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Becky Hand R.D. : Registered Dietitian, Licensed Nutritionist M.Ed.
Becky Hand is a registered dietitian and has her own company, An Ounce of Prevention. She has been involved in numerous food, nutrition and health education activities. She greatly enjoys conducting nutrition workshops, cooking classes, and food demonstrations.
Whether Becky is talking to school children, a scout troop, college students, high school athletes, a women’s club, church group, or corporate America, she wants her nutrition messages to be practical, easy to apply and fun!
Becky utilizes humor and hands-on activities to involve the audience in her presentations and assists them in setting realistic goals and action plans. Becky has hosted a nutrition talk show, written articles for newspapers and magazines, and provided food and nutrition coverage on television.
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Becky has hosted a nutrition talk show, written articles for newspapers and magazines, and provided food and nutrition coverage on television.
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Sara Hambidge : Physical Therapist
Sara Hambidge has worked in physical therapy since 1996. Currently employed with Trihealth Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine Clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sara has traveled to Sarasota, Florida with the Cincinnati Reds during spring training for the past eight seasons. The Saint Louis University graduate has been an avid volleyball player since high school, continuing her career as a Billiken.
Participating in basketball and track while in high school, Sara remains active in volleyball, playing in a sand league weekly. She also enjoys yoga and Pilates, and is a certified pre/postnatal exercise instructor.
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"We are the only ones that have the power to accomplish the goals we set out to do. So dream big, achieve big!"
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Nicole Nichols: Fitness Instructor & Health Educator
Nicole has a Bachelor's degree in Health Promotion and Education, specializing in Exercise and Fitness, from the University of Cincinnati. There she received national recognition from the American Association of Health Educators (AAHE) as a Student Major of the Year. Nicole holds several fitness certifications, including AFAA Group Fitness Instruction, Spinning, Prenatal and Postpartum Exercise Design, and EFI Sports Medicine (Group and Personal Training).
Her practical experience, working as a health & fitness writer, exercise instructor and personal trainer, has allowed her to help athletes, students, and even seniors achieve their fitness goals. She has designed and taught health programs on the topics of eating disorders, body image and self-acceptance, strength training for women, exercise for seniors, and prenatal exercise.
Coach Nicole is SparkPeople's Assistant Editor & Content Manager. She has also contributed to newspapers, magazines, and appeared on FOX and CBS news programs as a fitness expert.
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"I have a passion for helping people live healthier lives. When you're healthy, you're happy, productive, and are able to enjoy all that life has to offer."
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Jen Mueller : Community Leader & Fitness Coach
Jen has a background in business but left the corporate world because she wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. She got her Master’s Degree in Health Promotion and Education from the University of Cincinnati, and then went to work for the YMCA in Memphis, Tennessee. After spending two years there as a Program Director, she returned to Cincinnati and began working for SparkPeople. Jen is a certified personal trainer and has (very proudly) completed three marathons. She is also certified in Prenatal and Postpartum Fitness.
Jen’s passion is coaching people to help them reach their fitness and health-related goals. “The best part of my job is when I get clients to realize that they didn’t need me as much as they thought they did. They’ve had what it takes to make a healthy change inside of them all along. I just pointed them in the right direction!”
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"You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down but the staying down."
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Chris Downie : Goal Setting & Motivation Expert
As SparkPeople continues to grow into one of the largest diet and fitness sites in the world, I sometimes get asked if I have ever been overweight. Here's my personal story so people can see my motivation to help others reach their goals by starting this website.
The answer is “No.” In fact, I’m one of those people who can probably eat anything he wants and not gain weight. Your reaction might be, “Uhhh, ok…then what makes you qualified to have started a weight loss program and website?”
The answer involves taking a look at my past and highlights many of the differences between SparkPeople and other “diets”.
As a child, I was extremely shy and had anxiety – I later found out this anxiety runs in my family. Sometimes I would go a whole day without talking to anyone. This bothered me because I felt like I was an outgoing person trapped in a shy person’s body.
I decided to do something about it and basically started my own self improvement program. I started off with fitness and some nutrition. This helped me in many ways. Finally, I was able to start overcoming some of the anxiety. By my senior year in high school, I was captain of the soccer team. But, I was still a generally shy person.
After college, I went to work in Corporate America as an accountant. After about a year in this environment, a couple of things started happening:
First, I started realizing that some habits I was building had dangerous implications for my health and performance. For example, I was working 50-60 hours per week at a desk, so my activity level dropped significantly. By the time I got home, I was exhausted from stress and poor sleep, so I’d sit on the couch and watch TV. Nutritionally, I was eating many meals at either fast-food restaurants or at the company vending machine. Then, I started paying attention to the people around me. I remember one overweight co-worker saying, “only 7 years, 6 months, and 4 days until I retire.” This hit me like a ton of bricks because I realized I was on the path of becoming him if I didn’t change.
Second, I started reading about the power of goal setting and leadership. This sparked me to think about taking my earlier efforts with fitness and nutrition and combining them with goal setting and leadership. This ended up being a real breakthrough. I started thinking about what was most important to me in life and things like long-term health, family, making a difference for other people, and starting my own company were at the top of the list.
When I broke those long-term goals down to short-term action steps, one thing I came up with was starting a fitness streak where I would do a 10-minute workout everyday – preferably in the morning. I soon learned that this was helpful in some life-changing ways:
- It gave me momentum and made it more likely I would do more fitness after work or even take walks at work
- Mentally, the small wins started making me feel like I was in control of my destiny again – that I really could succeed at all my goals. At the time, my job was very stressful and wasn’t the best fit for me (can you see me as an accountant?), so I thought, “Ok, the company might “own” me for 60 hours per week, but when I’m working out, this is my time.
I also did things like wrote down my goals and even made a collage of magazine pictures that symbolized my goals and hung this up in my office. Then, no matter how bad of a day I was having, I could look at that collage and see that everyday I was working toward my goals!
Near the beginning of this streak, a co-worker right across the hall would congratulate me on my streak while making negative comments about herself. But, later on, she started her own fitness streak and ended up losing more than 50 pounds AND motivating other women to get in shape and lose weight. I hadn’t even spent that much time motivating her. This is when I realized and came up with the quote, “Your daily actions and words can impact more people than you ever realize!” I now think this lesson was some kind of “sign” that I was destined to help people lose weight the smart way. Here’s the full story about this if you are interested: Pat's Story
I ended up doing the fitness streak for 700 days in a row – a local community paper even did an article on it. This was basically the start of the SparkPeople Fuel for Improvement System. The results from this program ended up changing my life – I could tell there were both mental and physiological effects. I had developed all kinds of new healthy habits For example, I learned that I liked people and was very interested in “what made them tick” and how to help them improve (this was another thing that led to SparkPeople). I wasn’t shy at all anymore. My energy levels and self confidence exploded.
These results gave me the courage to leave Corporate America and start a company with a friend. This is a very long story that I can do separately, but eventually the online auction website we started grew into the second largest person-to-person auction site behind eBay and became eBay’s first acquisition in 1998 for what became a crazy amount of money as eBay’s stock exploded.
While at eBay, I met my wife at their California office. It turns out we have the same birthday and were asked to dance as the “birthday couple” at an offsite party. We now have an 8-month-old boy named Will.
After eBay, I wanted to start a company that would help other people reach their goals, so started working on SparkPeople. At first, we were more of a leadership, goal setting, and motivation company. But, we found that whenever someone who needed to lose weight went through our program, they lost weight the smart way. So, we started building more features and content specifically around weight loss. Importantly, we focus on the whole person – where proper nutrition is only one of many factors that can lead to long-term weight loss.
Looking back, if it hadn’t been for the small steps I started taking (while keeping the big picture in mind), there’s no way I would have ever reached the personal and professional goals I’ve been blessed to reach. Now my mission in life is to help many other people reach their goals.
- Chris/SparkGuy
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"I've been fortunate enough to achieve some great results using the SparkPeople System, now I hope to motivate others to do the same!"
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Dean Anderson : Behavioral Psychologist / Stress Management Expert & Certified Personal Trainer
Dean has Master's degrees in Human Services (behavioral psychology/stress
management) and Liberal Studies, and has taught college courses in both
philosophy and psychology. He has extensive social work experience as a
caseworker and community organizer, working with individuals, families, and
community organizations confronting issues such as domestic violence,
substance abuse, mental illness, and chronic poverty and unemployment.
Dean's interest in fitness and nutrition began six years ago when, at the
age of 50, he was compelled to confront his own problems with morbid obesity
and related mental and physical health issues. Since then, he has been able
to reduce his weight from 370 to 220 pounds, and is currently able to manage
his problems with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol with
"healthy eating and exercise."
Dean has recently been certified as a personal trainer and Lifestyle and Weight
Management Consultant by the American Council on Exercise.
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Tanya Jolliffe: Nutritionist
Tanya earned her dietetics degree from the College of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio and served as a clinical dietitian in several Cincinnati area hospitals specializing in general nutrition and organ disease. She has over 15 years of nutrition counseling and education experience areas such as prenatal nutrition, general family nutrition, and therapeutic nutrition in end-stage organ disease.
Tanya participated in high school athletics and was a four time Ohio High School state track meet competitor as a high jumper. Additionally, she participated in collegiate level volleyball while at The Mount and her team enjoyed district and national recognition. Tanya stays in shape playing volleyball, running half marathons, walking and strength training.
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TIM
Tim works on the marketing team at SparkPeople. He considers himself very lucky to be a part of such a great team where he gets the chance to help people achieve their goals and dreams every day.
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JOSH
Josh heads up the engineering department at SparkPeople. He does some programming of new features as well as site and database maintenance. Josh is on his own weight loss journey and is happy to help people use the SparkPeople.com tools to lose weight.
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DAVE
Dave manages product development at SparkPeople and loves to help people out with more technical questions on the site. If you have questions about using different parts of the program, or have any suggestion for how to improve SparkPeople.com, Dave can help you out.
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JEREMY
Jeremy does web development at SparkPeople and has a degree in Information Systems from the University of Cincinnati. He uses SparkPeople on a daily basis to help him reach his fitness goals, and is planning to run his first 5k this year.
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GRANT
Grant has been part of the Marketing Team at SparkPeople since 2002. He leads our PR department and has helped SparkPeople members get featured by numerous national women's magazines and television programs. As a result, Grant contacts a lot of members who have lost a significant amount of weight with SparkPeople to help expose their stories to the world (so don’t be surprised if you receive a SparkMail from "GrantM").
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DENISE
Denise's first introduction to SparkPeople was as a member who needed to lose weight. While the SparkPeople plan taught her how to live a healthy lifestyle, it also compelled her to change her career goals. Denise is now taking classes to become a certified personal trainer and nutritionist.
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STEPFANIE
Stepfanie, an editor and writer at SparkPeople, is passionate about green living, nutrition and yoga. She enjoys cooking, ethnic cuisine, farmers markets and learning new languages.
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NANCY
Nancy has a degree in nursing and was a member of SparkPeople before joining the staff as a Moderator in the Community. Her mission is to help others learn the process of living a healthy lifestyle and to let them know it is never too late to start. Nancy is an avid runner and her goal is to become a certified running coach. She wants to inspire the world that you don’t have to be an Olympian to run.
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Show Your Spark with a SparkPeople T-Shirt!
