Maxine’s Journey: From Dietitian to Full-Time Online Coach

At Team Royalty Training, you actually have two coaches — not just one. You work with me and Jay directly. Jay tends to have more of a tough love, direct coaching style, whereas I’m a little more… how should I say this — nurturing and emotionally involved. It’s great because we balance each other out, and our clients get the best of both worlds.

10 years of competing.

That being said, I’ve been competing for 10 years, and I have very specific guidelines and methods I follow when prepping clients. So yes, we’re definitely strict, and we definitely have high expectations for our contest prep clients.

But like I mentioned, it’s nice because there are two of us — we balance each other out.

My coaching style changes a lot depending on the client. Once I get to know someone better and have a clear idea of their needs, I can gauge how much I can push them, how much I need to push them, and when I need to pull back. That just comes with coaching experience.

What does coaching mean to me.

I’ve been coaching since 2018 — so about seven years now — and I’ve worked with a lot of different types of clients. Once I understand you better, I can assess what I need to do to give you the best experience and provide exactly what you need from coaching.

Another thing I wanted to share: coaching, to me, is not just handing out a diet plan and a training program. It’s actually coaching someone. That means giving them structure and being there for them — supporting them throughout the journey. That’s what coaching really is.

My journey and how I got to where I am in terms of my work.

As a teenager, I struggled with eating. I was never officially diagnosed with an eating disorder, but I definitely had one—for probably four or five years. I was restricting my food intake, terrified of eating, and exercising for all the wrong reasons.

I wasn’t in a good place.

Then I discovered bodybuilding and competing in my early 20s, and that really helped shift my mindset away from restriction and fear of food. I started focusing on fueling my body with foods that made me feel good and gave me the energy I needed to work toward my goals.

At that point, I hadn’t competed yet, but I decided I wanted to do a bikini competition.

Starting my first bikini prep really changed my mindset.

I went from being scared of food to being excited about food — seeing it as fuel for my body. I know a lot of people have the opposite experience and can develop eating disorders through prep and competing, so I understand it can go both ways. But for me, it really helped.

After doing that first prep and competition, I learned so much about nutrition — the importance of protein, carbohydrates for energy, healthy fats… all the things I had been restricting. That really opened my eyes and led me down the career path I chose: becoming a registered dietitian.

Driven by personal experience, I became a dietitian.

"I wanted to become a dietitian because I wanted to help people who struggled with food the way I did. At the time, I was studying psychology. I ended up switching to sciences, changed universities, applied to the dietetics program, didn’t get in at first, had to do more prerequisites and volunteer work… but I finally got in."

I completed my four-year degree, then a one-year internship, and finally started working as a registered dietitian in a hospital. That was in 2021.

Throughout university, I also continued competing and earned my pro card in 2018. While going through school, getting my pro card, and building my way up in the fitness industry, I started my coaching business in 2018.

Everything kind of progressed from there. From 2021 until 2025, I worked full-time as a dietitian in a hospital.

I was super excited about that at the time — finishing my degree, getting a good job with benefits and steady pay. That was the goal. And I stuck with it for a while.

I turned my passion and experience into full-time coaching

But if you’ve been following my journey, you’ll know that two months ago, I decided to leave my full-time hospital job and go casual. That’s why I’m here today — I’m no longer working full-time, and I’m putting more time into launching my coaching app and growing my business.

I’m excited to say I’m now a full-time online coach. But I bring all of that experience in nutrition and dietetics — plus my degree—into my coaching. And I truly believe that knowledge and background give me an edge and help me serve my clients better.