Are You in Metabolic Chaos? Find Out With Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist, Reed Davis

Hi, I'm Dr. Tabitha, the functional gynecologist. I'm a board certified OB, GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey. And I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. I want to be your functional gynecologist. So welcome. Hi, ladies. So today we're having a great conversation with Reed Davis.

He is a board certified holistic health practitioner and a certified nutritional therapist. So that's pretty awesome. We are going to talk about comprehensive women's health and how it's never just one thing that's causing your issues. Right.

We need to look at you as.

A whole person, body, mind and spirit.

Spirit.

Everything that's, you know, in your environment and lifestyle, your choices, your food, all of it, and how it all interacts and plays on itself. So I love his perspective on things and the way that he, you know, goes about investigating what's going on with someone and gets them on the path to wellness.

So I love his approach.

You know, this is just a good.

Conversation, so I hope you enjoy it.

And, you know, don't forget, if you're.

Enjoying it, I would love for you to hit the subscribe button, let itunes and everybody know that you want to.

Hear more of this. That helps me and helps all the.

Women out there and then share this.

Episode with all your girlfriends, your sisters, your moms, your grandmas, your daughters, everybody, right?

So I love that we're supporting each.

Other and we're on this health journey together. I think it's so important. So today we're going to talk about just comprehensive women's health and a different approach to getting you feeling better again. It's not your typical going to the doctor, getting your prescription, and we'll see in three months. It's just a different way of looking at things. And we're going to talk about how your body handles things and tries to stay in balance and what prevents it from doing that.

So it's kind of an eye opening episode.

I really enjoyed it, so I hope you do too. But let me sing Reid's praises real quick. So he is an expert in functional lab testing and holistic lifestyle medicine. He's the founder of functional diagnostic nutrition and the functional diagnostic nutrition certification course with over 3,000 graduates in 50 countries. That is so awesome.

So Reid served as the health director.

At a wellness center in Southern California for over 10 years with over 10,000 clients. So he has done a lot of lab testing. Right. He's one of the most experienced clinicians in the world when it comes to this. Reed serves on the advisory board of the American Natural Wellness Coaches Board and the American association of Natural Wellness Coaches. He lives in the US and when he's not teaching the FDN certification course and helping his graduates build their private practices, he's usually found gardening or riding motorcycles.

He's an awesome guy with a great perspective.

And if you're interested in becoming a health coach because you have found that getting on this health journey has been so rewarding for you, and you're just.

Feeling inspired to help others and get others onto that path, like, becoming certified.

With Reed is one of the best things that you can do. His coaches are uber successful. They.

They help people all over the world. And so it's a really cool course.

If you want to do it. So we talk about that a little bit at the end, the links in the show notes. But I just want you to, like.

Listen, absorb, soak in the information and figure out what kind of golden nugget.

You can get out of this episode. Just one little thing that you can say, oh, my gosh, that makes so much sense. Take away, make some shifts in your life and start doing something different.

You're adding that up to all the.

Other golden nuggets from all the other episodes, and you are going to be a whole new woman in the next year. Right? So awesome. Here we go.

Well, welcome, Reid, to the Functional Gynecologist podcast.

I'm tickled to be here, Dr. Tabitha, so thanks for asking me.

You are so welcome. I'm excited for our conversation today because this is important information. Women need to get on board with taking back their health, right?

Yes. Yeah. I mean, if you don't take control of your health, someone else probably will. So listen, let's work towards being in control of ourselves and our own destinies, if you will. Especially today with the way things are. Can't put it in someone else's hands.

Yeah, exactly. And I don't know about you, but I feel like women drive the health or unhealthiness of their family. You know, they're kind of the ones in charge. Oftentimes they're buying the groceries, they're deciding what's for dinner. Are we going outside and playing and moving our bodies, or are we sitting around? Feel like women have so much of the control and we need to just embrace that, right?

Yeah, no kidding. I started working in a clinic 22 years ago and I had never had a health problem in my life. I've been the dentist a few times, you know, wisdom teeth or whatever, but I'd never been. And I didn't know what the medical system was like until I started working with women in a clinic. They were coming in and they'd already been to four or five or eight different practitioners and they're the ones who get frustrated and you know, desperately searching for help. So, you know, yeah, it was all women. And then once we had success, then they bring in their husbands, the non stubborn ones, and then. And their kids, you know, And I love working with kids too. So. Yeah, women and children mostly.

That's awesome. Yeah. I find that men are usually the last to jump on board, but when they do, it helps women be so much more successful because they're doing it together. What are the most common things that you're seeing women come into you and your practitioners complaining about?

It's chronic stress related disorders. We don't do anything with infectious disease or broken bones or drive by shooting victims or anything like that. No one's walking in our office with, with, you know, Ebola virus, these, these real emergent conditions. No, everyone's coming in with chronic stress related disorders. They're just really tired and overweight and they can't sleep and they got sinuses, allergies, moodiness, irritability, a lot of aches and pains and digestive disorders, obviously. You know, just the stuff that started off five years ago. You felt okay and then it slowly started to creep up on you. Now you kind of could be a wreck with multiple complaints. You know, you just know your life's not the way you want it. There's things about the way you look and feel. You want to change and you know it's going to require some effort. And so you got to have an expert you can rely on who's going to find out really what's, what's really wrong with you and fix that instead of just the prescription, you know, diagnose treatment. Here's your, you know, prescription. People aren't settling for that anymore. I think it's wonderful.

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. The things are so insidious, they just kind of add up slowly over time. So it's not like you realize necessarily you're sick or you're not well. You know, it's just some point you realize, I do not Want to feel like this. I am miserable most of the time and something must be going on, something must be wrong. And I hear the same thing all the time. They're just like, I'm not myself. I know I shouldn't be this exhausted. I'm not sleeping, sleeping, all of that, right?

Yes, yes. And as, as a functional medicine practitioner, you, you see that and you don't want to follow the typical algorithms that, that most doctors are required to follow. Yeah. People are coming in, I have a word for it. Metabolic chaos. There's just all of these things upstream that are out of balance or not working. Right. And, and then they interact with each other. So some of the underlying causes aren't even discoverable. There's no test for them and these kind of things. But you can have an effect on it. If you have a holistic lifestyle program along with whatever emergent things might need to be tweaked, then you get people on a path. So what we sell or enroll people in is a pathway. And I don't know a perfectly healthy person. I've been doing this 22 years. I don't know. Perfectly. Do you know one?

No.

They don't exist in this day and age. It's not possible.

Yeah, yeah. So people, you know, they have this chaos ongoing, and you can only sort it out by getting on that path and going through processes like starting to eat. Right. I mean, really right. For your type, we have the ways of figuring out the exact right diet and going to bed on time and exercising and looking for stress. There's so many stressors around in the environment. And then, of course, supplementation is important. I don't have my own brand or anything, but I know a lot about them and I teach all of that stuff, the investigation and the diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation.

Yeah.

So when you are talking to clients about, like, it's time to get on this path and go a different direction, do you give them any kind of timeline?

Yeah, you know, everyone's different.

Yeah.

So you, you probably want to start with their main complaint. Like if it's migraines, you know, you, you better find a pretty short path between having them and not having them, you know, so sometimes, you know, there's little tricks or we call that relief care, but once those are gone, then people go, well, I'm glad my migraines are gone, but, you know, I'm still tired, I'm not sleeping. So, you know, that's why I say it's a pathway. It's not just take this for your migraines or for your asthma, for your skin condition or for whatever it is, you've got to get people living right. And it begins with the first step. As far as timelines go, we want 90 days up front of a really strict narrow path. So if we're selling a path or we're enrolling people into a pathway, number one, the practitioner should be walking it themselves. So if your doctor is so.

Amen. Amen.

Yeah. Well, you obviously do, you know, and you know, even with your six kids and all that, you find time to prepare any nutritious meals, you go to bed on time, you know, you handle the stressors in an organized fashion. You don't let your life get out of control. So you want to set the example, but again, you're just enrolling people in that. And they're going to have to start with the first step. And it's going to vary from person to person. We find their weakest area, let's work on that. But I just wanted to quickly go back to the 90 day thing. So we enroll people in a 90 day program. They're used to going to a physician. You know, standard medicine is you run a test, yeah, here's your problem, here's your pills, and then I'll see you in 90 days or maybe longer. Right, Good luck with that. And we're like, well, no, we're going to run a few labs, not just one for one. We're going to look at some healing opportunities, then we're going to work together for 90 days.

Yeah.

See the difference? You know, it's like, let's do, let's. There's the path, there's the first night and then that's a bite sized piece. People can commit to 90 days. And it starts when we're looking at your lab results. You know, so it's not the day that you enroll. You're going to send you some kids. Most of these are at home testing. Like I know you use the Dutch test, that's an at home test. We have several others similarly could be done conveniently from your house. And then when you sit down to go over the results you get, the lifestyle program covers every cell in your body, every tissue, every organ, every system. And then, well, let's see, how are we going to implement this? And you got to work with the health coach or doctor with coaching skills or with the staff that can do the counseling part. I know you still work one to one with clients. And so that's why it's important to have an Enrollment thing, things they could do at home.

Yeah.

And I work side by side with my functional nutritionist because it takes a team, and it takes ongoing monitoring and accountability and reassurance and motivation and all these things that you're talking about that a coach or nutritionist can provide for someone. Because like you said, if you just hand them the plan and tell them to come back in 90 days, they're going to be the exact same. I did that for 10 years. I know how it works. It doesn't work, right.

Yeah. Yeah. Started off, like in the clinic as the patient educator. And so my talent became taking fairly complex information and making it simple, making it easy. And people would come in and there'd be a diagnosis and something they're working on. And I would say to them, you know, it's not coming in the office and getting your prescription refilled, or, you know, we also had chiropractic and acupuncture, and so there was treatments available. And I said, it's what you do at home that matters. So I became really an expert in the lifestyle program. Like, what do you mean? Well, if you're a chiropractic, if your neck hurts, you're coming in for adjustments. Are you going home? And stretching and strengthening and improving your range of motion and, you know, keeping good posture and you're sleeping. Right. And, you know, so I started developing home programs based on their individual thing, and it turned into this whole just lifestyle medicine program that we teach now.

Yeah. And it's pretty amazing. You have a huge program of practitioners. Right. Over 500 practitioners that you can oversee and how people get on that right path. I love it.

Yeah. So, you know, again, I think what's important to get back to that women care more about their health, and they do more, and they actually live longer. The average age of death is, I think it's 78 for women, but it's. It's about 74 for men even. That's way too young. That's way too early to be kicking the bucket, you know?

Yeah.

My mom's 91, still going strong, you know.

That's awesome.

Yeah. My Grandma just turned 94, and it's like, my other grandma's lived that long.

So I know I'm going to be here a while.

I better, you know, at least have a body that I feel good in and do stuff with, you know, like, that's how I started to see it. I used to see it as, like, oh, it matters what it looks like. Now it's like, how does it Function and feel. That's what's important.

Yeah, and that raises the question of genetics. You know, there's a lot of ability to test your genetics these days, but you can't treat genes. I mean, actually the new vaccines are about treating the genes. But forget that you can't treat genes, I can't treat genes. People can't treat their own genes. They can only control the expression of those genes. So when, when you said what kind of problems do I see in the office? It's, it is your genetic potential. I see people with genetic potential and you know, that's usually a pretty good thing. You know, they, they've, you know, not programmed to die at 30 or 40 or 50. So they have this genetic potential now. It gets signaling from the environment and from your lifestyle. So genes by themselves are just information and it gets expressed in a healthy way. Hopefully you able to detoxify your body and digest your food and other things. Some of that is regulated by genes. But also the idea of getting macular degeneration or diabetes or there's genes that express in a very negative way, prostate cancer, you name something. So what do we do? Well, if ill health is the result of your genetic code getting signaling from environment, lifestyle, we better make that environment and lifestyle the best we could possibly make it. That's how you control genetic expression. Again, my mom's 91. If you don't mind, I'll tell you a quick funny story because one of the things that is signaling, if you will, is our self signaling what we tell ourselves, how we view the world. And so we're actually, you know, when you get up in the morning, go, life sucks, you know, well, it's probably gonna suck, you know, for you, but if you get up, you can actually make a conscious decision that you're gonna have a positive mental attitude. That's a form of signaling that affects genetic expression and the, the expression of health. And so my mom last, last Thanksgiving I was visiting her in another state and she was sitting in her car in my sister's driveway and she's 90 then. And my brother in law is about 65. He's putting air in her tires. He's just checking his mother in law's tires. You know, nice thing to do all that, right? And his name's Ernie. So my mom goes, hey Ernie, who's gonna check the air in my tires when you're gone? She said it so innocently, it was like, that's her attitude. You just like, as if she's gonna outlive him. So you get. You have your genes, but you have the signaling and that's the key. Including how you view the world.

Yeah, exactly.

So I love it.

You're really focused on just overall healthy, positive lifestyle, tuning in your diet, getting your body moving. So when you have a woman who seems like she's totally hormonally imbalanced, she's overstressed, life is, you know, she's. She's let stress take away, take control of her life. Where are you starting with them?

You know, I start with some lab work. Actually. I don't work with a person that won't let me get some data. This data is just. It's just information for me. I'm not looking to diagnose and treat a specific thing. I have a different philosophy on it, that there are functional labs. A lot of these are research use only. They're not covered by insurance, therefore, and they're not truly diagnostic like a physician might use. So they're again, gathering data on how things are functioning. I check six main areas. The hormones, the immune system, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and then the nervous system balance. Because in 22 years, and having run thousands of labs and thousands of people, it's kind of my claim to fame. I ran more labs than anybody, almost anybody on the planet. And I made observations. This is back in the day. I had some good alternative mentors. I made these observations and everyone coming in, remember, mostly women, they would have this complaint or that complaint was anything from, you know, perimenopause to osteoporosis to, you know, prediabetes to you just foggy thinking. Fibromyalgia was really big back then. And so I would say, look, you know, I'm. You've already had enough diagnoses and treatments. You know, that's like. Guess it's you just. You just. Trial and error. Try this. Try this is why people go from one practitioner to the next. Yeah, I might have been number six or eight or ten. I would say, look, I want to be the last one. You got to let me do some, some research here. You got to let me be your health detective. And I don't want to look in one room or two rooms. I want to look in the whole mansion, the whole house. So again, top to bottom, hormone, immune digestion, detoxification, energy production, nervous system. By the way, it spells hidden H I, D D E N. So it's very easy to remember. And I found that I could identify these imbalances and dysfunctions, and some things were okay. But some things weren't. And when we just again, don't diagnose, treat specifics. That's number one. And number two, no drugs. We're a member of the American association of Drugless Practitioners. I believe they're important sometimes, and I have taken a few in my time when I just had to. But generally they don't heal anything. They're for palliation, and that's not a bad thing. But if you want to fix stuff, you look at these drugs markers upstream, and you start correcting the reason you got the imbalance in the first place. Most of it is stress related, but there's all these different forms of stress. So our protocols are all natural and they involve a lot of behavior changes. So I can give you another acronym to describe it. It's D R E S S and I already had mentioned it. DRE S Diet, Rest Exercise, Stress Reduction Supplementation. That's a holistic lifestyle grounding program that's good for everybody. It works on every cell, every tissue, every organ, every system in your body. And simultaneously, by the way. So if you have a multi causal, you know, funnel of complaints, you ended up down here all in that metabolic chaos state. Multiple complaints. Well, you've got to go up and use a multiple healing approach. And it's just like magic how it works. Now, we don't guarantee results, but we guarantee we're here for the right reason and reasonable results. Like, if you can just tell us what you really want. Let's work on it.

Yeah. Oh, I agree so much with everything you're saying. I just think you're right on. And, you know, I feel like people are still in the mindset of, you know, the pill for the ill. You know, they just want the quick fix. They want the doctor to fix them. And it really is about taking ownership and doing what you need to do on a daily basis, on an ongoing basis. It's not like I'm going to do this for 30 days and then I'm good. You know, I get so many women coming to me saying, well, I did hold 30. I felt great. What's wrong? Why, why do I feel like crap now? Well, you went off the whole 30, right, and you went back to your old lifestyle. So I just think people need to really wrap their mind around the idea that they need to change the life that they're living. And do you find that to be the most challenging part of the work?

It can be very challenging depending on the complexities of mental emotional conditioning. You know, just the. Sometimes it's so easy to figure out what's really wrong. Upstream again. Hormone immune digestion, detoxification. That alone we find everybody's got some kind of dysfunction. They have dysbiosis, they got the cortisol to DHEA is at a ratio. They've got things going on, toxic livers and what have you. And they'll start off okay. They start, you know, really thinking more about the supplements than the rest of the program, like. Like, you know, to tell me what to take. And that's because they're conditioned that there's a pill for the ill, as you just said. And, you know, if it's that you have to eat right, like every meal, like, you. You can't cheat. Or if you do, it's once a month, you know, like, you can have your pizza and beer if you just gotta. And so it's. If people can stick. Which is why health coaching is so important. The idea of setting goals and things. I don't want to digress too much from the answer, but it is. It does require a lifestyle change, but it doesn't have to be painful. You know, it. You can do things to overcome those mental, emotional challenges, like the habitual eating of crap, if you don't mind me saying, it's so habitual, it's unconscious behavior. And so unconscious behavior is 90% of most people's behavior. They're very not even conscious of what they're doing. They're going to the fridge and grabbing the ice cream or the. Whatever it is, and they're not even conscious they're doing it.

Oh, yeah, I lived that. I remember when the Lose it app came out and I got it on my phone and I thought, okay, I'm just going to track my food. And I was stunned at how often I just subconsciously grabbed the cookies and ate them and never even realized that happened, you know, And I was like, wait, I didn't log that. I just ate that cookie and it happened all day long. You know, I was living this crazy, stressful life as an obstetrician. And so, you know, I've learned a lot. I was my own guinea pig. But I think that's key. Like, we're just going through the day so mindlessly and just putting things in our mouth that are around and available or we're. We're filling our stomachs instead of nourishing our bodies. Right. You know, you're not thinking about food as nourishment. And so I think that's a huge point. Super important.

Yeah, it's. It's really critical because people, let's say they go to their pantry because they're kind of craving something. And even that craving is usually the result of something. It could be an imbalance. You're not eating the right amount of protein, fat and carbs, and you get poor energy production. I mentioned that as one of the key things. So when you don't have the right ratio of protein, fat and carbs, you will have cravings slightly different. So then you go to the pantry and you might for a split second be conscious that this is bad for me. Like those chocolate chip cookies, I probably shouldn't really eat them, but I'm just going to have them this one time. And you just can't overcome that. And again, you get that little glimpse of, I shouldn't be doing this, and then your subconscious behavior patterns and just, I'm going to do it anyway. And that it just dominates. So even just practicing consciousness and awareness helps you with that behavior. That's something a health coach can help people with. Let's be more conscious of our behavior. And you'd be surprised at what you might do. And once you get a little bit of success, because inertia is the problem, you can't get the ball rolling. But once you start, hey, you know, the scale is actually going down. I'm actually losing a few pounds here and I actually wake up in the morning with more energy and I actually have clearer thinking. I think I'm answering questions more succinctly and clearly I'm not going. Or like that. You're not losing your keys, whatever. You know, when you have a little bit of success, you might have to get hammered a little bit. Like, just please go with the program and. And you actually see results, then it gets a little easier, don't you think?

Oh, definitely. Give them some quick, easy wins. Like you said. Start with their most, you know, their biggest complaint and try to get some relief on that. Whether it's migraines or rash or insomnia. Get that dialed in. And then they start to trust you and feel like, yeah, okay, maybe this stuff actually works. And then they start feeling motivated to put in more effort.

Right?

Yeah, it's well or, yeah, it is effort, but it starts also coming easier. So you just become more conscious and you're able to follow healthier patterns a little bit better. And then the other thing is to teach others to do it. So as soon as you realize that, you know what, you're actually, you're setting the example, you started, you started off the program Today with moms are basically in charge. And that's not a bad thing. You know, I grew up in the old fashioned world where my dad's job was just to take care of my mom. And he did. He always made sure mom was happy, you know, just with whatever she needed and wanted to do and, and things like that. And he, he was a good dad too. He played with us and everything, but, but man, he really took care of my mom. And then mom was in charge of all the meals, what we wore, you know, going to school and music lessons and I had art lessons. My mom thought I was going to be an artist or, you know, whatever it was, you know, so moms have big job and today's world is so different. I think it's very challenging. I wouldn't want to be a mom today at all.

Think, yeah, it's definitely challenging. And you know, I would love to hear what you're seeing most commonly in these women. You know, over in the Midwest. I'm in Michigan. I see a lot of insulin resistance and prediabetes and it is stemming from their crazy stressed out lives, their increased wine production. You know, they're having a glass of wine to handle and get rid of the stress in the evening, then they can't function and wake up in the morning, so they're drinking caffeine and they're in that roller coaster. And so that's pushing them down that diabetes path. Are you seeing that over on the.

Yeah, yeah. Well, pre diabetes, you know, the insulin resistance and what they call metabolic syndrome. And so therefore you've got weight problems and then weight problems usually get depression, a lot of depression and, and anxiety. But you see the opposite too. You see women that just go, they just are, you know, not anorexic, but they're just really super concerned and they're spending all this money on surgery and unhealthy stuff. And then, yeah, the alcoholism and drug use and things also. Thyroid is huge. Do you see a lot of thyroid in your condition?

Yeah, we have a lot of autoimmune thyroid, tons of Hashimoto's here. I think because we're on the Great Lakes of Michigan. There was just so much toxic burden dumped into our lakes, you know, the past couple centuries that it's finally catching up with us. And so many people just have autoimmune disease now from their high toxic burden. And you know, we were in this state of winter for so many months out of the year. We're not moving our bodies, we're eating a lot of comfort food, a lot of gluten, you know, things like that. And a lot of it.

Yeah, I feel, I feel you on that. I actually grew up on the Great Lakes. I'm in Southern California now, but I grew up on Lake Ontario and Lake Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. I was all over that area. So I'm a good sailor. But you mentioned the toxic burden, and I'm just going to go back to. You have your genetic potential and you have signaling and it's the environment, which is horrible. And then you have your lifestyle, which could be, you know, also a negative signaling. A lot of it's just negative. If you sit around watching tv, eating crap, that's a ton of negative signaling every single day. And I think we would be remiss to not point out the accumulativeness. Yeah, you know, you're not, you know, people had shorter lifespans 150 years ago, but they're taking the average lifespan back then. You had infectious disease, like all over the place. Your kids would catch something, they'd all die.

Yeah.

You know, and your wife too, or your spouse too. You know, maybe the whole family, because. So the average lifespan was shorter, but now the, you know, we're living longer because we've eliminated those kind of deaths. But I don't think we have the super high quality of life. You know, people are almost all in a downward spiral, even if they're living longer. And so, yeah.

They definitely had a longer health span. Right. They were healthy up until the end because they weren't dealing with all of this stuff. So what kind of testing do you typically recommend from the get go?

Yeah, so yeah, okay, we were talking about that. Like, so what do you first do? We run, I run five labs in every person. That's the deal. Because I've got to get these individual points or dots if you want, and then connect them. It's in the connecting of these dots.

Yeah.

So you, you mentioned, or I mentioned thyroid, and you mentioned autoimmune, which is even worse. Thyroid. You know, so typically you go to a physician and you say, I'm tired and fatigued, I've got weight, I can't lose it, my hair's thinning, my extremities are cold or even numb, I'm constipated. And the physician goes, that sounds like thyroid. That is a classically or traditionally reliable cluster of symptoms that says low thyroid. So that physician may even run a thyroid test and then pat him or herself in the back. I found your problem. It's this Low thyroid. That's not the problem, I guarantee it. That's the body's response to the problem, which is all of the various stressors which you're trying to force your body to shut down a little bit to conserve resources, to hibernate a little bit, if you will. So low thyroid is very typically just a response to the environment. Again, it's so stressful that your body thinks you should conserve resources and slow down metabolism and, you know, put on a few pounds to protect you and on and on and on. So I think that, you know, again, that's kind of why we go upstairs and I always run five labs on every person. I don't trust one. The one lab theory, like the cluster symptoms test. This. Yep, found your problem. Here's how we're going to treat the paper for you again. Here's your prescription. Come back in three months. I insist on running a hormone test that covers a little bit of the immune system digestion. We check the immune system out, especially gut. The gut is 80% immune system detoxification. We look for congested liver. Those four alone in a food sensitivity test. That's five labs, you know, so we're going to run probably either the Dutch or saliva test for the hormones. I run a metabolic wellness panel for oxidative stress, digestion and liver congestion. I run a mucosal barrier test because the biggest source of autoimmune. Autoimmune is, you know, leaky gut. We like to look at zonulin, the histamine diamine oxidase ratio, things like that. And then I run a pathology screen on every person and I run the food sensitivity test. That test alone has helped so many people. You know, looking backwards. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. I just want to reiterate the most important point that you said the thyroid is the canary in the coal mine.

Right.

It is just a response to your body that something is going on. It's not the cause and the reason. If women could understand that, that is your body's way of saying, hey, something's out of balance and I'm taking the brunt of the work and we're going to slow down, get into survival mode. You know, we're going to turn down the metabolism, turn down all those thyroid functions, like you said, because we're going to hunker down. I think so many more women wouldn't give up on their health journey. They would continue to question because they get this answer of low thyroid or hypothyroidism, and they're like, oh, okay, that, that must be what's wrong and why doesn't my medicine work? And then they just live like that. So I think that was such an important point that you made. Like that is a question where you need to go next, what, what's going on? What's causing this hypothyroidism? So thank you for pointing that out.

Super important.

Yeah. It's kind of like when I started in the business. Remember, I've always been in the alternative area. Never in traditional medicine. I don't have any background in that area. I don't really study disease and drugs. So in the day when I very first started, everything was adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue, adrenal fatigue. And there was these analysis we did that said, oh, you've got adrenal fatigue. And then we would give people things to do. A lot of it would actually work because we were reducing stress on the adrenals. There really was never anything wrong with the adrenal glands themselves. They weren't really tired. They just started, you know, metabolic processes changed a little and things got out of balance. Mostly the cortisol, which is your stress hormone. And it's very, it's very catabolic. It breaks your body down. That would go high. Well, the dhea, which is counter regulatory and actually balances it out, that would go low. They're both made in the adrenals. So when that was out of whack, we said, oh, you have adrenal fatigue. There really was nothing wrong with the adrenals. It was a lot of the signaling and maybe the receptorship a little bit. And then of course the output. And the adrenals also output aldosterone, which controls your electrolytes in your body. And you know, that can lead to a lot of problems too. So the adrenals weren't really getting tired. And hypothyroidism is kind of like the new adrenal fatigue. Oh, it's. Your thyroid is tired. Hypo. It's the signaling. It's being suppressed in some ways and it's not expressing, you know, keeping your metabolism up for a reason.

Yeah, yeah. I truly believe that our bodies are made to be healthy and maintain homeostasis and that our organs are not just naturally going to go dysfunctioning, you know, and cause disease. Like, that's not how bodies are created. We are doing this to our bodies from, you know, what we've created in society, all the toxins, everything else. And we need to remove those impedances. We need to support with nutrition and you know, it's like the idea that your gallbladder's sluggish and it's not functioning well, so let's take it out. Like that's not how our bodies were created to be handled, you know, just like you overstress the adrenals. It's not the adrenals fault. They're doing their job. They're protecting you. They're downregulating for a reason, you know, and if we can understand that and embrace it, I think we'll all be better off.

Yeah, precisely. Let's ask your audience a question. Do you think you have to teach any cells what their job is?

Right.

Obviously not. You know, there's an innate intelligence, and you just reminded us of it when you said you truly believe the body is designed to be healthy and that basically it's there to be screwed up by us. You know, we're not saying people don't have some genetic defects, mutations and things. That happens again, I think, because of the environment, but it happens. But otherwise you're designed to be healthy. The body seeks balance. It's called homeostasis in every cell. And there are all these fundamental homeostatic controls that we know about and that we can measure and that makes sense. And that. And then there's. Again, it's the signaling that those systems receive that will throw them out of balance. If they stayed a balance long enough, you ruin things. So, I mean, I could give examples. Mostly I do this for my students. I'm not sure the audience would be into it much. What do you think?

Yeah, I would love that.

Let's a take, take how. How do you get unhealthy? So the body seeks homeostasis. You don't have to teach any cells what their job is. Those cells know if you know what kind of tissue they belong in, if they're brain tissue or muscle tissue. And everything works together and knows what everything else is doing too. I don't want to sound like the wacky guy from California, but it's the same intelligence that holds the planets in their, you know, proximity to each other and makes them all go around the way they do and things like that. It's actually quite a remarkable intelligence, if you will. So we don't have to teach it anything. We just have to not screw it up. And let's take one thing we could measure where the. There's a very narrow balance. Blood pH. So your blood has a pH of about 7.4. That's a tiny bit alkaline. If it was acidic. What would happen, you would just evaporate. The acid would just eat up your blood vessels and your organs and things. So it's slightly alkaline, but then the range that that's allowed to fluctuate is about one point, maybe like a half a point. Go from 7.4 to 7.4 and a half maybe, or 7.3 and a half. But if it went either higher or lower than that, you could die like very quickly. And so there's homeostatic mechanisms in place to make sure the blood stays that narrow in range in terms of ph. Let's take a different marker. Let's take blood glucose. Well, heck, your blood glucose can fluctuate this much. You can go from 90 easily on a fast to eat a meal, it could go up to 130, 140, 180, 80. So you've got this wide range. So what I'm trying to show you is that there's flexibility built in to certain systems. But if you were to continuously stretch it out and stretch it out like you're constantly eating too much carbs, you're constantly spiking your blood sugar. And yes, it's designed to go from here to here, but if you keep it up here all the time, pretty soon it's going to stretch a little bit higher and it's going to stretch a little bit higher. And it's like a rubber band. It can only take so much stretching before the rubber band gets, you know, dried out and it's, it's unable to maintain that homeostasis on its own. So you would need intervention. And I'm giving you just a rough idea of why. You know, we have balance which is required, and we have resiliency so we can stay alive and handle stress. Various stressors of various, various input signaling. But you can't take advantage of it for long. It will accumulate. It will do you in. You'll end up with again, a cascade happens. And you know, this stretching out means this has got to get stretched out and something else is going to get deficient. You know, it all works together and it accumulates. I think we should probably go back to the fact that all of these negative signaling from the environment and lifestyle are accumulative. Again, you're stretching the resiliency of whatever system you're talking about. And it kind of, I won't say it wears out because most of it's restorable. Most of it's restorable. So if you lived yourself into that problem slowly over time, don't you think you can live yourself out of that problem if you started getting the right signaling back that you could return things. There's some things that are ruined. Like if you had your gallbladder out, that's not going to grow back. You're always going to be dealing with a bile insufficiency. Otherwise, if you haven't had parts taken out, just please don't get your parts taken out unless you have to. So you see what I'm getting at? You lived yourself into it, you can live yourself out of it.

Yeah, I think we need to have.

Patience with our bodies. You know, we're under this idea that things happen overnight. People go to the doctor, they get their yearly blood work, they're told their blood works fine, you're normal, it's fine, you're normal, it's fine, you're normal, it's fine. Next year you have diabetes. That is not the truth. You were not fine and then got diabetes. You were trending toward diabetes for years and years and years and no one told you that. And now that is not something that develops overnight. So I think you're right on with that. It's just, it's a process that happens after your systems lose their resiliency. I imagine all our different systems just ping ponging off of each other and trying to support each other when one's out of balance. And when you get enough of them out of balance at the same time, nobody can juggle the balls anymore.

Right.

Nobody can carry the load load anymore. So I. And just because you were told that overnight doesn't mean it happened overnight. And it's going to take that long to get back into balance too. So people need to have some patience.

Yeah, I mean talking about it philosophically is fun. I like describing things in a way people can understand. Like what you just said. I would put as let's take two sawhorses and put it a two by four on it and then start putting bricks in the middle. Stacking bricks and stacking bricks. And your life is stacking bricks, different types of bricks, like poor diet. You don't, don't sleep right. You don't exercise enough, you get all these various stressors, you're adding bricks and adding sprigs and bricks and over the years that thing's going to start to bend and then eventually it's going to start to crack. You're going to hear like, and pretty soon one more brick and like that. So we could do as health practitioners is start removing the bricks. We identify with the lab testing, you know, Food sensitivities, parasites, bacteria, funguses, viruses, things like hyperpermeability of the gut, dysbiosis, and various, you know, versions of that and all these things. So. And we can slowly take the bricks off. If people would stop looking for the quick fix and really look into these ways of this holistic grounding and the data that's available so easily, I think we could do a lot of good in the world.

Well, I can see why you're so successful, because this comprehensive approach is what works, right? That is what actually works. And, you know, we're talking about moms and everything. And I think that the programs that you're running and the coaches that you're training are an amazing opportunity for a lot of moms who want to take control of their health and then teach other people. Right. And go out and be coaches themselves, because I think that can be super rewarding and keep you going and keep you on track. Like you said, teach others what you've learned. So how can my listeners potentially get into being a health coach or being a nutritional practitioner with you?

Yeah, there's a URL website you can go to. It's FDN today. DrTabitha. Dr. Tabitha. So FDN stands for Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. That's the school I created, the system I created, and we just call it FDN. So there are. I've actually trained 300 FD enters, but I have 500 who are in my professional membership group that I started. So we're around. But FDN today, DrTabitha. Because we'd like to know if Dr. Tabitha's audience is interested. And that's our way of finding out, you know, if you just use that URL and, you know, we're here. My mission is to create an army of natural practitioners who look at underlying causes and conditions and, by the way, who are not opposed to medicine. We actually work hand in hand. We understand very well what is our backyard and what is that of a physician who does attendant care, who does emergent issues. Good example is if you have headaches and they're constant every day, and they pound and pound and things like that. Well, a physician could run some tests that we can't. I can't do brain scans and MRIs and CT scans or cysts in your liver and things. So it's really good to get both. Like, but if your physician has sort of turned you away, like, nothing's wrong with you. You're not crazy. Yeah, you're not crazy if you don't feel the way you want to or like how you used to, there is something wrong, something that's again, out of balance. It's losing resiliency. And we can. That's what we're there for. Not to practice medicine, but just to identify healing opportunities and then build health.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I kind of feel like a unicorn in the fact that I do both. You know, I do the conventional side, I do the functional medicine side. And I just think it's so important to realize that you don't. You don't treat a diagnosis. You get the body back into balance. And those diagnosis are just something that helps with billing and coding and insurance and everything like that. But really that is not the problem. So people who are focused on like getting the right diagnosis, like the certain autoimmune issue or whatever, it's about inflammation, it's about mitochondrial dysfunction, you know, it's about imbalance. And so people got that bigger picture and worked with, you know, someone who's just trying to get the body back into its best state of health. They're going to have the most success. That's the truth.

Yeah, I know. You meant. You just mentioned the algorithm that I was talking about. The idea of. Physicians are required by their standard of care and also by the insurance companies who are sending their patients to just follow certain algorithms. The diagnosis and treatment model is the biggest part of that. You have to have a DX code and a CPT code and then they kind of dictate how you have to bill that and what the next step is, what that procedure is going to be. And the best physicians like yourself, the ones who are trying to navigate, that's the sort of business algorithm. But here's what my patient really needs, right. It may not be offered within that algorithm. And so that's where, you know, the health coaching thing and the collaboration that you have ongoing with your functional nutritionist net are really critical. So Good on you, Dr. Tabitha, for being, you know, beyond the algorithm.

Thank you. It's been a long road and, you know, I just want other physicians to see the light, you know, because once you know better, you do better. And it's a broken system. We're all caught up in it, and we just need to realize that there's a better way to look at things. You know, I often see women who don't have a diagnosis yet because they aren't there, but they are on that path, and you got to turn around and go the other direction. I mean, it's just important to focus more on prevention and reversal than waiting for that diagnosis. It's so much harder to get back from diabetes than it is from pre diabetes. You know, it's just huge difference.

So.

Yeah, good on you.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for all the work you're doing. You're making huge difference for women and for men all over the world, so that's awesome. I'll have all the links in my show notes, but where else can my listeners follow you?

We have social. Yeah, we have. We have social things. You can put that in the notes, too. There's a website. It's FDN Thrive. Like, Thrive Thrive. You know, FDNThrive.com. that's a pretty cool place. There's a. There's a podcast listed there where we interview different people. We should have you on Dr. Tabitha. Okay. I'll refer you to my blog, my podcaster, and we'll get. I'm looking forward to working with you because you're. You're out of the box, and people need that. And the last thing I'll say about it is it makes for happier doctors, too. Even though a lot of them make a lot of money in the old algorithm, they can't be that happy because they know that their. Their customers, if you will, their patients are frustrated and looking around. You know, they're looking around for something else besides what they're given. So they. You obviously seem like you're happier.

Yeah, I'm much happier because my patients actually get better. Right. They don't just complain about the same thing year after year. Gaining another five pounds, feeling more tired, you know, like right now.

I agree totally. What a concept. Your pace injection. Imagine. Imagine.

Yeah.

Good on you. And thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for being an awesome guest, and we'll talk to you soon.

All right, ladies. I hope you got something out of that episode. I really enjoyed talking to Reed. I think everything he's doing is amazing. And he's right on. To actually reclaim your health and feel amazing and vibrant and have energy and have your body function functioning and doing everything you want it to do, it's a journey. It's not an overnight pill or supplement. Right. It takes some work, and you can get to the point where that's just your new life, and it's not full of effort and it's not difficult. You know, I went through that myself, finally coming to terms with not eating gluten. I felt like a victim for a while while, like, oh, poor me, I can't eat gluten. I'm missing out on all of this stuff. But when I shifted my mindset and started thinking and realizing I'm so blessed, I found my problem. And when I don't eat gluten, I don't have pain, I don't have depression, I don't have eczema. My bowels work. Like, that was my focus. And I felt so blessed that I was able to fix those things. And so, so I don't feel bad not eating gluten anymore. I don't feel deprived. I feel amazing and blessed that I figured out my problem and that I actually am in control of how I feel. And so it's super empowering when you really take ownership of your health journey. So I really encourage you to do that because you are the only one who can make yourself feel better and get back into balance. And I'm a doctor, but that doesn't mean I can fix you. I can only guide you and help you along the way and be your cheerleader. Like, I'm totally down with that. And I will help you see where your imbalances are and where we need to work on. And I will be there cheering you on, hugging you, being here for you every step of the way. But I can't do the work. You have to do the work work. So if you are, like, ready to do that work with me, I would love to help you. You know, I'm licensed in over half the country. I think I'm up to 25, 26 states, something like that, because it's just my mission to help women reclaim their health. But you have to be ready to take ownership, like I said. And I can guide you and we can do this together and we can get you feeling amazing and living your best life. So if that is something you're interested in, Definitely go to www.doctortabitha.com. it's three A's, no eyes. Or you can call my office. The links are all in the show notes. I would love to work with you if you are ready to do the work. So go out, have a K. Kick ass week, ladies. I'm praying for you. It can only get better, right? Let's just embrace that idea, stay positive and keep moving forward. Bye, guys.