This one is personal.

I want to talk about someone I admire—not a supplement, not a protocol, not a study. A person. Someone who’s doing the kind of work that makes me proud to be in this space, and who embodies something I think a lot of us are chasing: the courage to build what you believe in, even when the system you trained under taught you something different.

Her name is Dr. Jodi Nishida, and she is the real deal.

She Saw Me Before I Could See Myself

I need to start with a story, because it’s the reason this post exists.

Early on in my journey as a health coach, I had a really rough experience. Someone made me feel like I was irrelevant in the health space—like I was stupid, like I couldn’t get anything meaningful done without a specific type of credential. The kind of experience that makes you question whether you belong here at all.

Jodi was one of the first people to lift me back up. She helped me understand that what I was doing was already making a difference—that the energy I was giving to naysayers was energy I was taking away from the people I was serving. She didn’t just encourage me in passing; she helped me establish the foundations of who I am today as a practitioner.

I’ve never forgotten that. And I think it says everything about who she is—that in the middle of building her own clinic, her own cafe, her own movement in Hawaii, she still had the time and the heart to pour into someone she believed in. That’s the kind of person we’re talking about here.

The Pharmacist Who Changed Course

Jodi is a Doctor of Pharmacy with over 27 years in healthcare. That alone would be a career most people would be proud of. She could have stayed in that lane—filled prescriptions, counseled patients on dosing, collected a paycheck, gone home. Nobody would have blamed her.

She didn’t do that.

Instead, after discovering the ketogenic lifestyle and watching it reverse a serious autoimmune arthritis condition she’d been living with for 13 years, she did something that takes a particular kind of guts: she questioned the system she’d spent her entire career inside of. She looked at the metabolic health crisis in Hawaii—one of the hardest-hit states in terms of diabetes and obesity—and decided that food needed to come first, not last.

In my experience, the practitioners who end up making the biggest difference are almost always the ones who went through their own health transformation first. There’s a fire that gets lit when you feel the change in your own body; it gives you a confidence that no textbook can. Jodi has that fire—and from everything I’ve seen, she hasn’t let it dim one bit since 2019.

The Keto Prescription

In May 2019, Jodi opened The Keto Prescription Clinic in Honolulu—Hawaii’s first and only accredited low carb medical clinic. She’s certified in ketogenic nutrition through Low Carb USA and the Nutrition Network, and she holds accreditation as a Metabolic Health Practitioner.

Here’s what I love about how she’s built her practice: she didn’t go it alone. She partnered with physicians—an internist, a cardiologist—to create a legitimate medical framework around therapeutic carbohydrate reduction. That’s not easy to do. Most practitioners in this space are operating solo, fighting upstream against a system that still thinks dietary fat is the enemy. Jodi went and got institutional buy-in. Blue Cross Blue Shield Hawaii has been watching her outcomes closely to see how they can help employer groups get healthier. That’s the kind of credibility that moves the needle for all of us.

Her approach is clean, whole-food keto—no supplements, no surgery, no expensive packaged meal programs, no gimmicks. She teaches people how to eat real food from a grocery store, and she pairs that education with point-of-care testing, disease state education, and ongoing coaching. She even addresses the emotional eating component by working with a psychologist to help patients understand the root causes of their relationship with food.

That last part is something I don’t think gets enough attention in this space. We talk a lot about macros and metabolic pathways, and those things matter; they matter enormously. What sometimes gets lost is that the reason someone reaches for sugar at 10 PM isn’t always a dopamine issue—sometimes it’s a loneliness issue, or an anxiety issue, or a decades-old coping pattern that no amount of nutrition education will untangle on its own. Jodi gets that, and she built her program accordingly.

Rise Cafe—Where Food as Medicine Meets Real Life

Here’s where Jodi’s story goes from impressive to something I’d call visionary.

Most practitioners in the metabolic health space teach their patients what to eat and then send them back into a world that makes it nearly impossible to follow through. The restaurants serve seed oils. The coffee shops serve sugar. The convenience stores stock processed everything. The gap between “what I learned in my appointment” and “what I can actually find to eat” is enormous—and it’s where a lot of people fall off.

Jodi looked at that gap and decided to close it. Literally.

She and her husband Jeff opened Rise Cafe in the Kaimuki neighborhood of Honolulu—a full-service low carb coffee shop and restaurant where everything on the menu aligns with the metabolic health principles she teaches in her clinic. The clinic is even located inside the cafe. Think about that for a second: you see your metabolic health practitioner, and then you walk ten feet and sit down to a meal that was designed with the same philosophy. No disconnect between the appointment and real life.

Their tagline—“Rise and Shine, Rise Up to Great Health”—isn’t marketing fluff. It’s what the whole operation is built around. They do catering, meal preps, parties, and online ordering. They’re hiring summer baristas and fry cooks with the pitch that this is “much bigger than a coffee shop”—it’s a coffee shop on a mission to improve the health of Hawaii.

I haven’t been there yet. It’s on my bucket list. I want to sit in that cafe, order something off the menu that I know was made with intention and care, and just take in what it feels like when someone builds the full vision instead of stopping at the clinic door.

Why This Matters

I spend a lot of time thinking about the infrastructure problem in metabolic health. We have the science. We have the clinical evidence. We have practitioners who know how to help people reverse chronic disease through dietary intervention. What we don’t always have is the ecosystem around the patient that makes it sustainable.

Jodi built that ecosystem. A medical clinic, a cafe, community partnerships with local restaurants and even 7-Eleven Hawaii, a co-authored book (“The Keto Prescription”), a thriving online community she calls KetOhana—ohana meaning family in Hawaiian. She didn’t just build a practice; she built a world where metabolic health isn’t a niche hobby. It’s just… how things work.

That takes a kind of relentless energy that I find genuinely inspiring. She’s smart, she’s bold, she’s fiery, and she doesn’t flinch when it comes to speaking the truth about metabolic health—even when that truth runs counter to what most of the medical establishment is comfortable hearing. I admire that deeply, because I know from my own experience how much easier it is to stay quiet than to stand up and say, “We’ve been doing this wrong.”

The Human Behind the Work

I want to end on this, because I think it’s the most important part.

In this space, it’s easy to get caught up in credentials, protocols, and clinical outcomes. Those things matter—they’re the foundation. What really sticks with me about Jodi isn’t her PharmD or her accreditation or her clinic’s partnership with cardiology. It’s the way she shows up for the people she serves. The reviews for her clinic don’t talk about her credentials; they talk about her patience, her time, her genuine care. They talk about how she listens. They talk about how she makes sustainable health feel realistic instead of overwhelming.

I know, because she showed up for me that way too—at a time when I needed it most and didn’t even know how to ask.

That’s the practitioner I want to be. That’s the standard I hold myself to. And that’s why I wanted to write this—not because Jodi asked me to (she didn’t), not because there’s anything in it for me, and not because I’m trying to sell you on her services. I just think more people should know about what she’s built. In a world full of noise and quick fixes, Jodi Nishida is the real deal—and Hawaii is lucky to have her.

If you’re ever in Honolulu, stop by Rise Cafe at 1135 11th Avenue in the Kaimuki neighborhood. Tell them Rance sent you. And if you or someone you know is dealing with metabolic health challenges and wants to work with a practitioner who truly gets it, check out The Keto Prescription or Rise Cafe.

As always, I hope sharing stories like this gives someone some hope and direction. There are good people doing great work in this space—and Jodi is one of the best.

Rance Edwards is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) with over 2,000 clinical hours of experience, specializing in chronic disease management and lifestyle medicine.

Know someone who could benefit from a practitioner like Dr. Jodi—or from working with a metabolic health coach closer to home? I’d love to chat about how coaching can support your health journey. Book a free discovery call—no pressure, just a conversation about where you are and where you want to be.