach in functional diagnostic nutrition.
00:15:18
Speaker
I can tell you what they are and I can tell you how they came about because when I wasn't running the clinic and seeing some of the doctor's patients in between my classes, just even in the first year that I worked there, I saw hundreds and hundreds of people. But when the clinic was closed, it was only open three days a week.
00:15:41
Speaker
So on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I bought a bone density testing machine and I went out and I had a route. So I went, I had about 23 different locations. I said it where I could do my bone density testing.
00:15:56
Speaker
And this was a lot of work, but I didn't know any better back then. I just work hard. It's a good thing to do. And all these women who showed up for their bone density test needed their hormones checked. So I became, in the first year or two, I ran thousands of hormone tests. And I found out that most people have some imbalances if they're not healthy, especially if they have weak bones. That was just one area.
00:16:26
Speaker
I found out these people had all these other complaints on top of their weak bones, or maybe even their bones were good. I had a real DEXA machine. It wasn't a toy. It was a serious piece of equipment. I had to get certified to use it. And then I would test their hormones. And they would thank me because they were on the road to improving their bone density and started feeling better. When your hormones are out of balance, you should feel a little bit better.
00:16:54
Speaker
and sometimes a lot better. But then obviously, you know, the same clients that I was working with then.
00:17:02
Speaker
would say, well, you know, I've got this digestive thing going on or I've got this other. And so over a 10 year period, I just started adding another lab and adding another lab and came up and I tried a lot of different labs looking for lots of these imbalances and dysfunctions upstream. And so I boiled it down to hormones, the immune system, digestion, detoxification.
00:17:31
Speaker
And that was good enough for a few years. And then I discovered about energy production on a cellular level and the nervous system balance, you know, the autonomic, parasympathetic, sympathetic. So that H-I-D-D-E-N hidden, it's very easy to remember. And it's, again, hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system. Sounds simple. It kind of is, but it took a long time to discover that these were the things that if I looked at those in every client,
00:17:59
Speaker
Then I'd be able to take advantage of that information, capitalize on it, leverage it, because it described pretty much what that person would have to do to get better. And that's how we came up with all the protocols, which is the other half of the story, I guess. But the H-I-D-D-E-N is the answer to your question. Right, right. So from there, you've run all sorts of labs.
00:18:29
Speaker
Did it come down to what are the, because one thing I like during my functional diagnostic nutrition training is that to the untrained eye, it looks like running four or five labs is a lot and it's expensive. But if you actually look at what certain functional practitioners are running there, sometimes they're racking up lab tests costs of like two, three, four, $5,000.
00:18:57
Speaker
And what I like is for a very cost-effective little package of tests, we can discover a ton of healing opportunities as you put them. So what are, for the folks listening, what are the tests that would be kind of the core few tests that we would run to identify these healing opportunities?
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah. And this was so much fun to discover too, you know, that the saliva test that I was running initially, remember my first year it was all I ran was saliva tests for hormones. And it took, you know, I was very, very busy and, and started adding then a urine test for, uh, like oxidative stress and liver function and, uh, digestive markers, you know, so, so I was saliva and I added urine testing. Then of course, um, people need to be screened for pathogens. So we would do stool testing.
00:19:50
Speaker
And then they need to be screened for food sensitivity. So we do blood testing on that. So we need bodily fluids to get those categories of healing opportunities can be covered with blood, saliva, urine, and stool. And you said that it might sound expensive to some people. Well, remember, these are
00:20:11
Speaker
demographic or a group of people who are caught in a frustrating cycle of trial and error. You know, they're going from one practitioner to the next and they were running, oh, it sounds like thyroid. They run a thyroid test. Yeah.
Value of Comprehensive Testing
00:20:24
Speaker
And they treat, they start giving them thyroid supplementation and it might, they might feel a little bit better, but they're not healing, not really getting holistically better. You know, they're not learning much. They're just buying some product and trying that and
00:20:40
Speaker
then it might have a new complaint. And it sounds like low testosterone, so they measure that. Yep, pat myself on the back again. I found another problem. So it's just a bunch of trial and error and trial and error. So by just going ahead and just getting the labs done, you're going to actually save yourself a lot of time, frustration, and money. And some people are very desperate.
00:21:04
Speaker
So to spend around $1,000 or less on labs really isn't much of a stretch.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yep. This is what I'm trying to educate folks is you are much better off investing in three tests now rather than doing one, doing something about it, doing another one in three months. And then because what you could have done is identified all of those things at the start, addressed them in that initial protocol and you may have saved yourself maybe
00:21:37
Speaker
two, three, four, six, maybe 12 months in some cases, depending on how fast you go with it. Sure. Sure. And, um, you know, the, the people who are out there running one lab, they're using, and it's largely the way they're trained, um, uh, the symptoms or maybe a cluster of symptoms, which is traditionally reliable. Like thyroid symptoms are easy. Everyone knows the list of things.
00:22:03
Speaker
And then you'd run that thyroid test and again, sort of pat yourself on the back. I found your problem. Well, you really did it, you know, and again, you can give that person some medication or something that changes the test results, but it's not going to really heal the whole body. And so, um, that's treating the paper in our view. And I learned all this the hard way, Christian, you know, that I, I was, um, run a test and the person I'd work with the person
00:22:32
Speaker
well, now you need to run another test. And we were building layers. I always hit it in the right direction. But I had people say to me, hey, Reed, why didn't you just run all the tests at once? And so I said, hey, good idea. I just thought that this would be an ongoing process of discovery and found out no one wants, they want to end the cyclotronal and not just run another lab and run another lab.
00:23:02
Speaker
The other problem, of course, with running one lab or even two sometimes is you leave a lot of healing opportunities on the table. If you say, oh, it's leaky gut and thyroid, and you just work on that, well, you could be leaving an awful lot of other, like again, what's going on with the immune system and detoxification and the hormone balancing and all the other things you must do to be really healthy.
00:23:28
Speaker
And so as soon as someone labels it and starts treating that, they leave probably, you know, at least an awful lot of good work to be done. They leave that off the table and person ends up switching practitioners. They remain caught in that cycle of trial and error. Absolutely. Like one prime example is folks that
00:23:50
Speaker
People will say, I eat a healthy diet, so they feel like they don't need to run a food sensitivity test. So meanwhile, when they do run it, eventually, like four, five, six months later, they discovered that all along they've been eating three, four, at least, foods that were causing inflammation and an immune reaction. So you could have saved yourself all that low level degeneration, immune activation, et cetera, if you had just invested a little bit at the start.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, I like the way that you teach and the model of FDN, it's not about creating recurrent custom from one person, it's about teaching that person how to
00:24:36
Speaker
basically become a self-healer and then letting them, you know, use their newfound knowledge to maintain a healthy lifestyle. We just kind of helped them, you know, identify those healing opportunities. So what I like about the mission of Vevdyan, and this is why I brought you on the podcast because the podcast is, you know, my space to share the work of people that are making the world a better place in some way, right? And what I like is that
00:25:05
Speaker
this model scales in an amazing way where we can reach a lot of people rather than, you know, you find a few, you know, how they in certain businesses, like you, you, you have your cash cow clients and you just want to nurture those relationships. It's nothing to do with that. That's what I really like about. Yeah. Well, it, it evolved, uh, just from wanting to help and to be a practitioner in our, our world, that's the prerequisite. You have to be,
00:25:35
Speaker
have a high desire to want to help others. And you got to be willing to walk the talk. You know, this is setting an example in terms of your own lifestyle has to be something people want to follow. But you know, one thing we don't do is we have to end that cycle of trial and error. It's as simple as this. People are stuck on their healing journey. You know, they're on one, but they're just stuck or they're running up against a
00:26:04
Speaker
brick walls and dead ends and all kinds of things. We get people unstuck by running the labs, identifying this constellation of healing opportunities.
Holistic Health Approaches
00:26:16
Speaker
and then applying the general principles of health building. Now that means lifestyle. So that's where our D-R-E-S-S, the dress for health success comes in. It's not for us to treat, to medically diagnose and treat any specific thing. It's just look at what's out of balance, what needs some correction, and then apply these general principles found in the correct diet for each person.
00:26:45
Speaker
And we can determine what that is. Obviously, rest is really critically important. I'm not just talking about sleep, talk about resting your emotions and all kinds of aspects of one's person. Diet, rest, the ease, exercise, of course. The two S's, D-R-E-S-S is stress reduction or stress management and supplementation. And I don't sell my own brand of supplements. I'm not here to sell anything like that.
00:27:13
Speaker
But I know a lot about them and can use them correctly with these individuals to support or stimulate or substitute for what's missing from their diet. And they can self treat too. So people can self treat.
00:27:30
Speaker
That's it. So again, if you're stuck on your healing path, what we deliver is unstuckness. It's not like, oh, I've got this. I want to get rid of it. Point A, point B. I had migraines. Now they're over with. Yes, that should happen. But it's much more like you were stuck on your journey. Now you're unstuck and you have a pattern to follow. You've got the instructions.
00:27:58
Speaker
the lifestyle, the D-R-E-S-S. And it's a way to live.
00:28:05
Speaker
Love it, love it. I want to unpack the first S, so the stress reduction or stress management. So a lot of folks, first thing, when you say stress, they think work stress, psychological stress, but can you tell the listeners that there's a whole wide variety of different stressors, both internal and external to the body. Can you unpack that a little bit and kind of
00:28:33
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, well, listeners, you know, if I say the word stress, you probably think of, you know, work or relationships or money or something in the mental emotional category. And that's certainly, you know, ubiquitous, those kinds of things. I'm not an expert in those things as much as I am more in the physical trauma. And the kind of things that happen to you, like I personally
00:29:01
Speaker
just yesterday, Christian, I went and I got stem cell injections in my shoulder here and in my knee. On the other side, my right shoulder and my left knee. And it was painful. And even now, I'm hurting a bit, but I've had very stress. I did jujitsu, kickboxing, surfing, motorcycle riding. I played football and I've just got a really well-used body.
00:29:27
Speaker
So those aches and pains and dysfunctional joints and things like that, um, can really take a toll. That's just as stressful as, you know, you hate your job or your relationship's bad, or you got, you know, financial troubles, these mental, emotional things, your body response to these, this physical trauma and weaknesses and imbalances. This was the same thing. It throws your hormones out of whack that could throw your immune system off.
00:29:55
Speaker
Now you can get downward spiral, as you can see. And it's also very true with what we would just call biochemical or chemical stressors. Remember where I started, there's an environmental law in cleaning up the planet. And there are tens of thousands of chemicals being dumped into the environment every day. It's hundreds of pounds per person per day.
00:30:23
Speaker
And so, and it's not an exaggeration. Hundreds of pounds per person, per day, being dumped in the environment, that just can't be good for anything. Besides the birds, bees, water, air, trees and such, it hurts us.
00:30:39
Speaker
And so you've got those type of chemical things. Now you also have others that are totally, you're blind to electromagnetic frequencies, radiation and things. And then you've got the internal, the things that your own body produces, toxins. So a body that's not detoxifying properly can be in trouble too.
00:31:01
Speaker
What got me started on this partly was that in 2001, I read an article in a natural wellness magazine. It was, and it said that stress was the cause of 70 to 80% of all doctors visits. And so, and it was the cause of half of all disease. So, so I started looking into it way back then. And, you know, that's where we're able to sort it out and unpack it the way we do.
Managing Stress and Metabolic Chaos
00:31:32
Speaker
stressors like food sensitivities, very easy to detect all the pathogens and overgrowth and imbalances in flora and the microbiome, easy to detect. Maybe not quite so easy to correct, but at least you know what you need to work on. And again, so so we get people from stuck to unstuck by now they're in a process of discovery, and moving forward and correcting course. It's not a
00:32:00
Speaker
prescription, like take this for that. It's a way to live, which I know you support. Yeah. Like this is literally my favorite topic that we're talking about. So it's doing interviews like this is like Christmas day for me. And another really big and prevalent stressor that people are generally not aware of is blood sugar dysregulation. I think this one
00:32:27
Speaker
Can you actually maybe unpack that a little bit? Let's say we eat too many carbs at lunch. What kind of a cascade can that put our body into over the next couple of days? Sure. Well, if you eat poorly, let's start there. You think that a candy bar or chocolate bar is a good healthy snack because it's got peanuts on it.
00:32:49
Speaker
that's obviously false and you're going to be spiking your blood sugar. You're going to cause carbohydrate metabolism issues. We won't unpack that too deeply, but when you're not metabolizing carbohydrates right, it'll lead towards you're not metabolizing your proteins and fats correctly either. You're just going to throw the body off. This creates metabolic chaos. I mean, I think you could say that the process
00:33:18
Speaker
of a stimulus from outside, you know, sort of entering the body like you're eating poorly or you're not exercising or you smoke cigarettes or some ridiculous thing. You're causing chaos in the body.
00:33:32
Speaker
Now, we're all different. And we'll have different sort of weak links in metabolism. And there are just thousands and thousands of metabolic processes going on. So you're bound to mess something up. And then those things start to affect each other. So if you picture the surface of a pool that's perfectly smooth and you throw
00:33:55
Speaker
a handful of little rocks in there. Not only do we get the splash in the ring from each rock, those rings collide with each other and create new problems, which frankly are undiscoverable. There's not enough testing. And there's certainly no one test. And so we just look at, that's why we use that constellation of things. But I think the idea of metabolic chaos,
00:34:24
Speaker
Uh, is really an important concept and everyone's so different with different weak links in metabolism. Um, you know, and we, we just get out of balance in so many different ways. And then we lose, we start to lose resiliency, you know, so it's, it's hard to bounce back if it just keeps going and going and going and going. Yeah. You know, that kind of makes sense why we keep discovering new health.
00:34:50
Speaker
conditions, diseases. We have thousands of them classified and we keep discovering new ones. If you keep adding metabolic chaos on a system, it just keeps breaking down in new and different ways. That kind of actually makes sense, that analogy with the pool and throwing the pebbles in.
00:35:11
Speaker
Um, next up, I want to, I want to really talk because little preamble. So what we have been taught for the most part is, and even I lived like this, uh, for a long time until basically until I kind of discovered FDN. But if I have a headache.
00:35:32
Speaker
I take ibuprofen, right? If I have a pain in my back, I might take, you know, I might like put like some Volteral gel or some type of gel. That is treating the symptom. But can you tell us why this is exactly the wrong approach to dealing with whatever ails us?
00:35:55
Speaker
Sure. Well, getting relief for symptoms isn't wrong. You just don't want to stop there. And so you hear a lot of natural type practitioners say symptoms don't matter. And in the long run, they're not the problem.
00:36:15
Speaker
They're the result of the problem, which is upstream. And so you might be inclined to just ignore them. Well, that's not good either because you can't have your clients walk around in pain or having hot flashes. So there's such a thing as intelligent relief care. And, you know, the more natural, the better, in my opinion, that actually where I did a little bit of good 20 plus years ago now, when I learned to do the nutrition,
00:36:44
Speaker
the course I was going to was a lot of supplementation with all natural products. And it was kind of a replacement for drugs. So instead of drugs, which have all kinds of toxic side effects and all that, use natural products. Well, I think that's a more intelligent form of relief care. But if you don't continue the investigation, go upstream. Again, if
00:37:12
Speaker
know, let's look at the hormones, the immune system, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and then autonomic balance, these things are incredibly important. And what my just, you know, those, that was kind of my discovery, the H-I-D-D-E-N, if you fix those things, or return balance, and resiliency, you return health, and symptoms just go away. You know, I don't really, other, again, other than that short
00:37:41
Speaker
period of relief care, don't pay much attention to them. It's corrective care. There's a corrective diet that's right for you as an individual. And there's corrective sleep and rest. And there's corrective exercise. And obviously with stress reduction, there's a lot of unpacking to be done there. We mentioned foods and the environment and pathogens, bugs and things.
00:38:08
Speaker
And then supplementation, I think is required because food quality just isn't what it used to be. I actually ate food that my grandfather's grew, but you don't find people doing that anymore. You know, all the natural, rich minerals and vitamins and things. It's not in today's food to the same level as it used to be.
00:38:31
Speaker
So we need, I think we need to supplement vitamins, minerals, sense of fatty acids, antioxidants, and these phytonutrients trace elements.
Importance of Personalized Diets
00:38:40
Speaker
These things could be supplemented with very high quality products today.
00:38:46
Speaker
Absolutely. I totally agree there. I'm a big proponent of supplementation as well. I want to ask you a few questions about the future of FDN, but before we get there, I want to give folks a little bit more of a taste for the dress protocol. So as you already mentioned,
00:39:06
Speaker
D-R-E-S-S, so diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplementation. So we touched on stress reduction and the various stressors that can contribute to all manner of dysfunction in the body. Can you talk about the diet? Because the reason I want to talk about diet is I discovered the metabolic typing diet book
00:39:32
Speaker
few months before I joined the FTN course and after implementing that diet with me and my partner, it was an absolute transformation. So can you tell us how you discovered that, you know, I don't want to say like, I know it sounds like a big thing to say, but that that is the optimal diet. But can you tell us what is the D in dress really kind of, how do you define that?
00:39:58
Speaker
Sure. Well, there's a precept that there's no one diet right for everyone. That's obviously true. There are foods that are bad for everyone, but you can't see this one particular food is good for everybody.
00:40:15
Speaker
And so mostly I learned this from the author of the book you mentioned, and I recommend it to everyone, The Metabolic Typing Diet by Bill Wolcott, William Wolcott. And I remember the day I'd been working on this for years in the clinic,
00:40:32
Speaker
And then I walked into a Borders bookstore, probably almost, you know, well, probably 18 years ago, 19 years ago, walked into a Borders bookstore. They're not in business anymore. But I bought six copies of the metabolic typing diet. You know, I was, you know, drinking some coffee and strolling around and you could sit down and read. And I got into this book, read halfway through the first chapter. I said, man, I'm taking this back to the office. I distributed it to all the practitioners in there.
00:41:01
Speaker
And one of them said he'd already read it and it was, you know, we started just saying this has got to be the way. It has so much respect for individuality and it's a way to sort it out. And it teaches you a lot of the anatomy and physiology and biochemistry besides behind food and genetic requirements.
00:41:25
Speaker
And so we're all different. We have different requirements. And when you get it right, you become a well-oiled, well-fueled machine. Your body starts working better on a cellular level. So when you fuel cells properly, they produce energy at the right rate in quality and quantity. This is straight out of the book in Bill Wolcott's work.
00:41:48
Speaker
So I just adopted that whole system as the D. In FDN, the D in dress is metabolic typing because you're going to get it right on an individual basis. It might sound complicated, but it's easy to do. And you just have to eat right. And we know how to figure that out.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, and for folks that are like, well, what exactly is that? I don't want to oversimplify it, but it's basically doing a questionnaire. There's several ways to do it. And you then, it's centered around your macronutrients of fats, carbs, and protein. And obviously, we're so individual, metabolically.
00:42:37
Speaker
that we all have different requirements so in different ages and stages and our own requirements change so it may sound oversimplified but simply knowing what ratios of proteins, carbs, if I will give you an example right so in my case I went from kind of keto to metabolic typing so I was eating way too much fat
00:42:59
Speaker
not enough carbs just by adding a tiny little bit of carbs. Oh my God, I could go eight hours without feeling a hunger pang. This is why I wholeheartedly support the diet and I recommend it to everyone as well.
FDN Training Process and Impact
00:43:15
Speaker
Yes, you can dial it in for yourself.
00:43:19
Speaker
how much protein, fat and carbs. That's one part of metabolic typing and it's a key part. You burn fuel. Some people burn it faster than others. So you need slow burning fuel. You want more protein and fat. You might just have heard them called protein types. But you can dial in just like an old fashioned radio dial. You can dial it right into where your energy production
00:43:45
Speaker
and your sense of well-being and satiation. Like you said, you feel so satisfied. You don't crave anything. You're not hungry. You can get all the way through to the next meal without really, you know, you have to stay hydrated, of course, but you get all the way through the next meal easily and still have energy and a sense of well-being. And of course, you know, satiation is important.
00:44:13
Speaker
and not having cravings, so everyone can dial that in. Yeah, yeah, I love it. For anyone that's out there that's kind of got a little bit of their interest peak, can you tell us what is the journey for someone who becomes an FDN trainee? Yeah, we seem to attract
00:44:34
Speaker
all manner of folks. You know, it's really interesting. It's fun to do and you get to work on yourself. So we have people who come to us and that's just all they want to do is work on themselves. They're tired of the cycle of trial and error. They want to
00:44:49
Speaker
learn to run the labs on themselves and follow the protocols on themselves and just have more, it could be anything from a serious condition to just, they want to have more energy and lose a few pounds. It just depends on the person. Now we also are huge and our main group who would take our course would be the health coach and personal trainer and anyone who's in the allied health specialties.
00:45:17
Speaker
They're just do-cutters who want to help others. And they may have a couple of certificates. They may have a bachelor's degree. They've got a certificate in personal training and yoga or something, or nutrition, really, really a lot of nutritious. And they want to expand and start, you know, because their clients aren't all getting better. If your clients are ending up down the street, you might have helped them a little with something, but now they're down the street because they got something that you couldn't handle.
00:45:46
Speaker
That's what the FDN course would teach you. Again, looking at the constellation of healing opportunities upstream with the labs and then applying these principles of health. So anyone that wants to help others can do it. And lastly, we have physicians who take our course because they want the training that they didn't get in their training. And they also want the freedom that we provide because they can, you know, doctors are pretty much
00:46:14
Speaker
handcuffed by standard of care and certain algorithms that they use to get paid by insurance companies. And of course, there's geographical boundaries drawn around their state that they live in and they want to practice all over. So we give them a, you know, pathway for doing that. We facilitate it. All the logistics are in.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, this is mind-blowing that doctors are coming to FDN to learn how to apply functional lab testing. It just speaks to the quality of the course.
00:46:55
Speaker
It's so easy to dismiss a course that you can complete in several months if you really work hard like I did. It's easy to say how is that in any way comparable to a four-year bachelor's degree.
00:47:12
Speaker
I am definitely convinced that it's so powerful. I'll give you an example. I thought when I started running the lab test on myself at the start of the course, I thought, and I remember I wrote this as part of the intake form for Christian. I said, I want to optimize my health, right?
00:47:33
Speaker
So my comprehensive hormone panel, the Dutch test came back and my testosterone was lower than the bottom of the range.
00:47:47
Speaker
for a 60 year old man, for a 60 year old man. And my estrogens were all super low and my cortisol was through the roof and my DHA was super low. And I was like, what the hell is going on? I'm taking all these supplements, I'm eating super well.
00:48:05
Speaker
And I've got the blue blockers, etc, etc. All organic food. This was before I even joined the FTN. But then I ran the stew test. Then I saw the parasites and then I saw the bacteria. Then I saw the candida. And then I did the hair test and I saw all these heavy metals.
00:48:24
Speaker
and so on and so forth, right? So I guess the point of that is so many of us, we think we're healthy, we think we eat healthy and so on and so forth. But if you look underneath the hood and you make a few tweaks,
00:48:43
Speaker
You like about three months in, I had energy. I mean, I was sleeping better because I was tracking it, you know, with the ordering. I was sleeping so much better. And like the power it's and you know, you help a few clients after you graduate and you just see the power that we hold in our hands that we it's not, you know, that we're doing anything, but we're just transferring knowledge and helping people help themselves. Basically, that's what I love about it.
00:49:12
Speaker
I agree completely. It's a riot. It's fun to know that you're doing some good in the world and it's a profession. So I've created it to be a way you make a really good living. People are already in the business of health coaching or what have you and they want to just improve and sharpen their skills and they want to be able to charge more money
Growth and Global Spread of FDN
00:49:37
Speaker
they want to sell packages to a person that is very substantial amount of income. And that then affords you to live the lifestyle that you have to live. You need to be able to afford a gym membership or gym equipment for your own home and to do the D-R-E-S-S program. It becomes your way of life and you can
00:50:03
Speaker
you do very, very well for yourself. We've had people who were engineers or real estate agents or, you know, some other profession that they weren't getting any, um, spiritual or emotional satisfaction from one bit, you know, and, and we all know that feeling when someone says, wow, thank you. I mean, you, you said it to me twice on this call, you know, that you just really appreciate that you ran into it. And, um, it wasn't an accident just so, you know, um, these are meant to be things.
00:50:33
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, back in 2008, did you have any idea that FDN would grow so much and explode so much around the world? No. I suppose in the back of my mind, I knew I was doing important work. But remember, I'd helped over 10,000 clients. So I was just running a really busy clinic and we're helping thousands.
00:51:00
Speaker
But everywhere I went, after a while, after, you know, in that ninth or 10th year, people start saying, why aren't you teaching others so that, you know, they can do it too? You read could help a lot more people if you would teach. And I had the labs that I was using coming to me and saying, who the hell are you? No one runs as many labs. I didn't know you couldn't do it. You know, I just worked hard and had a lot of clients. I was very good at gathering clients because I'd like to go out and talk.
00:51:29
Speaker
So I was lecturing like four or five times a month for years, just libraries and anywhere I could get an audience. And so it just snowballed. So anyway, the first course I taught to answer your question, there was only 19 people in it.
00:51:48
Speaker
It was just a weekend workshop, but they loved it and encouraged me to say, wow, that was the best workshop I've ever been to. Well, then we very quickly went online and the rest is kind of history, you know, cause now we're in 50 countries, thousands of practitioners we've trained.
Reid's Personal Health Routine
00:52:06
Speaker
Thousands. Wow. That's insane.
00:52:08
Speaker
Love it. What does the future hold for us within the FTN organization? Well, I think it should be a household name. I think every person on the planet deserves to have good health. What we learned last year
00:52:24
Speaker
was that if you're not in control, if you don't take control of your life, your health, your happiness, someone else will take charge of it for you. There are those that aren't as concerned about you as you are. So you've got to take the bull by the horns yourself and be responsible and don't take what's handed out to you. So our training includes that mindset of being self-reliant.
00:52:54
Speaker
You can go back in even American literature and find lots of writing on that. It's an important mindset. I just see that growing. We're open for business. We want to have you come and learn and then go help others, help us complete our mission.
00:53:17
Speaker
I really like this concept of we need to become more self-reliant because we truly have become weak and helpless as individuals. We kind of defer our power to
00:53:35
Speaker
to whatever the government, our doctor, our teachers, whatever. So I love it. I love it. This is something I've been more and more trying to kind of build myself into a more self-reliant, stronger individual. And I think that this
00:53:54
Speaker
this kind of leading by example, what you said earlier as a practitioner or as practitioners, we need to live by example. It resonates with me a lot because when I look at you, I don't want to put you on the spot, but how old are you? I'll tell you, I'm closer to 70 than I am to 60.
00:54:21
Speaker
Yeah, so this is kind of like the guy. Yeah, I'm almost 70. Yeah, you're almost 70. So this is what I like to see. So for the folks watching this video on YouTube, you know, this man, you know, you can see he is doing something like he wants to talk. So, um, uh, you know, this is, you know, big respect, big respect. That's all I'm going to say. I don't want to sound like a fan boy here, but yeah. And I appreciate what you said. Um, I,
00:54:50
Speaker
I spend a couple hours outside almost every day, but I start in the morning very early. I'm early to bed and early to rise, work like hell and advertise. So no, but I should, you know, get up and do something for yourself. And it's all, it's all about point of view. You know, I just have a good outlook. I think that's my whole life. I just kind of been happy. I'm happy, go lucky. And, you know, I don't have much of a rear view mirror.
00:55:19
Speaker
I'm always looking forward and what's next and whatever it is, we get past it. And this is true for my 90 year old mother, kids story real quick. This is just last year, went home to Ohio for Thanksgiving. And my mom came over to my sister's house where I was staying for Thanksgiving dinner. And she drives herself at 90. She lives in a home just a couple of miles away. She drives over.
00:55:48
Speaker
And she had already talked to my brother-in-law. He went out in the driveway to put air in her tires. And so he's putting air in her tires. She's sitting there behind the wheel. She's a little 90 years old. And she goes, hey, Ernie.
00:56:07
Speaker
Who's going to put air in my tires when you're gone? You know, he's, he's basically about 65. But she wasn't kidding. She, she just, she literally was like wondering, well, when he dies, who will put air in my tires? That's the point of view. It was the point. You know, that, that, that was my whole point was man, you, and she's 90 still going strong. We left our, our butts off at that one.
00:56:34
Speaker
That's awesome. I like to kind of ask people, I need to start doing this more on the podcast. I love asking people about their daily routines and stuff like that. So can you tell us, please share what you like. What's your kind of like your supplementation regime? I saw you have the blue blockers like me.
00:56:53
Speaker
So you're clearly at the cutting edge of the best practices. So tell us, what do you do to stay young, like your supplementation, exercise, whatever? Yeah, it varies quite a bit. Again, you need to look at categories of things like vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, your fish oils, and things like that, which can be found in food.
00:57:22
Speaker
antioxidants, because we live in a very, I mean, one of the tests we run is an oxidative stress test and everyone's, you know, the free radical damage, the whole idea of mutation from that and damage the DNA and what have you. So vitamins, minerals, the sense of fatty acids, amino are antioxidants to fight off the damage from the environment.
00:57:47
Speaker
And then something else that might be for your particular situation, like I also take anti-inflammatories. I take the curcumin and extra fish oil and things.
00:58:01
Speaker
Every day, because I've been very hard on my body, kind of overused it, but I have a lot more use of it to go. I'm going to keep using it. I can't wait to go skiing this season. Again, I just had stem cells in my right shoulder and left knee yesterday.
00:58:18
Speaker
And they're very sore. But I'm going to be skiing in another in a couple weeks here and keep you so supplements, you've got those broad categories, vitamins, minerals, since fed acids, antioxidants, plus something for your condition, your current state. Now that's a healthy or another way is healthy person. So I take that.
00:58:42
Speaker
You know, when you get older, you probably, you don't want to do things that would stabilize your, your hormone levels. Um, but I've, I've run labs, probably I run four or five different labs a year. I mean, every year I'm running my labs. I also go to see my doctor and get regular checkups and things. And they always say the same thing. You're, you're fine. You know, like, yeah, blood pressure cluster, you know, all these things here are pretty normal. So.
00:59:12
Speaker
Yeah, we don't just go by their work anyway, but I don't know if that answers your question well enough. Yeah, it does. What about, do you take like any sleep support, for example, or do you do like red lights? The blue blockers are good. You got to wear these, especially at nighttime. It's afternoon here in California, but I definitely, you want to keep
00:59:39
Speaker
electromagnetic frequencies and radiation and blue light and things. You want to have good sleep hygiene. So make sure the room's dark, slightly cool, but with warm feet and things like that. Me personally, I hydrate pretty well throughout the day. The only time I might get up once during the night to go to the bathroom,
01:00:01
Speaker
Um, and, uh, but I sleep soundly and you want your sleep to be deep, deep sleep. You got to get into non rim sleep where you're out. You're like unconscious, you know, you're, because then your body can, um, purify itself better and lots of good things happen to you. But, um, yeah, the red regimen,
01:00:22
Speaker
is, again, I go to bed early. Last night, I think it was 8.30, you know, nine o'clock. I read. I probably shouldn't read from a Kindle, but I do. Actually, it's on my iPod. I have the Kindle app. I love to read. You know, I usually don't get past five or eight, maybe 10 pages. And I'm asleep. You know, I'm out like a light. And I get up early at 5.30. You know, five o
Conclusion and Connecting with FDN
01:00:48
Speaker
'clock, 5.30 every day.
01:00:50
Speaker
I think one of the ways to stay young is when you have a big mission and you're active not just with your mind but with your body, so you're clearly doing that. That's my plan to never retire, basically. Well, you might change your mind about that when you're
01:01:11
Speaker
It just depends. I told you I'm almost 70. My wife is 41. We are very active and like to do stuff. I got to keep myself in shape for a lot of reasons. I still play with my kid. He's 38. We do all kinds of things. A big thing now is wake surfing.
01:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, just surfing behind the wake of the boat. He bought a new boat. So I think staying active is kind of my secret to everything. It's always on the move. This is a stand-up desk, too. I will switch this. I'm not going to do it right now. So I'll have the desk, and I use a stand-up desk. I think that's really important. Get off your butt. Absolutely. I got one as well. I just don't use it, lady.
01:02:04
Speaker
It's easy not to, but you got to do it. Especially when it has the lever that you have to turn yourself. You've inspired me here. I press a button. It's got a memory on where it needs to go. I just had my knee worked on yesterday, so I'm going to sit. Good idea.
01:02:27
Speaker
Reed, final question for you. Where can folks find you on the internet and find out more about FDN, if they like, et cetera, anything you want to share, plug, et cetera? Sure. Well, we have set up a special link for the listeners today. It's fdn.today slash connecting minds in your honor. And so fdn.today slash connecting minds, and we have
01:02:56
Speaker
people there who would answer all your questions and help me. We use like a chat box and they'll engage. I think it's staffed, uh, you know, 14 hours a day, you know, uh, from time zone to time zone. So, um, engage there, get all your questions answered. Um, and, uh, go do some good in the world. Yeah.
01:03:20
Speaker
Thanks a lot. Listen, I really appreciate your time. It took us, you had a very busy year with the conferences last year, so it took us a couple of months to get this booked, but I'm really happy you could spend some time with our listeners. Thank you so much, and just keep doing that amazing work you're doing, man. Love it. Thank you, and you do the same. You're doing amazing work, and here we are.
01:03:44
Speaker
communicating across the planet and there's such like-mindedness. It's very encouraging. The sense of community, I'm feeling, you know, people talk bad about how things are going and I understand it, but you got to change your tone and do some good work like what we're trying to do here. So we want people to join us in that.
01:04:09
Speaker
I think we've inspired some people for sure. I know some of my friends are asking about this course and I'm like, yeah, you better do this course. It's like literally gonna change your life, literally. You'll never be the same. Well, thank you. Yeah, thank you, brother. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Connecting Minds.
01:04:39
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating, or inspiring. For episode show notes, links, and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov.com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.