What Does a Day in The Life of An FDN Trainee Look Like?

Introduction

[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Well, hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka, Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show about what a day in the life of an FDN trainee looks like.

Apologies for the little bit of a change in audio quality. Normally, I have a pretty cool setup because obviously I podcast all the time. We are on the road today, and unfortunately, we’ll have to do this on the phone. Thankfully it will be just me, so it’s a little easier when it’s only one person on the phone. It’s sounds atrocious when it’s a couple of people. And it’s going to be another short, sweet episode as we continue our intro to FDN series.

If you are somehow clicking on this one and don’t know what’s going on yet, basically because of a large influx of people checking out FDN recently, due to some marketing stuff we’ve been doing, we wanted to make sure that we had the right information for them. It can be really tough and even sometimes, I guess, intimidating when someone is clicking on a podcast and we’re 260 episodes in acting like everyone already knows all the terms and stuff like that.

Of course, we want to be respectful to our main audience, and that’s actually why we did this. Because we realized if we do this once, we never actually have to do it again. We can make it a series that is right on the website. When people click on the podcast now, they can see our intro series, or they can just go to our normally scheduled episodes. So, everyone kind of wins in the long term.

An FDN Trainee: Open Enrollment

With that said, the main thing that we were going to talk about today is what the day in the life of a trainee might look like in terms of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. If you missed the other episodes, I highly recommend going and checking them out. It’s not a requirement for this one per se, but I am going to reference things that came up in the last three episodes. They are best listened to in order. I will have those all in the show notes below for you guys. Go check them out. They are all pretty much the length of a third of a normal podcast, about 15 to 20 minutes a pop.

What would the day in the life of a trainee or FDN graduate look like? A lot of people do ask this. They’re wondering what the course is like. Is it self-paced? Can I join at any time? Everything that I’m about to say is true at the time of recording this and has been true for years for the most part. So, it’s not like it’s going to change anytime soon or I’m going to list off any things that we have prospects of changing. There’s nothing like that.

This is pretty much the way it is at FDN. When you enroll in the course, you do have the ability to enroll at any time. We have open enrollment. The reason that we do it that way is because, thankfully, we are big enough now that we’re able to have the team of mentors and staff members that need to help the trainees always available. They are always available to help the people actively going through the course. So, that’s not a big issue for us whatsoever. That’s really nice.

An FDN Trainee: Payment Plans

In addition, since the course is self-paced, that is correct, the idea that we would prevent you from joining at any time when you can basically do this on your own time, would just not be congruent with what we’re trying to achieve here. Right?

We want this to be something that someone can come through and give as much effort as they’d like to give or are able to give at any given time. That’s kind of our philosophy with this. It’s how we like to do the course, and it translates really well into our work, in my opinion. Because as an FDN graduate, there are structures to how you should run an FDN practice, but there’s a lot of flexibility even there as well. We’ll touch on that soon.

So, you join the course, you click “enroll now”, make the purchase, and you get yourself involved. We do have several different options for enrolling, by the way. We have payment plans that are available right on the website. You can see that under “enroll now”, functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/enroll-now-health-certification/, and you can see those options right there. Of course, it’s very easy to find it on the website too, which is just functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.

We do have payment plans. They’re all in-house, not something that you need a credit check for. It’s not an approval process on our end. You just click the option and will automatically get access to the course. We do have, at the time of recording this, a third-party option through something called Affirm, that can be useful in very specific situations.

An FDN Trainee: Login Instructions

I wouldn’t necessarily go do that on my own. Book a call with one of the course advisors first. That’s myself and other team members that talk to people about the FDN course and see if it’s a good fit for them, or if we need to refer them out to another program, or maybe really going through a program isn’t the right call for them at all at the moment. We advise them one way or another.

Thankfully, the bulk of the people that call is pretty much in alignment with the course, but I would say about 20% of people get referred out in one way or another to something else, or just not doing a course right now in its entirety because of the fact that they might be sick or struggling with health issues.

So, you enroll on the course, you’re good to go. Within 10 minutes of clicking that purchase button and the payment going through, you will receive your login instructions. The reason it takes about 10 minutes is just because there’s several email automations that have to occur, but it’s always within 10 minutes. You get all your stuff to your email.

If you have unsubscribed to us in the past for whatever reason, I can’t imagine why you would do that, but if you have, the login stuff will not work if you use the same email that you unsubscribed with. So, make sure to reach out to us if you do not get your login stuff. When you get that stuff though, you’ll have access to the course immediately. You’ll be able to do the first module within that same 10-minute span of you signing up.

An FDN Trainee: Facebook Trainee Group

Also, you’ll get some terms of service agreements, and you’ll want to get those signed. Get the information submitted to us so that we can ship out your lab kits. Because if you don’t know this by now, we do include four test kits in the cost of tuition and an additional test that’s not actually a test kit. We can touch on that a different time. But you will get over a thousand dollars, basically, worth of lab tests going through the course, which is really awesome.

Then you will get access to our Facebook trainee group, something that is definitely not going anywhere. Maybe we might use a different platform in the future, but certainly we’re never going to change the trainee group thing. It’s been a huge success for us. When I went through the course over six years ago now, I actually didn’t have access to that group because it didn’t exist.

I will say the number of insights that you can get from being in there, the connections with the community, just being able to kind of tag off other people, see where they’re at in the course, can be inspirational. There’s a lot of things that you can get from it. That stuff’s just invaluable. Not to mention, you can ask questions in there at any time that you would like, and we do have staffed mentors in there ready to help and ready to answer the questions.

But what’s really fascinating about the trainee group (and we also have a graduate group, mind you), is that even though we have staffed mentors in these groups to help out and answer, what happens is people in the group start helping out even though they’re FDNs, even though they’re not getting paid to help.

An FDN Trainee: FDN Support

It’s such a community-based place that you’ll go in there, say hello, ask a question or whatever, and you’ll get like 10 different answers. Then finally the mentor is able to answer because the other trainees were already answering so quickly. It’s really cool how that happens.

So, you get your access to the trainee group, you will have two Live trainings in there a week. They are not required to graduate from the course; they are for extra support. I’ll say that again, so people don’t miss this cause I said it’s self-paced. Those Live calls are not required to graduate from the FDN course; they are for extra support. They’re huge hits amongst the FDN trainees, but they are not required to get through the course.

On Wednesdays, we do something called Hot Topics with Elizabeth Gaines. She’s our lead course mentor. That is probably the most popular thing that we offer outside of the main FDN course itself. And then on Fridays we do the Trainee Study Hour with Reed Davis, founder of FDN. And I believe Elizabeth or someone else that’s a mentor usually hops on there as well to support him.

If we ever need more in the future, we will add more accordingly. But right now, we have found that there are healthy amounts of people hopping on that. Some just chill in the backgrounds, they don’t actually ask questions and so it’s not overwhelming. But if that ever happened, we would just continue to add more calls throughout the week so that people can get their questions answered.

An FDN Trainee: A Calendar Schedule

So, if you are in the day of the life of the FDN trainee, what you might want to do is schedule stuff properly on your calendar. I know not everyone is a calendar-based person, but if you are going to be a graduate of FDN, you’re probably going to want to take the entrepreneurial or business route. It’s time to learn to use a calendar, okay?

I am not the most planned person in the world; I am more routine than not. But I’m not the most planned person in the world, not the most extreme type A and yet I use a calendar. That’s just how it has to be. I think it’s just part of being an adult, in my opinion. It might piss some people off by saying that, but I really do think it’s a part of being an adult.

You have to know what you’re doing at all parts of the day. I mean, if you don’t know what you’re going to do with your time, you’re just going to waste it, right? It’s like not having a goal for your life. How do you even know if you achieved it? You really don’t. So, the similarity to not having a goal and to not having a calendar is how do you know if you have a successful day? You don’t, because you didn’t have anything to do, you didn’t put anything on there.

What I would be doing is getting in that habit if you’re not already. For my hyper type A people, this is music to your ears. You already have seven calendars, so this will be very easy for you. But you might want to put in the time specifically that you’re going to commit to the FDN course.

An FDN Trainee: An Hour Daily

You probably already know this, but if you don’t, we generally recommend at least an hour and a half to two hours per day to get through the course in a timely manner – about eight to nine months. You can do less some weeks, you can do a heck of a lot more some weeks. But if you can commit to that schedule of an hour and a half to two hours a day, you’re going to be golden.

Most of the videos are done in such a way that they’re only 30 minutes a pop. Now, you might have back-to-back topics that are very congruent with each other video-wise. You can do the one in 30 minutes, take a break, take a breather, and then do the second one right after that. So, you could even break it up in a way where maybe you do 45 minutes in the morning, 45 minutes at night. Whatever works for you is fine with us.

But you will have to commit to probably bare minimum an hour a day on average to get through the course in the year timeframe that is provided. If you ever need more than a year, we do have extensions available, but that is a total personal choice, or there would’ve been some kind of extenuating circumstance that popped up in your life. It is not designed by any means to take more than a year; really shouldn’t take more than eight or nine months, in my opinion.

So, you’re studying, you got your time broken down. What is that going to look like? Well, you can learn a lot more about this by watching the FDN course tour. That’s fdntraining.com/tour.

An FDN Trainee: Study Groups

You’ll see your modules and know where you’re supposed to be, it’s very clear. As you go through the modules, you’ll have these mini quizzes. The quizzes are easy. We don’t check your grades on that. You could take it a hundred times and fail each time, then succeed on the hundred and first time and you’re totally good to go.

Those are meant as study tools. They’re meant as things that are helping you see where your strengths and weaknesses are in the knowledge as you move along the course. They can be very useful when you are about to get to your final exams too. I’ll explain that in a moment.

So, you’re going through the course, you go through these modules, you have all of the stuff with the quizzes. You might ask some questions occasionally in the Facebook group. There’s nothing wrong with asking questions more often than occasionally. Just make sure that you’re actually doing the work, right?

You don’t want it to be a crutch where you’re just asking questions while being kind of lazy and not really trying to do the research yourself or even trying to look into what was given to you. But if you really have a question and it comes up every single day, there’s nothing wrong with asking as many questions as you’d like during the FDN course.

Some people will also form study groups. Depending on what you chose to do with that, again, it’s not required, but you could just post in the group. Hey, anyone on my time zone that’s looking for a study group? I’m on module two. Are you on module two? You’ll find a ton of people that will be able to relate to you that might want to do that.

An FDN Trainee: Science-Filled Modules

Maybe part of your weekly study looks like hopping on with them for an hour or two, going over where you’re currently at in the course, quizzing each other a little bit. Again, totally optional. Not something everyone does, not even the majority. But it’s definitely something that could be highly useful and really only made possible ever since we introduced the FDN trainee group several years ago.

There are always hundreds and hundreds of people in there at any given time. That’s only going to increase. I say “at any given time” because the second that you graduate, you are moved out of that group. So, it’s not like a group with debt accounts where people just never respond or never reply. It’s people that are actively in the trainee process of FDN and have chosen to join that. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t join it, but technically it is a choice. It’s not a requirement to graduate the course. My point is you get a lot of interaction there, lively people. It’s really nice.

So, you go through all of the, I’ll call them beginner but they’re not really beginner modules because you will jump into the science right away. It’s not something that you need a background to do. Anyone can do this course, but you will be challenged in a really fun way, especially if you haven’t been in school in a while.

I enjoyed the course. It required me to study, it required me to get out of my comfort zone, but I graduated just like everyone else. It’s a doable thing; it’s just more than you might expect for an online course. And I think that’s a good thing because it raises our credibility as practitioners, but that’s a separate note.

An FDN Trainee: The Midterm

Once you get to about the halfway mark in the course, that’s when you will get your midterms. And the midterm is an open book thing, super, I won’t say easy, but straightforward. It’s basically like a big version of those mini quizzes that I talked about. Really, it’s a big version of the mini quizzes all put together, something that you should be able to achieve and accomplish. It’s something that you should be able to do pretty easily.

And if you find that you’re having a lot of trouble, that could be the time to ask around in the Facebook trainee group, go back through the modules. If you’re having trouble on the midterm, even with an open book, that’s when I would be reviewing some of the material I’ve already done. I wouldn’t be progressing forward, I don’t think, at that point.

You do your midterm; you keep moving along. And as you move farther along, you will start to get to a little bit of the tougher stuff. And this is the good stuff. This is where you get really tested and you are proving your competency in the knowledge so that we can graduate people who actually know what they’re doing and can actually run successful practices because they’re able to deliver high quality results to people.

You get about two thirds of the way through the course. I should have said the midterm is basically middle of the way through the first two thirds of the course. That’s a bit confusing, but it’ll make sense once you go through. Then you’re two thirds of the way through the course.

An FDN Trainee: The First Practical

The last third is going to be dedicated to the practical exams, and the practical exams are nice and intense. You will learn a thing or two about FDN, and you will be very confident in yourself once you get graduated. I don’t know if you could say it like that, but we’ll say “get graduated” for today. See, you don’t need to be a genius to do this course.

But once you get yourself graduated, you will feel fully confident because of the things that you went through with the practicals. So, the first practical exam, if you will, that you’ll actually do is not really a practical at all. It’s actually going over your lab results – those lab tests that you ran in the beginning of the course. That’s when you get to go over those test results with your mentor.

And there’s a variety of mentors to choose from. You could choose the same one for most of the things if you wanted to, or you could choose a different one for pretty much everything if you wanted to. It’s up to you. When I went through, you were assigned the same mentor throughout the entirety of the course. There’s advantages to that, but there’s some really cool insights that you can get from hopping around with different mentors as you go along. Those are all things that you schedule on your own time.

We have mentors in like every time zone you could possibly imagine. We got them in Australia, there’s some in Europe, they’re all over the United States, and Canada. It’s very easy to find someone that works in your time zone. And when you are doing these practicals, again, that first thing that you’ll do is go over your own lab results.

An FDN Trainee: Our Own First Clients

At this point, we structured this very precisely as to when you do this, because now you have information. You went through all of the course content at least once to get to this place. And so, when they’re going over the test results with you, yes, they’re coming from this very high-level view because this is what they do all the time and they’re experienced. But it’s not your first rodeo either.

You know, you’ve been through this stuff in the course, and you’re going to have some really interesting aha moments as you start to connect what you’re seeing with what your mentor is saying. Then they can help guide you as you’re going along. So, FDN, basically, has created a course where we are our own first clients as we go through it. It’s really fun; it’s one of the best parts of the course to see where you’re at health-wise.

You could be totally optimized, which is really, really rare or you can be like most people at FDN. We either currently have health issues and that’s why we’re going through the course, or we’ve gotten a little better, but we know that there is some room for improvement and we’re able to do that too. FDN is going to find the weak things in your body that is for sure. We won’t miss out on anything to work on.

So, you go through those exams, if you will. Again, they’re not really tests, it’s more the mentors going through stuff with you, and then you move on to the real practicals. That is when you will be given these mock client cases.

An FDN Trainee: Mock Client Cases

What happens is you get the information for these pseudo clients. We give you all the labs, all the results that they got back, and this is all stuff that you learned in the course already, remember. So, we have taught you how to create this overall picture when labs are presented to you – the set of labs I talked about in the HIDDEN Stressors episode.

Now you know how to form this big picture. You know how to give a consultation to a person who has worked with you as a client. And when you are ready, you will do that first practical exam. Your mentor will basically play the role of the pseudo client. So, you’re going to talk to them as you would a client, show them the insights that you gathered from the labs, and this is without any help.

We’re telling you everything that you need to know, but you’re not getting any help yet as to what was found on the labs or whatnot. You’ll see the data points, and that is it. So, it’s up to you to know what to do with that based on what you learned in the course.

Then at the end of those calls, the mentor will spend approximately 30 to 45 minutes going over what you talked about. They’ll review how you did, tell you where you did great, tell you where you have room for improvement. If you knocked it out of the park, they might tell you, you did perfectly. But at the same time, if you did really struggle, we’re also going to be kind but honest about that. These are exams that you can fail.

An FDN Trainee: The Written Final

It is definitely on the rarer side that someone fails it. If you do fail it, it’s a proctored exam, right? So, FDN the company does not make any money off of this, but we do need to pay our mentors.

Basically, we charge you a $50 fee to retake it, and you have to wait at least two weeks before you are able to book again with one of the mentors to get that back going. That’s not a money grab for us. FDN’s not making money off of that. That is something that we give to the mentors for their time. Because remember, they’re spending a good bit of time doing this with you.

After those exams, you’re going to have about three of those, you are going to want to finish up with your written final. Now, the written final is an open book thing that you would’ve been working on since about maybe halfway through the course you get access to it. And just because it is open book, my friend, does not mean that it is easy.

That thing sucked. It took me forever. I still got like a B+ on it or whatever. I think it’s the only thing in my life that I did not get an A on that I actually tried, which is ironic considering I love FDN more than anything. But it’s tough. You gotta put in the work, do the stuff, and really understand the material.

If you get a C or above, you are good to go. Don’t quote me on that one. I believe it’s a C or above. It might be a B-. Either way, you will know what grade you can get. Anything above that is passing, anything below you will have to resubmit.

An FDN Trainee: The Verbal Final

Finally, is the last final, and that is your verbal exam; it’s also called the verbal final, by the way. It’s kind of simple compared to the other stuff cause it’s more of a Q&A type of thing, just to make sure that you actually know the information and can do it off the top of your head. It is only about 30 minutes total. Most people say by that point everything has clicked. They already feel super confident coming in.

It’s actually, in my opinion, not the hardest part of the exams. I would say the longest part is the written exam and the hardest part is the first real practical you ever do with a mock client cause it’s the first time you’ve done it ever. It is challenging and of course you’re intimidated even though the mentors are the nicest people in the world.

We are the ones taking control of the call; we have a lot to show these people. So, we have a lot of things we can get that are insights and it’s our job to choose which ones were most useful and relevant to that particular case. When you do it for the first time, it is a little bit nerve wracking.

But again, this is the stuff that you need to do if you’re going to go work with people and charge money. That’s why we do it. You’d much rather do it for someone that is fake, in the sense that you’re not actually giving them health advice or anything like that in that moment, versus someone who paid you money and is a client. That’s not the first time that you want to do stuff like this; that’s why we have it in the FDN course.

An FDN Trainee: Access to the Labs

Then you finish the verbal final, and you graduate. Within several business days after graduating, you have access to all the labs. You have access to everything that the graduates have, and you are ready to go as an FDN.

Some people have asked before, will I be able to do all the labs even if I’m on a payment plan and my payments aren’t finished yet, but I graduated the course? As long as you are making those payments, the answer is yes. So, someone who is on a 12-month payment plan but graduates in six months has just as much access to the course and graduate material as I do, even though I’ve been paid off for years, obviously.

I thought I’d be able to maybe get to the graduate side today, but I have this amazing ability to fill up time and I hope it’s with some half useful stuff. So, I think what we’ll do is keep the mini-series truly mini. I got a couple more episodes that I want to be able to bring to you guys in this series, and I think this is a good wrap up for today.

If you have any other questions about what a day in the life of a trainee might look like, reach out to us @fdntraining on Instagram. Or you can book a call with myself or one of the other course advisors. That’s at fdntraining.com/call.

Conclusion

I will be back next time to talk about what the day in the life of a graduate might look like, especially from that business side. And I also want to sneak in some legality – the legality of FDN. I might be able to do that in one episode, I think. I think I can do that one in one episode. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys then. But until then, please take care. Thanks.

You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com, on YouTube @FDNtraining, or on Instagram @fdntraining.

For more informational and functional health-oriented podcasts like this one, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/health-detective-podcast/.

To learn more about us, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/about-fdn-functional-testing/.