Dr. Tom Rifai, the inventor of the 5 Keys to Optimal Wellness and America’s Flexitarian lifestyle leader, is the founder of Reality Meets Science, a forward thinking, customer journey focused digital wellness company.
Dr. Rifai is a master of helping clients and patients achieve metabolic health, food behavior modification and transformational lifestyle change. He has accumulated over 20,000 hours of clinical and leadership experience directing and designing multidisciplinary intensive lifestyle intervention programs, including Henry Ford Health System, where his 5 Keys lifestyle change system is the gold standard for their metabolic health programs.
Dr. Tom, as his patients, online community and coaching clients affectionately know him, is a Diplomate of the American Boards of Lifestyle and Internal Medicine and National Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists (of which he spent 2 terms as board member). His Harvard Lifestyle Medicine Continuing Medical Education course, ‘Nutrition and the Metabolic Syndrome’, is the most popular of Harvard’s online Lifestyle Medicine CME offerings and has been taken by over 6000 healthcare providers worldwide so far.
Dr. Rifai is a seasoned speaker and was recently invited to address Harvard’s Institute of Lifestyle Medicine and now serves as the True Health Initiative’s News Of The Day (NOTeD) Editor.
Dr. Rifai developed the “5 Keys to Optimal Wellness” lifestyle modification system through an wholly unique combination of experiences, which include a his personal experience, recovering from binge eating disorder, and as a “comfort food-aholic”, which brought him to the brink of death in 2007.
His education was perfectly suited for behavior modification and metabolic health mastery including a B.S. in psychology from Michigan State (earning Highest Honor), an unparalleled medical school experience, with solid nutrition programming, through Wayne State with lifestyle medicine and metabolic health inclusive internal medicine training at Beaumont Health System. In his final residency year he was chief resident coordinator for the Beaumont Nutrition, Preventive Medicine and Weight Control Center.
Dr. Rifai is a unique physician educator, passionate Flexitarian lifestyle coach, plain language speaker and leader in lifestyle medicine at a time we need compassionate, expert leaders like him the most.