[SPECIAL EDITION] Episode 115: Rachel's Story

In this special edition episode, MindStrong Founder and CEO, Rachel Freiman, shares her personal backstory on the road to creating and growing MindStrong. 

Rachel is the CEO of MindStrong Fitness, a lover of lifting heavy things up and down, and an educator dedicated to helping others unleash their healthiest, most empowered selves through mastering nutrition as a lifelong skill, rooted in neuroscience and psychology. To date, she's helped a whopping 3,000 women do exactly that. 

She has more than fifteen years of classroom instruction, and certifications in Personal Training, Sports Nutrition, and Behavior Modification. A true neuroscience and psychology nerd at heard, she has studied the Neuroscience of Nutrition under the renowned Dr. Nicole Avena, visiting professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University. 

Rachel is the author of the bestselling book Becoming MindStrong: The Truth About Health, Fitness, and the Bullsh*t That’s Holding You Back and podcast host of the Becoming MindStrong Podcast. 

She developed MindStrong Fitness with an inside-out approach, to focus on both physical and mental attributes in building healthy, sustainable habits.

When she’s not in the gym, Rachel enjoys exploring the world with her partner, snuggling their puppies, Gus and Frankie, eating, and thinking about the next time she'll be eating. 

The biggest event in MindStrong history kicks off Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026! MindStrong's Runway to Summer: 3 Day Metabolism Boosting Challenge is 3 days, live on Zoom with me, for a deep dive into all things metabolism healing (complete with a live Q&A each day)! Reserve your spot here:

www.MindStrongFitness.com/challenge

Transcript

Becoming MindStrong Season X Episode 115

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Mind Strong Fitness, Rachel's backstory, nutrition skill, music career, teaching experience,
entrepreneurial spirit, online coaching, business growth, COVID impact, Ignite program, Her Fitbiz,
metabolism boosting challenge, female coaches, business risks, personal development.

SPEAKERS
Speaker 1
Speaker 1 00:00
Welcome back to the becoming mind strong podcast, and we are going to close out the season
with a little bit of a special episode. And by special, I mean an interesting one. For me, I get
asked a lot about my backstory, about my background, about how I got into the world in
menopause and do what we do. And it's one of those topics that for me, I'm always like, Do
people really care about the backstory, or do they just care if we can help them or not? But
doing this a long time, you hear repeat questions, you learn what people care about, and it's a
question I get asked quite a bit. So today, we're going to wrap up this season of the becoming
mind strong podcast with a special episode of Rachel's backstory. Check it out.
Speaker 1 00:53
Welcome to the becoming mind strong podcast, the official podcast of mind strong fitness. My
name is Rachel, and I'm the CEO of mind strong. And we are here for two things. We're here for
hope in a stage of life where it feels like we are doing everything right and nothing is working. I
am here to tell you you are not broken. This is fixable, and I promise there is hope. And number
two, we are here for truth in an industry that is designed to keep us confused with shake
systems and point systems and frozen meals. I promise you it doesn't have to be that difficult.
Someone can teach you the skill of riding a bike, someone can teach you the skill of knitting,
and I can teach you to master the skill of nutrition. So are you ready? Let's rock and roll.
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Speaker 1 01:50
So I was born on a warm so No, I'm just kidding. We're not going to go back that far, but I do
want to start the story as as far back as fourth grade. And you'll see why that's important in a
few minutes here, when I was in fourth grade, my school did a thing where they brought in
instruments and, you know, showed you you could join the band. And my parents essentially
said, Pick an instrument. You you're joining the band. No questions asked, and I did. I chose the
trumpet. I could not tell you why, probably because it was shiny and all the boys were doing it.
So I wanted to being a tomboy. I wanted to show that girls could do it too. And I was terrible. I
was terrible at music. I was always, you know, in school band, they do chairs. I was always last
chair. I never practiced. I hated it. And fast forward around seven ish grade. Seventh grade, I
got a music teacher who was so much more than music teacher. He was a former president of
the Make a Wish International Foundation. His whole thing was that music is a vehicle to give
back. And he got me really intrigued at what it could mean to be a musician. And I don't know
what he saw in me, because I was still terrible in those days, but he took my parents aside, and
he's like, look, there is a raw talent here that I think if we chose to develop Rachel could do
really well in music. So I did. I tried it. I started practicing, and lo and behold, thank you. Neural
connections. The more I practiced, the better that I got. Next thing I knew, music became my
life. I practiced hours every day. I'd wake up and practice before school, after school, I started
winning all state competitions. Fast forward a few more years, and I wound up going to it's
called interlocking Arts Academy for those who have also have artistic backgrounds. It's
basically the the Hogwarts of the arts. So it's a it's a boarding High School in the woods of
Michigan. There's nothing there but that school, and it's only for musicians, dancers, visual
artists, all artists of the all varieties, at a high school level. So I wound up going to high school
for music. I went to college for music. I got my master's in jazz performance, and went on to
live in New York City, and I was a jazz musician for about 10 years. Music was my life at that
point. I mean, we're talking about from seventh, eighth grade until my what, late 20s, early 30s
ish, and it was a ton of fun. I could not imagine doing anything else at this point. This is who I
am and what I do, and this was my self identity. And as I started getting into my 30s, you know,
being a jazz musician is a lot of fun until it's not, what I started finding is that the gigs that paid
really well were not fun. It was a lot of like wedding cocktail hours and playing the same songs
over and over again. And the gigs that were a ton of fun where we got to write our own music
and experiment is a band they didn't pay very well at all, if anything. Sometimes it was like a
meal or 50 bucks. So I kind of hit this crossroads where I'm like, man, you know, I'm getting into
my 30s now, all my friends are settling down, and a couple of them were having kids, and it
was just like, do I want this life indefinitely? Lee, so I decided to move to South Florida, where a
lot of my friends were. I was living in New York at the time, and just see what it felt like to live a
more settled life. There's this terrible saying in the music world of those who can't do teach. So
going from a performer to a teacher ego wise is a it's a scary move,
Speaker 1 05:21
but for me, it was like, Okay, well, I've proved I can make it as a performer, quote, unquote, make it whatever that means to you. And I knew I loved teaching. I had done part time
teaching the whole time I was a freelance musician. So I was like, let me just try it. Let me try it
for a year and see how I feel about teaching. And it was not an easy decision. There were, there
are a lot of voices in my brain telling me I was selling out all the things that come with that. So
moved to South Florida, started teaching middle school. The gold in this is that the school I was
teaching at what had, hadn't even been built yet, it was a brand new school. So for me, as an
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entrepreneur in my heart and soul, I got to build it from the ground up. And this is, this is, this
is a big part of my background. My parents were business owners. When I was living in New
York as a freelance musician, I had founded a nonprofit based around bringing music back to
public schools with a friend of mine, like I have always had this need to build my very first
business was called pinecone King. I was in fourth grade, and we would go door to door, my
best friend and I selling little pine cone wreaths. So the entrepreneurial spirit is deep. So I go to
teach at this, this brand new school, I get to build their program from scratch. And man, did I
fall in love. I loved teaching. I loved building this program. I loved Middle School, like taking kids
at this weird, awkward age that could be so terrible. And I mean, honestly, 80% of our
conversations were just about life, about self esteem, about the power of choice, about neural
connections. We would just nerd out and chat, but I held them to a high bar, and here's why I
started this story in fourth grade. I was not the gifted musician who just was born within her
blood. It's funny, because my mom was a pianist, not professionally, but incredible piano
player. I did not get those genes, so I really had a soft spot for the kids who struggled right, the
kids who were like, this doesn't come natural to me. It's like, Yeah, same. And it's a lesson that I
carry with me through this day, I truly believe that the people for whom things just come easy,
they get bored, right? Come easily. They just get bored. When I was at interlock, and I saw
people who had always been the best, and over the years, you saw them kind of fall off the
radar, because they never had to work for it. When we struggle with something, when we're not
naturally the best, and we have to put blood, sweat and tears into it on the other side of it, holy
cow, the reward is so much better. And I have the fast forwarding to present day. You know, I
have that conversation a lot with with women in our Ignite, our signature program, when
they're like, you know, I'm struggling with macro tracking. I don't know how to lock this in. I'm
like, Look, I don't say, Who cares that you're struggling like I care. I want to make it easier. And
chances are, when you lock this in, you're going to stick with it a lot longer, because we had to
put some blood, sweat and tears in there. So anyway, back to Florida, I started teaching middle
school. Grew this. It got to the point they they started using the band program at the school on
the the radio this. They were advertising on the radio, and they would use the program to bring
people into the school, because we grew it into this, this big, known thing, because the kids
would perform at Disney World and won all kinds of awards and all kinds of cool stuff. So I went
on to teach for about the next decade after that, a few years, quite a few years into teaching, I
just needed a release. I love to this day. I love teaching middle schoolers. I love the reward of
the work, and it's a lot of work. It's a lot of taking deep breaths. You're in a classroom of 40
middle schoolers at once. It's a lot of taking deep breaths, not losing your cool, you know,
reminding yourself their children, like, take a breath. So I just needed somewhere to let off
steam at the end of the day. And at the time, I had a really good friend who was super into the
gym, so I started going to the gym with her. I didn't know anything about nutrition. I'd been
someone who just ate very little, mostly lived off salads, had no idea what I was doing. And this
friend drove me nuts to no end because she was even shorter than I am. I only five four. She
was shorter than I am, and could lift like a beast. She made me look like the weakest human on
Earth. And because I tend to have a competitive side about things I care about, I was like, no,
no, this, this is not going to do. And I got very into the gym very quickly. Having being
someone, I find that people who are very goal oriented, who raise that bar a lot, right? We tend
to like weight training, because you get to see those numbers go up, and it's a good carrot to
follow. So I got very into the gym very quickly. I was not consistent in the beginning.
Sometimes I'd go hardcore. Sometimes I take weeks off, my body was not showing any results.
I didn't know anything about nutrition, so in the beginning, I was working my butt off and
nothing was changing. At some point the pendulum swung, because my friend was like, you
just have to eat more. You just have to eat more. I didn't know what that meant. So then I just
started eating a ton and got a little fluffy on the other side. And I just learned by doing. I just
kind of jumped in the deep end, and then it hit a point where I was like, You know what? Like, I
want to actually learn about this stuff. I'm going to be putting all this time, and I'm pretty,
pretty into it now. Like, let me I'm an educator. I love learning. Let me learn about it. So I
started doing some research. And the more I learned, if you listen to my content, you hear me
use the word flabbergasted in any story related to this, and I think it'll forever be my word,
because the more flabbergasted I became, the more I learned about this industry. Because
when you understand how nutrition works as a skill, it's not that complicated. It still takes time,
right? There's a difference between simple and easy, right? It is not you snap your fingers you
lose weight, but you understand that all of these point systems and these shake systems and
these diets like they are a very well packaged, pretty pink bow on things you don't actually
need. What you need is to understand nutrition as a skill. So when I started to learn that, I was
like, Man, this is gross. Like, this is disgusting, what's going on in this industry. So I didn't think
about doing anything with it. I just continued on my journey. And as I started to lock things in, my body started to show. I started to lose weight, my muscles started showing. And soon, just
organically, a lot of my teacher friends would come up to me in the hallway, or even teachers I
didn't know that well, and they'd be like, Man, I wish I could get in shape, but I have no idea
what to do, or I'm intimidated, or I keep going from diet to diet, and nothing's working. And at
that point, like mind strong was not even a twinkle in my eye. I was just like, well, I'm going to
the gym anyway. You want to come with me? I'll just show you what to do. So I started bringing
a few teachers to the gym. I would give them some tips, and the way I will forever tell this part
of the story is it was almost selfish. The feedback that I heard from these women were things
like, I have avoided mirrors for the past 10 years, and I found myself catching a glimpse and
like, double checking my booty this morning, or a big one that I heard from multiple people was
every time my husband would just, like walk by and put his arm around me, or, like, touch me, I
would cringe because I was afraid he felt some kind of role. And I noticed recently that I'm
walking around with more confidence and I'm leaning in instead of out when he touches me.
And selfishly, I was like that. That is what I want to do. That is what I want to help every woman
do. So at this point, you know, when I was teaching, it was not just teaching. I was doing before
school clubs. I was doing after school clubs. I had a 45 to an hour minute, 45 minute to an hour
commute to work like this was like a 12 hour day. My life was leave the house at five in the
morning, work, however many hours, 10 hours, go straight to the gym, come home, get my
stuff ready for next day, go to bed. Like life was was a lot. It was packed. So in between that
pack schedule, I decided, why don't I just start a little thing on the side, like I'm taking these
teacher friends to the gym anyway. What if I just started charging people and doing, you know,
some in person training, and I can teach them a thing or two about the skill of nutrition. So I
started doing that. I started taking some teacher friends to the gym, making a couple bucks off
of it, doing some more structured individual in person coaching. And very quickly I realized that
was not what I wanted to do. Like I love the feedback, I loved helping them, but I wanted to
make a big impact. I wanted to cut through the noise in the nutrition industry, and I wasn't
going to be able to do that one by one by one, right? Because if you're working one on one,
this, your time's limited. Even if you helped 10 people in a day, if you worked a 10 hour day,
that's 10 people, whereas I knew if I worked online, I mean, I could help 5000 people in that
same hour. The thing is on, this is pre covid. So online nutrition was not a thing yet. There were
a handful of people doing it, but it was not a thing. I remember even talking to people in the
early stages of like, Yeah, I think I'm going to switch to online coaching. And I had people say to
me, like, what is that? Isn't that a thing? I cannot tell you how many people said to me, that
seems risky. Maybe you should keep doing in person training, just in case. And there was
something in my gut that was like, No, this is this is the way that it that it's going, this is what I
want to do. I would rather just stay teaching middle school. I don't want to do in person
training. But there was something in my gut that was like, This is what we're going to
14:40
do real quickly,
Speaker 1 14:41
the biggest event in mind, strong history is coming up, and you are hearing about it first, from
March 3 through fifth, 2026 I am hosting my runway to summer metabolism boosting
challenge. It is totally free, and it is going to be the biggest event that we have ever done in
the. Three of mind strong. You can go to www dot mind strong fitness.com/challenge, or just
use the link in the show notes below to reserve your spot. I cannot wait. I will see you there.
Now, let's get back to the episode. So on my lunch breaks, quote, unquote, if you're a teacher,
you know you don't actually have a lunch break, right? You're making copies with one hand,
shoving food in your mouth with the other. But somewhere in there, I started building out a
website, you know, I'd get home and just burn the midnight oil and do all that, and started
slowly introducing this concept of training people online. Back in those days, it was Skype, not
zoom, so I would work with people one to one, and we'd be on Skype and ignite, which is now
as of the time I'm recording this. We're a team of 45 it is a very well oiled machine. Back in the
day, it was a one page PDF that linked to YouTube videos. It's It's very cute to look back on.
And I just started. I just started by starting. This is another little life lesson that I love, is you
just start, just by starting, right? So many people never start because they're so worried about
it being perfect, when you can just embrace the mess, just know it's going to suck in the
beginning and just start, and from there we can have trust in ourselves, right? We are
intelligent women. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get better. So just freaking
start, because the end version is not going to be the same as the first version. So I did and I
was doing both for a while. I was doing online coaching while I was teaching. It was, it was a lot,
but I loved it. I felt lit up every single day. And then here's, here's where the story, this is one of
my favorite parts of the story. I'd been doing this for probably about two, three years. At this
point, I was doing mind strong, very, very part time, still teaching, and I knew what we had
here. I knew that if I could put my time, focus and energy on mind strong, I could blow this up
into a full fledged business. But it was scary, because at this point I had left South Florida. I was
still teaching, but I was now teaching in California. So a teacher in California makes six figures,
or at least the school that I was in I was making six figures as a teacher in California, and mind
strong at the time, was making probably about 20 to $30,000 a year. Okay, so this means my
salary would go from six figures to not 20 to $30,000 a year, because that was the cost of the
business making. That was what the business name made. Not I wasn't making a salary at that
point. And finally, I was like, You know what? Screw it like Life is short. I don't want to look back
with regrets. I want to know that I gave this my all. I'm putting in my notice, and I will never
forget like I'm this is a 32nd story, but behind the scenes to this day, all these years later, this
was the scariest thing I've ever done in my life. There are no words. The amount of therapy
sessions I had and business coaching sessions I had, inventing to friends like this was scary. I
sat down with my then principal, I told her how much I love working there, how much I
appreciate it, and I'm going to go well all in on my business. And this will be my last school
year, about a month. Literally, a month after that conversation, covid hit. So covid, covid hits,
the world shuts down. And my principal comes back to me and she says, Hey, I know that you
made the decision to quit teaching. We're going to be fully remote for a while. How would you
feel if we kept you on your salary, you get to keep all your benefits, and you teach a few hours
a day online. And let me tell you, like talk about the universe throwing out a safety net. I now
had the time, space capacity to go all in on mind strong sans a few hours a day online, where I
would still get to keep salary benefits, all of the above. Thank you, universe. So I did. I had a
very cushy situation where I got to do both. I was teaching online. A few hours. The rest of my
day was spent with mind strong. That was a temporary thing, because once they went back to
school, that was gone. But check out what happened. Mind strong grew 450%
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19:02
in that year. Why? Because where, where
Speaker 1 19:06
focus goes, energy flows right when I was able. That's a Tony Robbins line, when I was able to
put everything into mind strong. The results spoke for themselves. And talk about following
your gut. Online coaching was not really a thing, except for those handful of people doing it. If I
had listened to all the people saying, shouldn't, isn't that scary? Shouldn't you keep doing in
person, I wouldn't have done it. Mind strong also blew up, because in a world now, a covid
world, where everyone was scrambling to try to figure out the online space and how do I do
online coaching and gyms are shut down. I already had a company, I already had a brand, so
we just took off. Now I wish that was the end of the story, and here we are, all these years
later, we flourished during covid, from a from a business perspective, on the other side of
covid, however, the online world changed drastically. Ly back when I started online again,
barely anyone was doing it. So I put out a workshop or a free challenge, or whatever else, and
people in the online space were like, holy cow, this person's offering us free content online. Yes,
I'm going to sign up post covid. Everyone was doing that right now. It's, oh, another free online
workshop. Yeah, what are you selling us? And we started to not just flatline, but we started
dipping significantly. And I will tell you, I am not someone who carries a lot of stress in general.
I think I do a really good job of zooming out and seeing life in general. And you know, it is, will
this matter when I'm 99 all the all the stuff we talk about in the podcast, those were hard days.
Those. I described them as waking up with an elephant on my chest every morning, because at
that point, as we grew and as we built a team, and as we had more business expenses, I It
wasn't just me anymore, right? It wasn't this fun little side project. This was my only source of
income. I had team members that relied on this income we had, we were used to helping X
number of women, and that was dwindling, and it was scary man. That was stressful. So that
went on for a while. I tried to just beat a dead horse and keep doing the same stuff, and it
wasn't working. And this, if I had to throw in third life lesson here, this one's more for more for
entrepreneurs, but I'm sure if you dig in, you could find this to relate to most areas of life. The
reason I believe that most entrepreneurs don't make it is because the moments that you have
to do this scary stuff are the moments where it feels the absolute worst. And here's what I
mean by that. I was now in a time period where we're nose diving, cash is not there, right? It's
hard to breathe. I'm waking up with an elephant in my chest, and I'm like, Well, I can either
keep doing what I've been doing and it's not working, like we've done this long enough to know
now it's not working, or I can bite the bullet and I can spend money that I don't have at the
worst time possible, where we're hemorrhaging cash, and I can figure it out and hire a new
coach that's going to help me figure out how to do this. And that is the breaking point. That is
the decision point that most people won't make. Most people say, Well, I don't have the money
right now. Business is nose diving. How am I supposed to invest? Well, then you're going to go
out of business, right? Math is always going to math. It's, it's those moments where it's scariest
to jump off the cliff that you have to freaking jump. You don't have to. You could just keep
living the same life, but if you want to live the life of your dreams, you have to jump when it
feels scariest. And that's, I mean, go back and listen to the fear podcast. That's one of my
favorite ones. So I did. I hired a couple new coaches, and, well, one particular new coach, and
then from him, I met our current marketing team. I met everyone else who's most of the people
in the business. Now, game changer. In the next year, we grew 650% we went from nose diving
to a multi million dollar business in that one year. At this point now, there's a time that I'm
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recording this. We're our team of 45 and counting, like, literally, as I'm recording this podcast,
we're hiring in new coaches. So that's going to, that's going to increase we have, man, it's, it's
a weird thing to think back on that one page PDF of Ignite. It was a one woman show. I mean,
we now have a director of coaching who leads our team of 30 coaches we hired in a COO this
year. So it's like taking your child and not just sending them off to kindergarten, but maybe
even sending them off to college, right? You lose that control, but you're so proud to see what
this baby has grown up into that's very much what it feels like. So I look back on all of that, and
it's a wild ride, man, but there is a common thread through all of it, like the reason I started this
conversation in fourth grade is because I truly, truly believe, if I hadn't struggled with music
early on, I don't know that I would be the business owner that I am today. Because I learned
grit, I learned tenacity, I learned how to sit my butt in a practice room for four to six hours at a
time, and focus and grind and give myself brain breaks when I need it, and then get back to
work, like all this stuff that you have to do to grow a successful business. I learned through
music, and I learned by not being very good at it in the beginning and now again, as the time
I'm recording this, like my whole drive, my whole mission, is to streamline processes so no one
has to learn the hard way. That's what Ignite is. Ignite is my backstory of being like, how do I do
this, right? What is, how do I work out properly? How do I stop being injured all the time? What
do I do with nutrition? Why is this so confusing to me? I'm like, let me just put together a
program that I wish I had when I started so we can condense time and get you from A to C as
quickly as possible. Now, just in this past year, I launched a second business called her fitbiz,
where I teach online female coaches to to build and scale and grow their own online company.
Same thing. It took me a long. Time of trial and error and no dives and recovering to learn what
you actually need to grow a multi million dollar business and scaling from there. And I started
that company for the same reason like, Oh, it doesn't have to be that hard. Let me just
streamline A to C for you so you can condense time and start scaling and start helping more
women faster. There's a saying that says the thing you struggle with the most becomes the
thing you're most passionate about teaching. And that is life motto. I think, looking back on my
story, obviously, there's a lot more to the past 40 some years than that, but looking back on
my, my life story, that's a lot of what it was. It was a lot of head down, hands in the dirt, blood,
sweat, tears, figure this out. And now looking back on it, I'm like, Man, there were easier ways
to do things. And if there's one service I can provide for this world in the time I'm here, is I
know my superpower is educating. Let me take all the lessons I learned the hard way and
streamline them so that everyone else doesn't have to learn the hard way. So here we are,
present day. As of the time I'm recording this, I'm living in Denver, Colorado. I am loving it, and
just so excited about where mind strong is, where mind Strong's heading. We're bringing in
again, this will change by the time probably this podcast gets released. But last month, we
brought in over 150 new women in one month, that number will double in the months ahead. We have a powerhouse team of coaches. We have powerhouse team of admin. I pinch myself,
literally pinch myself. I cannot believe the life I get to live. I remember my teacher days where
my dream I would love to just be able to sit at my kitchen counter and have a cup of coffee
before work. That was my dream. Now, I mean, if you're watching the video here, it's not true. I
have jeans on right now, but some days I have pajama pants on the bottom because you can't
see Right. Talk about living a dream life. And it didn't come easy. It came from taking a lot of
risks. It came from saying, You know what, I'm going to jump and I'm going to trust that the
universe has me, whatever you call the universe. Maybe the trust is just in yourself, but I know
that I believe in me. I believe in the universe. I know that it might not be smooth sailing, but I'm
not going to stop till it happens. So let me just leap. Let me just face the fear and do it anyway,
and that's why we're here. So thank you for listening. As I mentioned in the intro, it's, it's a little
odd for me to talk about my story, but I do get asked a lot. So those are, that's the I don't want
to say that's the highlight reel, because there were some lows in there, but that's the Cliff
Notes version, is how I'll put it. So I hope you enjoyed this season, not just this episode, but this
season of the becoming mind strong podcast. And thank you for being here, and I will see you
next season.
Speaker 1 27:58
I am hosting the largest event we have ever done, in mind strong history, and you don't want
to miss it, from March 3 through fifth, 2026 join me live on Zoom totally free for mind Strong's
runway to summer, my three Day Metabolism boosting challenge to join. And for more details,
go to www dot mind strong fitness.com/challenge,
28:23
or just use the link in the show notes below. You.
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