Spotlight Series: Ali Mader

Interviewer: Alright, guys, welcome back to another episode for the top provider initiative. So today with me is Ali Mader. Ali has her master’s degree in nutrition and she has started a unique business that’s a little bit different than the traditional nutrition and coaching model. So a lot of what she does is centered around meal preparation and helping individuals with that. So I know for a lot of our clients and clients, a lot of people know a lot about nutrition and they know how to use the information, but the applicability of actually doing it becomes a little bit harder and complicated and they end up not sometimes being successful because of that. So Ali has a really cool business model that we’ve started working with, and I think this fills a large gap in the nutrition realm of it’s not about knowing so much of what nutrients are in an apple or what, but just how to go to the grocery store and pick the right foods and not the wrong ones, and how to simply put that together and how to prepare for your day and your week. Because all success comes with great planning and preparation, typically. Ali, thanks for being here.

Interviewee: Thank you very much for having me.

Interviewer: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about how you got into this realm and what your background is and how you saw this kind of missing link in the nutrition realm.

Interviewee: You know, it’s been a long route to get into this business in this realm. This is actually my fourth career, believe it or not. I started as a social worker in specialized foster care and did that for a number of years, but that career had an expiration date. It’s a hard job to keep for a very long time. And so I was coaching gymnastics part time while I was a social worker, and I stopped being a social worker and went to coaching full time for a little bit. And then I started graduate school and transitioned into the classroom while I was in graduate school. And I started teaching health, wellness and nutrition education at that time. So that’s kind of my transition into nutrition and nutrition education, and that’s where my story into nutrition kind of started. And I was teaching nutrition health and I had five kitchens in my classroom. So that’s really where my passion for the science, nutrition, marrying it with the applicability of food went together. So that’s kind of the really short story of putting it all together came from.

Interviewer: Yeah, and as you said earlier, like, the applicability is typically what’s lost. Like, you can know all the things about nutrition, but if you don’t know how to put it together and make your own food and everything, it’s kind of sometimes useless.

Interviewee: Correct? Yeah. It’s hard. Having kitchen confidence is really, really important, and we can give everybody all the information, but if we don’t know what to do with a knife and if we don’t know much more than boiling water, it’s really hard to be successful in what we’re doing. So I like to help people put all that information together.

Interviewer: Yeah. So what types of services do you offer to people that need help? Or what problems are people coming to you with, and what type of solutions do you have for them?

Interviewee: People come with a variety of problems, and it could be as simple as, I just don’t know how to grocery shop for the right things and, you know, help me. Help me figure out what I need to buy in the grocery store. And we can do that and help me do it in an inexpensive way because there seems to be a myth that eating healthy has to be expensive, and it really doesn’t. So we go through and figure out how to shop and do it in an economical way. Lucky for my clients, being a social worker, being a teacher, and being a gymnastics coach are not high paying careers. So I actually know how to eat on a very, very small budget, so I can teach people how to do that. So people come in with those problems. But I also have clients that come in really wanting to figure out how to lower blood sugar or manage prediabetes and really change eating habits because they’ve left the doctors with pretty tough health reports. So we work on working on meal plans that work on those issues, and also clients that are athletes who are either working on a goal to get to the next triathlon or working on hitting new fitness goals, or they’re already doing something really well and they just want to get over a hump, whatever that may be.

Interviewer: Very nice. And what would you say is the unique or differing part of working with you versus just hiring some other nutrition coach that’s out there?

Interviewee: I think what is unique and different is that I have meal plans and coaching that go hand to hand in hand. That also teaches the kitchen confidence. So we put it all together. So my meal planning really gets into your lifestyle and what every day looks like for you and your family, and we put that together. So you’re not just eating for you, you’re eating for your family, and you’re eating food for the rest of your life. So we figure out how that’s going to work. And I have an online meal planner that has recipes in it that you can go in and you can manipulate with recipes and ingredients. And we work together to make it customizable to fit all of your needs.

Interviewer: And you also work with some other third parties, too, that involve, like, meal prepping and everything for them as well. Correct?

Interviewee: Correct. You know, ideally, everyone would be able to cook every day all the time. But I. That’s not reality. We have sports, we have jobs that have long hours. We have things that come up where we get home at 06:00 and our best intentions of cooking aren’t actually going to happen. So having something that’s ready made already in the refrigerator, that’s been delivered to our house ahead of time is a good, viable option. So I work with other companies that, that already have meals that you can have delivered to you that meet all of your nutrient needs. Some of them are diabetic friendly. Some of them are gluten free. Some of them are for low blood pressure. And I work hand in hand with them and the dieticians on staff there as well.

Interviewer: Very nice. It sounds like you’ve kind of already answered this question, I guess, of like, yeah. What types of people typically come to see you? But we’ve kind of already mentioned you kind of see all different walks of life coming to you. So where can people find you, Ali? How do they reach out to you and how do they get resources from you? I don’t know if you have any. I don’t know if we mentioned this before. Do you have, like, freebie type resources on your website or anything that people can grab?

Interviewee: So whenever you go to my website, you can just to get in touch with me, you can set up a free consultation on my Facebook or Instagram. There are always a bunch of recipes on there or links to recipe books and so forth. So there’s always access to those things on there. And there’s a plethora of fun things for people to access to.

Interviewer: So what is your website and your social media handles?

Interviewee: So my website is transformyourtable.com, and my social media handle is. It’s transform your table. All right.

Interviewer: There we go.

Interviewee: Yeah. And that’s it. Facebook as well now.

Interviewer: Okay, cool. Well, thank you, Ali. And if any of you out there listening have any questions for us as well, we would be happy to help lead and guide you in towards any questions you have about working with Ali. So thank you all for listening, and thank you for your time.

Interviewee: Ali, thank you very much.