Reed Davis: General Principles of Health Building

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. So here's the deal. Yep, that's right. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't, until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. But wait, it doesn't stop there. The Morpheus platform also provides live heart rate training for your clients that can be tracked and shown anywhere. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's train with Morpheus M-O-R-P-H-E-U-S.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Welcome to the future of fitness, my friend. How are you?

Oh, I'm great, Eric. Thanks a lot for having me here today.

Yeah, this is uh it's gonna be a lot of fun. Give people a little bit of backstory. You know, I'll I'll let you tell your story, obviously, because you do it better than me. But you're the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, and I had the pleasure of going through your education, gosh, I don't know, circa of 2014, 2015. And I learned a lot, man. I learned a lot that I was able to apply to my gym clients, my coaching clients, and my own personal life, just to health issues I was facing at the time. And it's been really valuable. And I'm so excited to just share a sliver of that knowledge that you can bestow upon our audience today. So thanks for coming on. I think as always, a good place to start would be tell us a little bit of your backstory, Reed. How did you get to be the founder of FTN?

And thanks a lot. I'm glad you had some personal success as well as added to your professional toolbox, so to speak, when you went through the course. And that I have to say, before I tell you my background, is one of the prerequisites. Matter of fact, there's very few prerequisites to take our course. One of them, though, is that you got to be willing to walk the talk. And I think that's true with just about any profession. You want to live whatever it is you're preaching about. And it started in the late 90s. I was saving the planet, man. I was in environmental law. That was, you know, I went to USD, the air, the birds, the water, the trees, the bees, and so on. Truly like doing some great work in the world and very rewarding. And but I when I started really focusing on all these um environmental effects on the animals and such, seeing how how bad that was, I started wondering about people. What's it doing to people, including me? You know, I've always wanted to be in control of my own destiny. I was in my 40s then, and I didn't want anything sneaking up on me. You hear about people dropping dead and just getting bad diseases all of a sudden. So I turned my attention from the planet and airbirds, water trees, beasts, and so on, to people. And I went to work in a clinic. And I'll tell this quickly, but it's it's really a fascinating story. For 10 years I worked there. I started off running the clinic, like as a businessman, and the owner was getting her diplomat in nutrition, she was a doctor, and said I could tag along and get my own certificate as a layperson and work on her patients in between my classes. And that's an opportunity I just had to jump on. And so that's what I did. And I totally fell in love with the clinical side of the practice, working one-on-one, face-to-face with Mrs. Smith or Mr. Jones or whoever, helping them with their problems. And what amazed me the most, where FDN started, I'll circle back to that, is that almost everyone walking in the door had already been to five or eight or ten practitioners. And I'd never had any health problems, so I didn't really get it how what the what the system was like and that. And it was just totally unsatisfactory. People were caught in this cycle of trial and error. And as naive as I was, but also as ambitious as I was, I said, I'm gonna be the last person you need to see. I'm gonna figure it out. In the law program, I did a lot of research and writing. It's really all about that. And so I knew I was a good researcher and I could figure out what's wrong with you. And the next 10 years was just a study in that effort, in that discipline of looking at underlying causes and conditions. I became an expert in functional lab testing. Back then it was just called alternative. I had some great mentors, but my strength was getting a lot of business in the door, running labs, and making my own observations along with the mentoring. So I was able to fill in the pieces of the puzzle myself on real people. And I recognized some patterns and started repeating this way of investigating the hormone immune digestion detoxification and so on. You took the course. And then, because I'm not a physician, obviously I can't just get out of a prescription pad and didn't want to. And people are already sick and tired of that anyway, just either a prescription or just being sold some supplements or here, try this therapy or that therapy. So I determined an entire holistic lifestyle was the only way to really fix these things, but all based upon the functional lab work, the data that we were able to collect on each individual person. So that's what FDN is: it's an investigation into underlying causes and conditions, a certain constellation of lab markers that we want to look at. And then those we call the healing opportunities. And then we, of course, applying the principles of health building to every cell, every tissue, every organ, every system in the body. So here's what's wrong with you, here's how you're gonna fix it. And then and that's why you are too and people in of your ilk do good or so personal trainers or nutritionists or nurses or you know, whomever. We have doctors, we have people that want to help others and who are willing to walk the talk. So in 2008, I started training, and I've been doing that ever since. And and that's what functional diagnostic nutrition is. It's that discipline, and that's what I uh called the course.

Looking at the diagnostics, I'm I'm guessing most of, and this is I let me back up for a second. So I think this is a really timely conversation because looking at everything that transpired in 2020 and the fitness industry has gone under such a drastic evolution. Really, what should have happened probably over five years happened over nine months. And one of the things that seems to be a consistent theme is that people are really and fitness professionals, and this has been a theme for two, three years. I've been on this podcast, nor most guests from Sean Pastuch to many others. We talked about what is where does the future of the fitness professional land? And really it comes down to more evolving into a health coach, right? Being a fitness coach is one thing, but being a health coach is really serving a higher purpose, not just getting people to lose weight, which is important, or helping them get their strength goals, which is important, but looking at the whole thing. And I'm guessing if I'm a fitness professional listening to this, I'm like, ooh, wait. So there's tools that I can now use that are diagnostic that I can start to maybe learn about and leverage within my evolution into health coaching. And so what give us some background? Like, what are the diagnostics? What are some of the processes that you teach people how to use?

Yeah, well, thanks for that and good background. Personal trainers, like I have one come to my house twice a week, and I've got a casita with its own garage, so I just converted that to a gym. Mostly we do Pilates, she's an authority on Pilates, but she does we do other things. And that's where a lot of uh of our um students start. Like they've got uh already a college degree, kinesiology or you name it, something in the sciences usually, and then they get a certificate or two or three or four, and they're really accomplished, and they start running into their customers other issues like it's great if you know how to add flexibility and strength and and all those things, but if you can also check their hormones and check their digestion and check that their liver's working and these sort of important things, then you can just add so much to your uh ability to help people. And so it's if you want to. There's certainly like my personal trainer, she hasn't taken my, I've been working with her for 10 years. She still hasn't taken my course. She's just really happy doing what she's doing. That's her wheelhouse, and she's very comfortable there. But man, so many others are like they want to know more. A lot of us are learn freaks or whatever you want to call it. We like learning new things. And when you find out how easy it is to run the labs, and actually the customer's running it on themselves, you're just expediting for them. So you're not being a doctor, you're not ordering labs like they do. You're suggesting to your client, hey, that fact that you're not sleeping, that's affecting your workouts. The fact that you're not eating, that's affecting your workouts. If you have irritable bowel disease, that's definitely gonna affect your ability to get in shape. So trainers are learning now to run these labs or or have them run by their clients through our program. And obviously, you're gonna know how to interpret them. What are the healing opportunities, and and what can you add to your workouts? Like basically, it's giving them stuff to do, giving the customer things to do between the workouts. So obviously, coming to the gym, or if you're going to see them, that's important. But it's what they do in between those workouts that matters, maybe even more. And and by the way, that's how I figured out this whole distance coaching model 20 years ago was that people were coming in our office for chiropractic and acupuncture and massage mostly. And I was a personal trainer, would work them out, give them some rehab and things. But the uh it's what they did at home that mattered. So our our whole thing is what can you do at home and what are you gonna base it on? Run the labs, then go home and do this. And it's gonna, and you know, that this is a pretty big, well-organized system, but that's how it relates to being a personal trainer or nutritionist or massage therapist or just someone who wants to learn more and do more with their clients to help the client get better.

Awesome. And I I know from it feels like such a long time ago, but going through your course and your certification, there was always a really strong emphasis on okay, where do we walk the line here between being a health coach and a medicine and the medical field? And I'm sure that's probably something that if you're a good fitness professional, you're constantly have that at the top of your mind. But how do you educate the people that come through the FDN on where those parameters are?

Well, there are definite parameters. That's the place to start. There is our backyard and their backyard. And there's like a fence and you don't cross it. You know, so we never in in all my days, even though I work very closely with the patients, they weren't my patients. They were the doctor's patients. They were my clients. So even on a professional level, they're your client. And you can investigate uh the underlying causes, conditions, and what we call, again, the healing opportunities. That is not the same thing as a medical diagnosis. So medical diagnosis is one thing. Now I can go into this as in as much detail as you want. I feel like as one of the sort of pioneers, I have helped define those two backyards. And I teach in the course very thoroughly how to stay in your lane, how to stay in your backyard. We don't medically diagnose, we don't treat any specific thing. We do look for healing opportunities like imbalances and uh things that aren't working upstream that might be producing the symptoms, but we we look at those things. Again, the hormones, the immune system, digestion, detoxification. These are labs, that's uh saliva, urine, stool, sometimes blood, and the person, the client's going to get that, and you get to look at the data and then make your suggestions to that person. That's not the same thing as diagnosing, and it certainly isn't treatment of any one thing. And that's another concept that I have helped define. Giving the suggestions to a client is not treating a specific thing. Everything we ask them to do is lifestyle-based. And it could begin with the way they think, the way they feel, the way they eat, the way they rest and exercise. Reducing stress is incredibly important, taking supplementation and things. And so we're giving them a system to live by and a code to live by that affects every cell tissue organ and system. It affects every cell tissue organ and system. So that's not treating any one thing. It's not a there's no diagnosis and specific treatment for their IBD or PCOS or CFS or all these other different things that they might have. We that's between them and their doctor, labeling it and taking medication and treatment for that one thing. We just work on every cell tissue organ system and get and people just get better.

Yeah. It sounds like you look at the you look at the human state as a whole and just work on an increasing overall health. Because when that happens, a lot of stuff just goes away, man.

You said it, it just goes away. Well, what happened to that chronic fatigue? I don't know, it just disappeared. And we didn't treat it, it just got you healthier and and got you living a better pattern using this circadian rhythm, which can be measured. You can do a test for that and see how you what what a roller coaster you're on uh as far as the hormones go, like the stress hormones and these kind of things. And all that really matters.

What do you um maybe you can walk us through like an example of how an FDN practitioner would hit address a common issue. Imagine like you you brought up a couple IBS is probably pretty common, chronic fatigue. What does that process?

This is where you we put the ology in our methodology. So a method is a way of doing something. A methodology includes the thinking, the precepts, the the fact, for instance, that every cell knows what its job is. You don't have to teach your cells what to do. That's an innate intelligence. So we work a lot with that innate intelligence, coaching that up, if you will. Now, there's also things that work against that intelligence. There's obviously the environment, which is where I started, there's tens of thousands of chemicals being dumped on all of us, but there's an internal environment, the microbiome of the bugs, the parasites, the bacteria, the funguses, and things. And there's food sensitivities, and there's sensitivities to just other things that you're coming in contact with. So we coach up the function, the intelligence within each cell. And again, a cell knows if it's in your adrenal glands or if it's a brain cell, if it's a muscle cell, it's a even if it's a fat cell, it has an intelligence. And uh we coach that up. We're always nurturing. And then at the same time, we're identifying and eliminating those negatives that we call contributors to metabolic chaos. And so it it sounds like a stretch, but again, the ology in our methodology is the way we think that there's something upstream, and that you may not even be able to identify it, but you can still have an effect upon it using these again principles of health building. So we can have an effect. You hear people in alternative space always say, might get to the root cause or get to the root cause. Well, no, you don't. You might get you get close enough to it and to have an effect on it. But as soon as you label something like one thing, you could be leaving an awful lot of other things off the table. And and then you're getting into kind of where you are doing a diagnosis and treatment of a specific thing. I hear even health coaches say, I specialize in autoimmune, or I specialize in this or that. And that's an okay way to market yourself because you're gonna attract people who maybe like you had that problem and you overcame it, and now you want to help them. But in terms of what we actually do, you don't niche. You because again, we using the general principles of health building affects every cell tissue organism, and therefore they just get better, like you said. And it is, if you've never heard that paradigm before, you you need to experience it. And that's why every trainee of ours, every student, runs the labs on themselves, like you did. You ran you probably ran the biohealth uh 205, 101, 401H, IP test. Yeah, transformation, you can't learn from a book. To transform, you it is an experiential um thing. It must be experienced. And once you do, you're just gonna want to share it with others, and you can make a really good living doing it. We've got a business model that I started again, you know, plus 20 years ago.

Yeah, so let's dive into that. Well, actually, let me because this is a curious question, then we'll get into the business model. Over because you talk to so many practitioners, you're always researching, you're always in the thick of it, really. Have you noticed any, have you had any interesting noticings about COVID and why it affects some people some ways and other people's it doesn't? And some people don't even know they've had anything from your side.

I think history is gonna um be important, and there's there's the experience we've already had with COVID's not new, uh, there's a new strain out, and then some of the history has yet to be written. And so I would hesitate to make any real predictions because it's become a political animal in football now, and so I don't go in that to that realm. I what I like are facts. What are the facts? What's this what's the real science say? And the death rate in this country, even though they say two million people have died from COVID, the same number of people are dying. And the average age of death from COVID is I think it's 78 years old. And the average age of dying from anything is 78 years old. So there's some statistics that are troubling in terms of what kind of a pandemic this actually is. And the bottom line for I think a health coach is there the people who do die from it, and and and I have to say this, I think more people die with it than from it. But those that die from it, they're they get into these cytokine storms and their lungs collapse and and they die. You can arm yourself by being less at risk. I have a 91-year-old mother. She's sequestered pretty much, she's mask wearing, and you can't go in her. She lives in a home and you can't go in and she can't go out, and it's really devastating. But if she does, she's one of the people that could die from it. There's people who should be doing all that stuff. The rest of us need to be conscious of exposure, of obviously, and but moreover, I think, in personal opinion, is to get resistant, just get really resistant. The thing that most children have already built into their makeup, kids get it less than adults, and there's a reason for that. So adults are more compromised, immunologically compromised and susceptible. There's I'm taking my supplements every day, you build the immune system up, and so that's what I've noticed. Is that people are doing that? But when COVID hit last March and they shut things down, we were able to say, we already work from home. I've already been working at home for 10 years. And so we didn't get affected very much. Matter of fact, there's a whole lot of new customers around because people who did get sent home from work were now needed stuff to do. Our people started like learning about health, and our course sales actually went up because people had the time now. And more people who've who signed up a year before were able to finish in that time of being sent home from work. We have some history we can look at past COVIDs and now we can look at this one and wait for history to unfold. I think it's going to be the healthy people stay healthy. And the unhealthy people, they get sick anyway. Don't go get COVID because it's a bad one.

Yeah. And I have to ask, out of my own personal curiosity, so what kind of supplements are you taking this way?

Well, we're I think we talked right before the uh show. Vitamin D is helpful if you're in a cold, dark, damp environment anyway. I mentioned I was from Canada, you said you'd lived in New England, stuff like that. Yeah, you're supposed to. I grew up as a kid taking fish oil for the other things that are helpful to the immune system. We knew that 65, I'm almost 70 years ago. And so there's that, obviously, vitamin C is a great antioxidant. There's something called N acetylcysteine or NAC for short. Selenium, it's a great mineral, works to help detoxify and convert things in your body. Quarcetin is one, and zinc. So if you can get a cocktail of those together, you can, again, this is not a prescription. This is just things that have are known to help your immune system out and keep inflammation down. And generally, people seem to do better when they're doing that, along with a good regimen of eating right and going to bed on time and exercising, moving their bodies, and removing any other stress that could be identified. And sometimes they're hard to identify. Supplements, as you know, are just one part of our dress for health success system, the DRES. Again, is diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation, D-R-E-S-S. And it's remarkable how that has an effect, positive effect on every cell tissue organ and system, including the immune system. Bringing it back to the COVID thing, I think I could handle COVID. I'm not trying to get it, but I think I could handle it. I I know have had some acquaintances now who've had it pass by very quickly.

So thank you for all that. That's good insights. And I think people are always, it's such a you can't go anywhere without hearing COVID news or having COVID conversation. And from whatever direction you are hoping the election went swing, I'm just glad it's over. We don't have to talk about it all the time. So COVID now is taken front and center of like it already was a big topic conversation, but everyone talks about it now. I want to go back to the business side of health coaching because I think there's a lot of people out there, and this really parallels with the fitness industry, uh, who really want to help people. They enjoy it. They left at some point they made a decision to leave a corporate track or some sort of W-2 job, and because they found a calling or they found that they really enjoy the helping people, maybe they're empathetic, they just have what it takes when they're really drawn to it. So they get the education, and then what? Right. Like, how do you, okay, I'm armed to help people, but how do I get my clients? And I think that's the big hurdle for a lot of people. So, how what's some of the things you've learned along the way, or how do you help people get to that point?

Well, people with an interest in that really need to learn how to be a professional. And so, broad picture, there's people that like the health industry or the health space being called the wellness space, the health and wellness space. There's so many different parts of that puzzle. But you can either do it as a hobbyist or as a professional. And and you can have, I know hobbyists that are just as smart and you know aware and as any professional, but they don't do it for a living. Matter of fact, hobbies cost you money if you think about it. I know mine do. I'm a gardener, I'm always buying plants and pots and all this stuff, and I'm a motorcyclist, so I have a couple sort of pricey bikes, and they like to have money spent on them. But but hobbies cost you money. So the wellness space could just be a big, you're paying for the gym, you're paying for your trainer, you're paying for your chiropractor, you're paying for your acupunctures, you're paying for your IV treatments, you're paying for your supplements, you're buying really good, the more expensive food, you're and all that stuff. Now, I think you need to do that to be a professional, but you can do all that and just be a hobbyist too. So now how do you change it into being a professional? Well, you you live, you have to walk the talk. You got to be doing all those things that you're gonna be leading by example your clients through some kind of uh transformation that they go through. And if they've never spent any money on anything except pizza and beer, it might be a bit of a challenge. But that's the other trend. You know, answering your your previous question about what kind of trends do you see, especially with COVID, people want to be healthy. And it's been going on since I got into the business. People are going to their doctors now and saying, hey, I don't want to have to see you ever. I don't want to just come in here with an acre paint and just get a prescription. That's not what I have in mind for myself. And that's actually where I started. This might seem like a digression, Eric. Sometimes you have to bring me back. Over 20 years ago, when I started, I wanted to be in control of my own destiny. Again, I didn't want anything sneaking up on me. And what we found out last year is that not only can stuff sneak up on you, like this thing snuck up on the entire planet, but there are those that would have monopolies and be in control of big parts of your life. And so I want to be in control of my own destiny, and I want to be in control of my own health and happiness and finances and geographical freedom and and all the other types of freedom that we're that we have uh grew up enjoying. So it's gonna take, I think, being healthy. You you at least look after yourself and eat right and go to bed and exercise and reduce stress. Turn the TV off, man. That's been the biggest thing for me is not watching anymore. And uh and then and take your handful of supplements two or three times a day. At least that can really help a lot. And I was revisiting the trends. There are now millions and millions of people. You when I was a kid, the only personal trainer was Jack Lilane, who my mother watched at lunchtime when we were home from school, and maybe Joe Weeder or you know, one of those types, the muscle beats type guy. That was it. Look what you have now. You have these huge chains, you can name them better than I can, that are places to go and work out. And now you have all of these uh look at grocery stores, their vitamin department has exploded. It's huge. So there's all these different ways of getting into the health space, and you can do it as a professional. I, of course, set the example for 10 years in office. I developed, practically invented, if you will, although others of my peers make the same claim to fame, the idea of distance coaching. You know, the the farther away from the office I lectured, and I love giving lectures, and I would go out and to libraries all over. You run out of libraries in San Diego, you got to go to Orange County, and you got to go different places. And I realized then, like, these people aren't gonna drive to my office. So we we created back then distance coaching over 20 years ago. Now everyone's doing it. It's just, and even doctors are doing telemedicine and things. That's another huge trend. You're you're seeing like my orthopedist who works on my shoulder and knee from sports injuries, we just meet on Zoom now, or his equivalent of it. So you can establish an amazing business and even working from your own home in the health space as a health coach. You just have to separate yourself from the hobbyist by charging for your services. Just like a lawyer. I've never had a lawyer do anything for me. I didn't write him a fat check for first. You go to your lawyer, hey, how's it going? Yeah, how's the kids? All right, that what's your problem? You tell him, he goes, okay, write me a check for X number of grand, and I'll take care of it for you. Give me the paper, whatever. So it's with health coaching, it's like that. How's it going? What's happening? Okay, what's your main concern? How often does that bother you? How long has that been going on? What have you tried so far that obviously isn't working? And so on. And then it's okay, write me the check, pay me, and I will run the labs, investigate, like health detectives, find out all the healing opportunities. Are your hormones out of balance? And there's lots of them, lots of opportunity there. Is your immune system overactive or underactive? And neither one's good. How about your digestion? Are you actually breaking down and absorbing all that great expensive food you're buying and supplements, by the way, that you're buying, and you may not even be assimilating? And if they're if it's not working for you, maybe that's the case. And then detoxification, you can measure your liver function. Are you detoxifying the liver, the kidneys, the skin, the lungs, and the colon, the lymph system? These are your detoxifying organs. So why not get data on all that and get paid for it? And you can make a really good living. We and last, I'll just throw this out there and see and see what you have to say about it. But we we tell our graduates if you're not doing six figures, you're doing something wrong. And that for an independent health coach or personal trainer is good money. You're making over 100 grand a year on your own personal, professional services. And if you learn how to create additional streams of income along with that, you could be uh doing very well working from home. And uh it's just a growing, one of the fastest growing professions.

Yeah, I mean, it is. And one thing that I think is a silver lining of last year's and talked about with a lot of guests, is that people are really focused on health now. It's become the forefront of conversations in so many different ways. And I wish more people were talking about let's just improve our overall health and immune systems versus vaccines as the, you know, the the godsend solution, which we don't really know for sure is going to be the case. But health is an it's it's a common topic now, which maybe it wasn't two, three, four years ago. So it's a great time to be a health coach. And with the business models that you guys do, is it like so? If I start working with people as an FDN certified health coach, is it like a do you work with people on a monthly subscription basis?

Like they pay you X amount per month, and then you're building clients that way, or what's the There are people who use that called a membership model, even and and maybe personal trainers or who grew up on membership selling memberships might prefer that. Personally, I like the package deal. You pay me a certain amount, we're gonna run the labs, we're going to design a personalized dress for health success protocol, and then I'm gonna coach you up on integrating that protocol into your life over the next 90 days. So the minimum package should be about a 90-day package, for which you have a package price. Now, different practitioners, like we call them FDN practitioners, functional diagnostic nutrition. They're certified. They've uh again, they've got their background in biology, whatever, some college degrees, some certificates, and usually some work experience too. So they're coming to us for the icing on the cake, how to run the labs and what the protocols really need to be. And then on top of that, again, how do you present yourself to the public as a professional? And you have your name, your credentials, and you have your desire to help others, and your willingness to walk the talk, to set the example, and obviously you need to meet people, get into existence with the public, which now is so easy, and just this online thing. Technology for me when I started was a pager and a fax machine. That was high tech. Pager and a fax machine. Now, if you had to wait for a fax to print out, you'd be pulling your hair out, you know. So I had to go out to libraries and even to grocery stores and different places. I did health screenings. I would take my bone density testing machine out, and I had a route of 25-30 locations in the end to go out and meet people that way. And with the legal pad, give me your name and and your phone number, you know, and email addresses came along, obviously, and on. But so you can do this the old-fashioned way. Once again, COVID kind of put library speech and lectures out of the question, which is very unfortunate. But you can do the same thing online. You just have your meetups and your webinars and your uh Facebook groups, and you serve. And if you serve, you're gonna find people with a problem that you can help fix. That's probably number one. What problem can you help with? And the second, who do you serve? And where are they? Where do you find them? So they're all online. Everyone has a Facebook account, Instagram is has taken over for commercial use. I still like LinkedIn and these things that I've learned to use. But I I have staff that's so much better at it than me now, but I I know what's going on there. So if you want to do this professionally, you got to have your skill set pretty well developed. Again, FDN gives you all the skills, all the tools, everything's there. The interpretation, the clinical correlation guides, you'll know what you're doing and then who you're gonna serve. That's where that niching thing comes in. I I personally have one niche, and it's people who've tried everything. If you've tried everything, you haven't done the and so that covers everything from thyroid to allergies. You name it A disease. But there are people because they're health coaches who specialize in what they had coming into the game. Remember, I didn't have a health problem. I just loved helping people and wanted and was determined like consumer protection. What do you mean you've been to eight people and haven't found out what's wrong yet? That's a ripoff. Let's find out what's really wrong. And I'll just tell you one quick story. I know we're probably running out of time. Very early on, lady came in, and I was also trained, by the way, in myofascial therapy. So I did some body work on the chiropractic patients before they got their adjustment. And I was walking this lady back uh to the treatment room, and I would work her trigger points for, you know, just five minutes on her neck and shoulders, and then put a heat pack on her, and the doctor would come and adjust her after a few minutes. So I said, What's going on? You seem really down. She goes, Yeah, I'm just really down. What is it? Well, it's this weight. You can tell I'm 40 pounds overweight, and it's really upsetting me. I said, Well, what are you doing about it? She goes, There's nothing I can do. I'm on medication for the hives that I've been on for two years and I've gained 40 pounds. And I and she said, she went to her doctor a couple days earlier and complained, you know, hey, I I don't this medication for the hives is making me fat. And he said, Lady, you got your choice. This is according to her. You can be fat or you can have the hives take your pick. And she said, That's really depressing, doctor. He goes, I can write your prescription for antidepressants. And I'm listening to this, going, and I said to her, Susan, I go, I go, why didn't you try to find out why you get the hives? And her head snapped around looking at me so fast, I thought she wasn't going to need her chiropractic adjustment, you know, for that day. I mean, literally, what do you mean? I said, Yeah, we can run some tests and find out where the hives are coming from. Really? Are you kidding me? So obviously, we ran a couple tests. One of them showed what was bothering her, causing the hives, and got off that in nine days after we gave her results and recommendations. She called her doctor and said, I'm off the medication and I'm not taking it anymore. And I'm doing two things I haven't done in two years: taking hot showers and working out to the point of perspiration. She hadn't done those in two years because even on the meds, she would get the hives if she did those two things. So she was taking hot showers and working out to the point of perspiration and eating a lot better, and doing the rest of her protocol, and two weeks later she's lost 13 pounds because the body just started giving it up and just releasing. And that's just one of many early stories. I can tell you the same thing with k cases of asthma, ADD, ADHD, gone. Just by looking upstream a little bit. Remember, there's I'll finish with this. There's nature and the intelligence in each cell, you don't have to teach them what their job is. You coach up those kind of things. And then there's what's interfering, what's contributing to metabolic chaos. And man, food is huge on the list, and so are some other things. But when you just look at things from that broad perspective, you can do a lot of good in the world. And you can, if you want to be a health coach, get paid really well enough to live that lifestyle I talked about.

Yeah, that's awesome, man. So I know when it talks about recording, I want to make sure it's covered here. You mentioned that you have an internship program too. So tell us, well, give us a couple things. We're how do people, if they're interested, how do they learn more about functional diagnostic nutrition? And then yeah, tell us a little bit about the internship program too.

Um people would want to go to fdn.todayslash future fitness in honor of this podcast with you, Eric. So FDN.today slash future fitness. And that way we'd be able to see if your audience um has an interest. You might have me come back and talk about other things. And if you just go there, you can find out about the training program. We the internship is for graduates only. So we are now offering our interns, our graduates, a chance to intern in our public-facing program. In order to teach full-time, I closed my practice and I really miss it. So I finally, my staff and I decided we're gonna have our own practice, and it'll be like the number one FDN practice on the planet. So we are now offering our graduates to be able to intern for us and get that experience that they want. Remember, transformation is not something you can read or listen to. You have to experience it. And so, if you want to transform yourself into this professional practitioner, here's the transformation. Work for us for three or four or five customers, or two or one. Just so it's a whole internship. I actually call it uh preceptorship. And so it was it's designed along the lines of nothing to do with medicine, but doctors, once they get their license, will often spend a year traveling around the world observing other doctors, and they pay big money for that to go watch some German guy do some surgery or something. You pay to watch that guy. So it's a and they call it a preceptorship, where the precepts of what you learned in school are seen through in real life. And so we call it a preceptorship. And so that's if if someone is thinking about joining our course, you have that to look forward to. But the other side of it is that the public now has a place to go where they can hire an FDN that is going to be supervised by the gang, the whole school. And that's at fdnthrive.com, fdnthrive.com. But if you know your trainers want to go to that um fdn.todayslash future fitness.

Awesome. Reed, thank you for spending uh a portion of your Tuesday afternoon with me. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, or morning, I should say. It's kind of cool to revisit all this.

And congratulations on everything you're doing, Eric, since you graduated. You said you did apply this to some of your friends, family, or customers, and then to yourself, which is the main thing, walking that talk. And then you've gone on to pursue your own desires, and uh you're very successful. You've done what 700 and some lecture uh podcasts. That's amazing. Congratulations on all the thank you.

I really appreciate it. And yeah, thanks for coming on, ladies and gentlemen. Read Davis. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Finis. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.