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Meet Lee Ann Thompson of Tyler’s Nutrition Training and Flexible Dieting in Chandler

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Lee Ann Thompson.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Lee Ann. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was adopted at birth. An insignificant detail to some, but I have always seen it as the biggest gift anyone could receive! I have always felt blessed that my parents gave me a chance at a better life and it has compelled me to achieve and make the most of what was given to me. This life perspective and the amazing people I’m surrounded with have afforded me much success across my lifetime.

I began playing multiple sports including soccer, softball, surfing, ice skating, hockey and soccer around age 5. I pursued every opportunity thrown my way and had many amazing experiences surrounding athletics when I was young. During high school, soccer afforded me the opportunity to compete in a youth National Championship at ESPNs Wide World of Sports in Orlando and to travel to Europe with an Olympic Development Soccer Team as well. I was also fortunate to earn a scholarship to play soccer at UC Berkeley(Cal) in 1999. I played soccer throughout my time at Berkeley and graduated with a Sociology degree in 2003.

In addition to sports, one of my lifelong passions has been bodybuilding. I started lifting weights at age 16. I loved comic books and superheroes as a kid and tried my best at a young age to look like my favorite characters. And to me, bodybuilders were the real-life version of these heroes! I read Muscle and Fitness and Flex magazine cover to cover, absorbing all I could. I stopped playing soccer after college but continued my love of lifting weights and continued to pursue my fitness goals by playing several years of women’s professional tackle football in the WFA and IWFL.

After getting married and moving to Arizona with my husband, I got my first taste of coaching as a personal trainer. I first became a NASM certified personal trainer in 2005 and worked at World Gym for several years.

In 2006, I left full-time personal training and became a Police Officer. I served for six years until our son was born and continued to train and help people with their fitness goals on the side throughout. I eventually left the police force to be a stay at home mom as I felt that was my most important responsibility. My job as a police officer will always be a huge influence on my life, and on my coaching style.

Competing in bodybuilding had been a lifelong goal of mine. So when life settled in, I finally pulled the trigger on that goal in 2014. A whole new world unlocked for me when I met my coach and now business partner, Tyler Mayer of TNT. I had been training for years and intuitively eating and reaching my fitness goals, but Tyler introduced me to tracking macros (or Flexible Dieting /IIFYM) and helped me take it to a whole new level! Though I dreamed of being part of this sport for the better part of my life, I could have never imagined that I would accomplish what I have thus far…….though there’s so much more left to do!

To give a brief idea, tracking “macros” or carbohydrates, protein and fat allows for a sustainable “diet” and has allowed me to compete in shows all across the country while still maintaining a healthy balance between being a working mom and a wife as well! I believe traditional diets are unsustainable and make people crazy, so I’ve become very passionate about sharing this approach and passing along the knowledge it has given me to others.

In 2015, I fulfilled a lifelong goal of becoming a professional physique competitor. I now compete as a drug tested professional figure competitor in the OCB and WNBF, have been fortunate to win several shows as a professional athlete and have competed successfully at the local and National Levels of the NPC in bikini and figure as well.

In 2015, I also began working with Tyler and Team TNT as a Flexible Dieting/IIFYM Online Coach. I now use my diverse life experience to help others learn to eat sustainably and reach their own fitness goals every day and that is pretty dang rewarding!

I have guided and helped 100’s of men and women to their fitness goals and given the tools and understanding to maintain their progress for life. I’ve developed so many special relationships in the process and TNT has grown and expanded in the process too! Our passion for helping others has grown so much that in 2016, Tyler and I started www.flexibledieting.com together. And now we’re looking to reach more lives and share the Flexible Dieting approach and touch more people on an even bigger scale.

Has it been a smooth road?
I am a firm believer in determining your own fate. When you decide you will succeed before you even start, bumps in the road are just that. In my personal and business life, I’m not ashamed to say I have had many!

They are part of the journey and path, not roadblocks. I’ve had LOTS of failures and I’ve learned so much more about myself through the failures than any of the wins.

Probably the largest personal struggle I have experienced is having an eating disorder my freshman year of college. Though it was short-lived, lasting around a year, I managed to get pretty extreme and whittled my 5 foot, 7-inch self down to under 100 pounds. But I now see this troubling experience as one of my biggest blessings and strengths!

Because of this experience, I learned a profound lesson in the ownership of my actions. I learned to accept and acknowledge that I had gotten myself to a very unhealthy place and become very unbalanced. I acknowledged I was not happy with where I was at and pledged to myself to make changes even if it was hard and uncomfortable. That acknowledgment made me more powerful. And not just powerful in that moment of time, more powerful for the course of my life. It was the first step towards owning my own happiness and that’s a choice that I continue to make daily regardless of what I face.

AND, in my current occupation as a nutrition coach, it has also allowed me to successfully help and guide others to find their own balance with not only eating but in life.

As business partners, Tyler and I encounter roadblocks daily! Aside from the inherent struggles of building a successful business, the main obstacle we face is a more theoretical one.

We find that the hardest part about our job is undoing the nutrition and diet myths that popular media and marketing has created across years. So many of these things become embedded within culture and society. It’s a tough job to unravel the psychology behind people’s concepts of body image and negative practices associated with dieting!

So many of these thoughts and practices can be very derailing to long-term health and success and we’re constantly trying to come up with ways to market ourselves and better break down these walls and barriers to help people see the truth about mindset, eating, nutrition and as it relates to long-term results.

Sometimes we struggle in marketing a product and a dieting method that steers away from instant results to offer long-term success as this way of thinking is counterintuitive in the fitness industry. Everyone wants results YESTERDAY and that is not a sustainable reality.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Tyler’s Nutrition Training and Flexible Dieting story. Tell us more about the business.
We run two business’! Flexibledieting.com and Tyler’s Nutrition Training and Fitness (TNT). Both are focused on teaching people the Flexible Dieting method but each has its own unique offering and approach.

TNT uses a custom, one on one approach to coach and teach the Flexible Dieting/IIFYM method. We provide daily and weekly accountability and support to help clients navigate life situations and gain a greater understanding and awareness of nutrition and their bodies. We regularly monitor progress using multiple data points and client feedback. We make strategic changes to macros(nutrition) and activity to create consistent and progressive weight loss results that can be maintained for life.

We pride ourselves on giving our clients the understanding to not only reach their goals but to keep the weight off and maintain their progress forever! Most of all, we love to build deeper relationships throughout the process. We find that forming a strong bond and trust allows people to break down mental barriers and bad habits only to be built back up in all new, more successful habits based in scientific knowledge.

We believe in this method and we’re on a mission to bust the diet myths that are rampant in our society. These myths cause unsustainable and irrational ways of thinking towards food and as a byproduct, so many have a damaged relationship with food, diets and their body image. So we love to teach people a whole new way of looking at things and support them to success!

I strongly believe that Tyler and my personality, the level of care and support we provide our clients and our deep-rooted empathy for others is what creates a recipe for achievement. When humans lean on each other for guidance and challenge their existing beliefs, magical things happen…and that’s the exact environment our one on one coaching creates.

And we help all kinds of people with varied goals! Our clients are moms, dads, young, old, athletes such as professional bodybuilders, accomplished endurance athletes, college athletes and everyone in between.

In 2017, we started Flexibledieting.com to reach people with the Flexible Dieting method on an even larger scale. Via this platform, we offer knowledge and resources to get started Flexible Dieting and an in-depth self-guided/paced online course called Flex Ed to teach individuals how to get started with the approach on their own. Though this course is self-paced, we offer limited support through Facebook Live videos. And we run group coaching and challenges via this platform as well.

Though Flexibledieting.com does not offer the one on one support that is the bread and butter of TNT, we designed this site as an entry level, more cost friendly way to educate people and stop the cycle of damaging and unsustainable diets that runs rampant in today’s culture. Though we believe one on one coaching is the most effective way to navigate and learn Flexible Dieting and get results, we know not everyone can afford this option and we don’t want anyone to get left behind!

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
In the next 5-10 years, I believe the fitness industry will continue its current trend towards more automated services and apps to support clients to goals and keep them on track with workouts and eating.

Unfortunately, due to deep-rooted cultural/societal beliefs, I feel the fitness industry will continue to trend towards quick fix type diets and exercise and nutrition plans that are “easy” and fast. Everyone wants an instant result even though the results typically don’t last.

But regardless of the trend, we intend to continue to offer a high quality, personalized service that creates lasting results and makes people better from the inside out!

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