The feelings I get when a Rhino comes back are pretty intense. I miss everyone. It’s the hardest part of being a gym owner. Your members become family and then they move away, have babies, change schedules, or follow other fitness paths. I tell them we are always here for them and I try to remember that most of our Rhinos eventually come back. I was raised in Las Vegas and love my home, but sometimes I wish we weren’t in such a transient town. However, I feel like we are needed here, to offer a sanctuary and community for everyone who doesn’t have roots here. We have 4 Rhinos who recently joined again who were with us 10 years ago. One actually moved to the East Coast and recently moved back! Wow!

The most recent ‘come-back Rhino’ is Jessica. She used to be a member years ago. She was part of our first ever 6 Week Challenge. And just last week she walked through our doors again to join the 6 Week Challenge once more. The reason she sticks out is that she made me a little book after the first 6 Week Challenge. It was a book that everyone wrote in, telling me how the 6 Week Challenge changed their lives. She doesn’t know that at that time I was about to lose everything. Life and business both were very, very difficult due to some outside factors. I almost closed Camp Rhino at that time. And when she came back, I was just so thankful that we were here for her to come back to.

I often share in the 6 Week Challenge introduction that nutrition saved Camp Rhino. There are a lot of other factors and people that Camp Rhino would not have survived without, such as John, Brent, Jathan and Priscilla, but today I want to focus on Nutrition and the challenge. At the time the 6 Week Challenge started, I had never eaten healthy in my life. I did it for the first time with the 3rd Challenge group to start at Rhino and it changed my life forever. For the first time, I had the energy to think clearly. I wanted to solve the business problems I had. I wanted to work instead of just hide under my desk from all of the problems. Camp Rhino and I would not be where we are today without implementing that first nutrition program.

Enter Anna Gingrich-Bardis. Our new Rhino Nutritionist. This girl is a bundle of enthusiasm and intelligence. I first hired her as a front desk girl while she was in college for nutrition. Then, I begged her not to move away and offered her a full time job as our nutritionist as soon as she graduated. This was a year before graduation because I wanted to beat all the other job offers she would have coming in. I can’t explain how I feel when I meet with her to work on our 6 Week Challenge and Nutrition Program. To say the least, our meetings are always exciting and crazy productive.

Anna came with 15 of us to this Summit in Chicago a couple weeks ago to learn about how to help our Rhinos more. There, we learned about this new nutrition program (HSN) that is designed to offer the BEST customized nutrition programs and accountability for gyms. The program has to be led by a nutritionist. Anna’s eyes lit up as she learned about it, and asked me to consider buying it, even though it was expensive. I immediately said yes. We have had 3 nutrition programs so far at Camp Rhino. Each one better than the last. Each one produced amazing results. But, there always seems to be new information, new solutions and new habit forming programs that come along.

We want to give you all the best, and we want to have a program that is not just a decent cookie cutter program that anyone with an app can follow, but one that requires a nutritionist to customize to get the best results. If you want to lose weight but have a hard time doing it, we want to offer the program that finally helps you lose weight and keep it off forever. If you want to bulk up and put on muscle mass, we want to be able to help you do it in the safest and most effective way possible. If you want to compete and go for your Spartan Trifecta or the CrossFit Games, we want to get you there through nutrition AND training.

I am so excited for the future. I know Anna will be a huge part of the success of our Rhino Family and can’t wait to see her help everyone transform into their best selves.