Great! Me too. This is what I am doing right now. I am not working as a personal trainer who happens to be a nurse. (Which is what I used to do for years) I am working as a bonafide fitness nurse. I work with physicians and other healthcare professionals when I want more clients. Right now I only work with 2-3 clients, personally, but I managed more clients through the internet and work about 15 hours a week and I make enough to pay my mortage. I know I could make more; but I am more committed to simplify this process for you; I am headed in the direction of spreading this message with your help, a gentlier "Army of Certified Fitness Nurse™ Coaches" who can't be ignored.
My name is Lori ‘Minky’ Radcliffe. I am Creator of Certified Fitness Nurse™ Coach, Founder of Certified Fitness Nurse™ Academy and President of Fitness Nursing.com.
My purpose in life is to STOP promoting metabolic syndrome and inflammation and start promoting realistic weightloss and health through proper exercise and real food nutrition and supplementation in as many people as I can. In order to reach as many people as I can, I am developing an internet-based (webinars/teleseminars/video) 6-module certification course. Written examination required. This course will give you specific (not conceptual) answers to get from where you are:
A Licensed Nurse and Fitness Enthusiast (not necessarily certified in fitness)
with ideas and a desire to help people get healthier through fitness >>>>>> to where you want to be >>>>>>>>>>>>>
A Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach
with clients who appreciate your nursing AND fitness training and skills, you receive respect and referrals from other healthcare peers, making money on your terms in an environment of support and future training and creating.
As a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach I choose to serve this very large group of people (pre-diabetic and inflammation) with my fitness specialty and nursing assessment and client teaching skills. (You can choose your own target market and ideal client) Why just pre-diabetes and inflammation for me and not heart disease or osteoporosis or cancer? Well for me, besides the fact that there are over 79 million pre-diabetics in the US*, it is because of my story which began at the “sudden” death of my mother:
Today, I know that even though I say that my mother died suddenly of a heart attack, while on a treadmill, there was nothing sudden about it. (family members told me at her funeral, that’s why they don’t exercise…’cause it’ll kill you. At that time I had no defense, but the comments angered me.) I know today, after college degrees, years of research (Weston A. Price, vegetarian, raw, gluten-free, calorie-cutting, paleo, nutritional books, respectable research journals, not-so respectable research journals, books, articles, e-books, wellness public speaking, supplements, 10 exercise certifications and trial and error (mostly error) working with hospital health resource departments (out in the public a lot), with physicians, with mostly women over 40, at gyms and clubs and privately, that she probably had inflammation and pre-diabetes YEARS before her heart disease (heart disease was a by-product) that eventually killed my mother and robbed her of the 20+ years that her parents had on her… genetically speaking, shouldn’t she have lived as long as they did?
That’s when I started to ask the questions…
•How in a generation’s time did my mother, our family get so sick? What did my mom’s generation do differently? What is my generation and future generations doing differently today? My mother listened to Conventional Wisdom’s recommendations to eat and move as best as she could. It is my belief that eating cereal grains and drinking diet soda and exercising in a chronic cardio-state, made her metabolic disease (diabetes type 2) worse. Her medications, that she took religiously, (she was an RN… but not always the best patient) were only a temporary solution. If her core reason for getting diabetes type 2 wasn’t ever corrected then she would just get sicker; regardless of the medication. Also just for the record, my mother was close to only 100 lbs. most of her life. When she gained 25 lbs. after menopause, we thought she looked ‘healthy’, that 25 pounds set her into diabetes type 2, at a whopping 132lbs.! So, I also know that ‘skinny is NOT healthy’. This was all preventable. My mother was malnourished and sedentary most of her life.
•And as for those other diseases, if you lessen the insulin demands and inflammation markers in someone and they feel and look so much better in 30 days, you better believe their heart is better, their bones are better, their brain is better, you get the picture. Everything gets better. That’s the “Why” in what I do. What's the "Why?" in what you do or want to do?
As a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach (CFNC) you recognize that there are physicians who want to, not just cure disease; but want to find health with their patients, but may not be able to commit to the time needed to counsel patients on proper exercise and real food nutrition. This Certified Fitness Nurse™ Coaching course explains to you in a dialogue format, what to say to physicians and other healthcare professionals so you can become the ‘go-to’ nutritional/exercise expert when it comes to offering a practical and exciting health/wellness option to their client/patient base. Since clients often pay their doctors by insurance, we don't accept insurance, (not yet anyway), so you are shown how to offer affordable packages to patient/clients at different levels of committment and financial availability.
Also as a CFNC, you know that diabetics are very non-compliant with diet and exercise, but why? Could it be the 'obesegens' (substances in our food and environment that mess with their hormones and keep them fat, make them lazy, they don't want to move) or do they not 'feel' the ravages of their poor food and non-exercise choices yet? Maybe a combination of both. As a CFNC you are willing to explore this; BUT you do not enable this. We are not managers of diabetes. But reversers of pre-diabetes. We demand compliance, loyalty and get results by incorporating the "3 Rights of CFNC's". Your potential clients must have pre-diabetes, inflammatory markers on their lab reports or by their measurements and a good attitude about taking back control over their body. (You can use my techniques for pre-diabetics if that is who you want to work with too or develop your own parameters from FN assessment for your ideal client. These are the parameters that I used for
pre-diabetics)
You propose that the patient/client’s weight may go down slowly in the beginning, but once the weightloss increases, they will continue to lose and not plateau until they reach their ‘natural’ weight. They will not have to eat less and less or exercise more and more…because their bodies are becoming more efficient using and burning energy on their own. They don’t have to snack on carbohydrates every 2.5 hours, to steady their blood sugars (which we know is making their insulin insensitivity worse). They can comfortably be hungry (true hunger; not toxic hunger) once in a while. Because as a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach you’ll learn how natural fat-burning, life-long fat-burning, never diet again fat-burning occurs on a empty stomach. Clients need support and guidance early in your plan, but eventually you’ll taper them off. As a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach you will NOT create dependency; you create feelings empowerment for your clients that increases self-efficacy and continued success without you moving into their home!
This way of eating is best described in a Paleolithic-inspired eating style. The individualized care plan from their Fitness Nursing Assessment to work within a Paleo-inspired food/exercise template is one that I use.
FYI - What is Paleolithic eating? It’s basically eating the way we used to about 40,000 years ago. Before the induction of grains. It’s also called “caveman eating” or “cavewoman eating”.
In a recent poll of the best and worst ‘popular’ diets, the Paleolithic -inspired diet finished last out of 20. But after the poll that a panel of nutritional analysts did, the most amazing thing happened. The people were able to say which diet worked for them the best. The Paleolithic inspired-diet worked more than any other diet, more than 3,000. More than Weight Watchers. So who do you want to listen to ‘stuffy nutritional analysts’ or people, like your clients, who say they would never go back to eating any other way than Paleo. Make sure you read their comments too. Read all this HERE.
Intermittent Fasting is also a priniciple of Paleo-inspired dieting.
Because of the poor quality of so many ready to eat foods, you as a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach, will recommend supplements (some are food-based) that best support digestion, like for the liver, the gall bladder, the thyroid and a great multi-pak specially designed just for CFNC's clients.
There is also the fitness/exercise piece. You will be taught how to deliver video to your clients. There specific exercises that will be recommended for the full 12 weeks. You can utilize your specialty once your client demonstrates they can effectively perform these exercises. You will be taught exercises that follow the priniciples of moving like we did over 40,000 years ago. Which would be:
- Pushing
- Pulling
- Squatting and lungeing
- Plank
- Some isometrics and minimal stretching
Eventually, you can utilize machines, TRX, body movements, HIITraining, Pilates moves, etc. with your clients. But they will always be volitional, client driven and not more than 40 minutes a week TOTAL time. You can create your own videos or recommend your favorites if you want to use other types of exercising. Walking is NOT considered exercise in this program. But it is considered physical activity that is easy, long-medium duration and can be done daily without much strain and stress.
You are there to guide and support and push when needed. Think "Nurse First". For example I remember years ago, I taught a weight training class for "bone health" with the hospital used to work for. I loved that!
Sure, I pushed them passed the 2 lb.weights, but the focus was on many things besides "toning their butts" (a great by-product of weight-training). The hospital liked the fact that I was a nurse teaching an exercise class on bone health. Once I stepped into the fitness world with this, that dynamic was gone. And I knew it was going to be different. In the fitness world, it's all the same, just a different name, style...nothing really special. But the health care world loves it. We will stay within healthcare. I am getting many of my exercises from a physical therapist and professional trainer who really know their stuff and have similar philosophies to the doctor's video on the home page
As a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach you can use a variety of
5-10 minute exercise prescriptions that emphasize a monthly vision/goal. Remember, you will also be taught the basic 'how to' with video (make your own) on the internet or cheaply pay someone to do it for you (if I can do it, believe me, you can too!) this will be included in the Certified Fitness Nurse™Coaching course.
You will also choose sample meals plans from popular diet programs and the option of using your own customized CFN health-pak, plus more.
We are feverishly working on “branding” the Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach, but not so much like “Walmart”, but by our distictiveness, our excellence in follow-up and follow through, and our service for doing this for the right reasons, not a faceless conglomerate. Remember you only need one physician's assistance and some internet clients to get you started. (you will be taught how to start an internet e-mail list, create your own traffic, not just Facebook).
Finally, for what I am going to finish with (for now), as a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach you will learn how to use education-based marketing and to charge by the package (NOT by the hour!) for your service per client which is based on the value you give at each level of your services. You will offer 'a package' to physicians and other health care professionals to determine which client it best serves. You may need to provide a short presentation. A package is more scalable.
Unlike most other professionals, lawyers, doctors, one-on-one coaches, personal trainers, etc., who charge by time, they soon realize that they become a slave to the phone or the clock. There is a ceiling to the money that they can make. They start to hate the phone and can even start dreading their clients because of the hole they have dug to maintain their lifestyle with back to back appointments and no down time for creation of new strategies and ideas.
You are in this for the long term with your clients. It takes 6 months for a true behavior change. Then another 3-6 months of support to maintain those lifestyle behavior changes. Clients are "titrated down" to only once a month via webcam and/or phone appointments.
This certification of a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach states that you are a licensed nurse who specializes in fitness by utilizing this proven method of Paleo-inspired eating and moving (my example), medication management, supplementation, all done at the minimum effective dose of each of these areas to get the client's desired result. Your fitness nursing assessment skills that you use to deliver results and set goals reduces waistlines and inflammation and increases health, happiness and well-being that can be tracked. You will be taught a specific way of doing this and how to market yourself to who we feel is the best market in healthcare. If you don’t approve of this style of teaching or the methods suggested, you most certainly can be a Fitness Nurse on your own terms. You must follow the template, (but can expand to your own niche or ideall client), if you want to call yourself a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach.
On a personal note: As much as I would like to assist each and every one of you nurses interested in fitness nursing, I don't want you to necessarily be like me. We all have different philosophies. Just as I must fulfill my purpose by creating ‘a tribe’ of Certified Fitness Nurse™Coaches who want to learn from my decades experience of what to do and more importantly what NOT to do when you promote yourself, you may want to do "your own thing" with fitness nursing. If that's the case and you need some guidance in fitness nursing but are not interesed in becoming a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach, I am available for Fitness Nurse coaching and mentoring through the Institute of Fitness Nursing mentor classes and private fitness nursing coaching.
Afterall, you may already have a great idea or a great thing going and you just need some “tweaking” when it comes to marketing or defining your purpose (most important, I will save you a lot of time, money and grief). Also a general Fitness Nursing 101 e-book is also being developed (Fall 2012) for those of you who are curious about option of working as a regular Fitness Nurse.
*According to the American Diabetes Association. http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/prevention/pre-diabetes/
The NEW SCIENCE of Bone Health!
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Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach
The 3 Rights of Certified Fitness Nurse™ Coaches:
Exercise, diet and supplementation strategies for self-sustainable waist reduction for the RIGHT client using the RIGHT minimum effective dose of each of these at the RIGHT time.
A "Done-for-You" complete fitness nursing service package to individuals, providers and even facilities.
Certified Fitness Nurse™ Coach is a licensed nursing professional promoting the benefits of fitness, life long waist reduction and reduction of all health-related numbers through supportive movement patterns and other integrative proven coaching techniques, to people at risk for pre-diabetes and inflammation. (You can help who you want)
The goal of the Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach is to empower the client to exercise on their own through self-efficacy and guided support and using the minimum effective doses of exercise, diet and supplementation/medication to get the client's desired result.
We focus on empowerment; NOT dependency.
We show them exactly how to do it, while clients are actually teaching themselves in the process. And they love it!
We assess our clients within the program principles that we offer. Mentally, emotionally, financially, physically and socially.
Sounds like a nursing assessment?
Yes, but shorter.
We utilize and provide adaptable mind-body fitness and eating tools. We show some compassion:
Someone trying to cut their grain intake and not eat cereal in the morning, shouldn't feel bad because they can't afford organic eggs at $3.89 a dozen, right? We provide sustainable, real-world, enjoyable options and strategies for real, busy people. (Most people are not going to soak chick peas and make their own hummus. Nice. Not realistic for most.)
Our goal is to get the client to achieve
self-efficacy.
They believe/feel that they can do it and
want to continue do it because of that
great feeling of doing it.
Hello there, it's Lori (a.k.a. Minky), this photo was taken Summer, 2011. Not bad for 2 /
16-minute exercise sessions per week. I have a 23 y.o. son. (And I was well out of college when I had him) That's all I say about my age.
I maintain my waist without much effort, using this CFNC program.
Listen, have you ever thought about combining your fitness skills with your nursing skills to bring about positive, healthy change in clients/patients?
Are you a nurse who is a fitness enthusiast and know that you can offer more value and assist so many by incorporating your love of exercise? Do you want to work from home and become more updated with the 'new economy' and the internet?
As a Certified Fitness Nurse™Coach I teach 4 principles in my offer to
pre-diabetics:
- Internittent Fasting (IF)
- Supplementation (SP)
- Resistance Training (RT)
- Occasional Bingeing (OB)
All in sync with the 3 Rights of the CFNC
What are the principles in your offer?
