ABOUT ME
Meet Rachel Hiser, founder of Chrysalis Health Transformation Group
My Personal Health Journey and Coaching Qualifications
Hi! My name is Rachel Hiser. I’m a mom of five (ages preschool to young adult), educator, avid baker, and nature lover. In 2023, I lost 30% of my body weight, dropping from a size 20 (bordering 22) down to a size 10 (bordering 8). I learned how to hack behavioral change and how to meet my needs in a way that helped me get unstuck.
Previously, I had struggled for over twenty years with my weight and my health. I lost and regained weight many times.
After losing my father prematurely from diabetes complications, I was determined to find a way to prevent that outcome in my own life.
In my early 40’s, after nearly giving up, I finally managed to lose seventy pounds and get back to a healthy weight and size.
Even more important, though, I learned how to...
have more energy and stamina to do the things I enjoyed
sustain healthy blood sugar levels
reduce disease risk through habits and skills
gain the freedom to live life well without starving myself or feeling miserable along the way
I learned what it takes to not just lose weight – but how to change from the inside out so that weight loss and sustaining a healthy lifestyle feels peaceful, integrative, and easy.
No more feeling deprived, depressed, or guilty.
No more riding the weight-loss roller coaster and feeling like I never get anywhere.
In 2025, I completed my certification to coach Nutrition as well as Sleep, Stress Management, and Recovery (SSR) through Precision Nutrition. These certifications, combined with my own extensive research and experience in helping others through their journey, enables me to be an effective life-change coach.
Now I help other women gain freedom from unwanted weight – once and for all – so you can also live a life you truly love.
Want to learn more about me? Read the long version below.
Want help to create lasting change in your own life?
My Certifications
While my personal experience and extensive research in overcoming many health and wellness challenges is very helpful, I believe that professional certification helps fill knowledge gaps.
Therefore, in 2025 I achieved the following certifications to enhance my coaching practice.
Certified Nutrition Coach (PN-1)
This teaches a foundation in nutrition science and behavior-change coaching that has helped over 150,000 clients develop real, lasting change to their health and wellness.
Knowledge, tools, strategies, and skills to coach the whole client using the "Deep Health" model.
Certified Sleep, Stress Management, and Recovery Coach (PN1-SSRC)
SSR coaching focuses on key knowledge and skills to help clients manage stress, improve sleep, and optimize recovery using science-backed strategies to meet client's unique needs.
Includes a deep dive into Physical, Mental, Emotional, Social, Existential, Environmental, Nutritional, and Exercise Stress and Recovery.
Plus sleep science, how to improve sleep quantity and quality, change adaptation, mindset, and more.
My Journey of Personal Metamorphosis
(aka, the long version)
The Moment of Truth
Most people embarking on a weight loss journey have experienced a poignant moment of truth.
That moment is when they:
1. Realize they look a certain way or are confronted with a health issue
2. Are not happy about it
3. Decide they must do something about it
My “moment of truth” was in February, 2023, when a friend sent me a photo she took of my cute baby boy in my arms during an event. I’m ashamed to say that, at the time, I couldn’t enjoy that photo. All I could see were my huge arms and the thickness of my body in the side profile image and, in utter shock, I thought, “Is this REALLY what I look like now?”
I was mortified.
I knew I had a problem. Most people who struggle with their weight already know.
It’s not that we don’t know the refrain, “Eat Less! Move More!” Oh, we know it. We know it well.
The problem isn’t not knowing. The problem is that we’ve tried that and it didn’t work. Or we tried it and crashed and burned.
When that fateful photo was taken, I had struggled with my weight for over twenty years. The gains started slowly at first. A few pounds here. A few more there. My first pregnancy contributed fifty pounds, of which I retained thirty and struggled to lose afterwards. A back injury the following year made weight loss even more challenging. Then we had more children and each addition to our family left an additional five- to ten-pound souvenir on my hips.
I tried dieting. I tried exercising. I tried intermittent fasting. I experienced some success with each individually and together, but something always happened to derail me. And the weight always came back. And by February, 2023, I was not just overweight. I was 75 pounds overweight and clinically obese.
Confronting Reality
Those who do not acknowledge and accept reality are doomed to break themselves against it.
Each of us have blind spots where we may not see reality. Sometimes we fool ourselves, turning a blind eye to the evidence around us.
Our brain rewrites what it sees in the mirror, transposing old memories of what we used to look like onto the image we perceive.
It takes something like an unexpected photo for us to suddenly see ourselves without that filter.
This is a hard truth, but an important one: Whether we see and accept reality or not, it is there. And until we face it, we cannot address the underlying issues that are holding us back.
I saw this in my late father's life. My father was a loving and kind father. He was incredibly disciplined and self-sacrificing. I respected him deeply.
However, he struggled with type 2 diabetes brought on by a lifetime of ingrained unhealthy habits and maladaptive coping mechanisms.
Despite his many attempts to lose weight, he was never able to achieve the lifestyle and behavioral changes necessary for permanent transformation. As a result, he lost his life at a mere forty-eight years old. It was a devastating loss for our family.
My father's death was a reality check for my own life. My husband and I started making many good lifestyle and food changes in the years following my father's death. And that did make a difference in some areas of our lives.
But I was still struggling with my weight and my own ingrained maladaptive coping mechanisms.
I was confronted with this truth when I saw that photo from my friend. It showed me it was time to acknowledge my state of being, how I felt about it, and then make some decisions.
Option One: Acceptance
As I worked to come to terms with my true reality, I realized that one option was to accept my size, learn to live with it, and just try to live as best I could without trying to change it.
I had already tried a lot of things over the years. But the weight had always come back. So, maybe I needed to stop trying to lose weight, accept this new reality, and try to make the best of it.
However, two things held me back from taking this option.
First was concern about how my body was going to age. I’ve seen many people struggle in their later years with health issues. Also, women lose bone mass as they age and this contributes to a lot of pain and health problems later in life.
Might I become one more statistic, living out my later years in pain and limited mobility? I already knew how miserable that was because I had lived in pain and limited mobility during the years spent healing from my back injury.
Second, when I imagined accepting my body as it was then, I felt really sad. It was literally a grief response, a sense of identity loss. That woman in the photo from my friend didn’t feel like me. She didn’t look like the woman I remember seeing in the mirror. Could I honestly accept the new “me” I had become?
As I faced the past and present with honesty and directness, I decided that I wanted to look at more options.
I felt that, if I truly couldn’t lose weight and keep it off after doing more research and exploring my options one more time, then I would accept my fate and my body the way it was. I’d invest in some cute clothes and stop comparing current me to past me.
There were things I still wanted that I couldn’t yet do. And it made me sad to miss out on experiences with my children, like field trips, hiking, and other activities that I physically couldn’t do because of my health issues and injuries.
It was worth giving it one more try so I could live a life I could really love with no regrets.
Option Two: Finding New Pieces of the Puzzle
I have extensive experience piecing my life together in what I call my “personal puzzle.” In my mid-20’s, I experienced a debilitating back injury and was also diagnosed with severe spinal stenosis, arthritis, and other health challenges. Despite their best efforts, including multiple rounds of physical therapy, steroid injections, back surgery (which failed), and more, doctors gave me no hope for a normal life.
Doctors told me I had two choices:
1. Try more surgeries, each getting more invasive and with severe, lasting side effects and continued complications throughout my life.
2. Or, accept the pain and be prepared to live on pain medication for the rest of my life, which included potential future liver failure and stomach issues as side effects.
Unacceptable. I refused to accept either vision for my future.
I refused to accept that I’d be disabled and in severe chronic pain for the rest of my life. I believed in the power of the body to self-heal and was determined to figure out how to make it happen.
I decided to make healing my body my Big Project and called it: Discovering My Puzzle.
Imagine a world full of puzzle pieces–these are all the tools, solutions, programs, surgeries, therapies, diets, exercises, supplements, and so forth that are available for people to use to build and improve their lives. Not all the pieces will be a good fit my personal puzzle. So, I had to figure out which ones belonged in my life. But there is no guide, no puzzle-box-lid, to show me what it should look like.
At first, that ambiguity and lack of direction was overwhelming. And debilitatingly terrifying. It felt like a black hole was in front of me, sucking my miserable, pain-filled life into it with no hope of escape.
One day it hit me: The ambiguity wasn’t a black hole. Instead, it was a blank slate. Ultimately, I had two choices: I could let my circumstances destroy me … or liberate me.
That meant I was free to choose my own future.
While I couldn’t follow the "normal" path of life, success, and happiness anymore due to my health challenges, I could still explore what success and happiness meant for me.
In essence, I realized an important truth...
I have the freedom to decide what the puzzle (i.e., my life) will look like by the pieces I choose to use and connect together.
And it worked. Over the next decade, my back slowly healed and I became more and more functional. I was still limited in many ways, though, and it frustrated me.
However, that February 2023 photo was the jolt I needed to get back to seeking solutions instead of wallowing in the misery of my reality.
So, “Option 1: Acceptance” went on the back-burner and I chose “Option 2: Find New Puzzle Pieces.”
I decided to stop focusing on what I couldn’t do and instead focus on one thing I could do. I discovered walking challenge videos on YouTube. These women were losing weight just walking, and I thought, “I can’t do much, but I CAN walk!”
Thanks to those YouTubers, I decided to walk fifteen minutes every day. Past me had made lots of excuses about how hard it was to make time to exercise. So, one solution was to limit the time commitment to what felt doable and reasonable. I decided that, if I felt like fifteen minutes was too much, I’d walk for just five minutes. The goal was daily walking, even if just a little. It was the perfect challenge to get me started.
Walking improved my life, decreased my pain, and made me feel more energized. Over the next couple months, I was able to slowly increase this walking time to an hour a day. And I lost almost thirteen pounds in three months JUST from walking!
Getting Help
But I was still struggling. I’d lost weight before and it always came back. Even though I was losing some weight, the scale was still jumping all over the place. I felt it was time to stop going it alone and get some help. I felt like I was missing something and maybe someone could help me find the missing link to move me from mild, temporary success to significant, life-changing success.
So, in April 2023, I joined a program called BodySlims.
BodySlims, through its program designer and primary “coach” Gerard Moran, reminded me that success in anything is determined by daily, focused effort on the right things. It is about consistency in the small things that lead to big results.
As an entrepreneur and business owner, I’ve known for a long time that success lies in the ability to identify the keystone activities that drive the majority of results.
Despite success in many other areas of life, I somehow never understood what combination of factors would help me achieve long-term success in weight loss.
BodySlims helped me refocus, simplify, and commit to a few key strategies for short periods of time. And that commitment paid off. I lost thirty-three pounds in my first 10-week BodySlims program. Overall, in 2023, I lost 73 pounds in 10 months between two BodySlims programs and working on my own. I went from a size 20 jeans and 2XL shirts to a size 10 jeans and medium shirts. It felt like a miracle!
Stuck, Once Again
However, something in me snapped in November, 2023. I went on a sugar binge over the holidays and regained about 10 lbs.
I felt like I was still on the weight-loss roller coaster.
Despite losing a lot of weight, I was back on the gain-train. Clearly, something was still missing.
So, I tried one more round of the BodySlims program in April, 2024. And while I love many aspects of the program, it had some critical limitations.
To be clear: I'm not bashing BodySlims. Some people have great results with it and I don't regret trying the program. It helped me get past some of my initial challenges. Gerard, the founder, helped me believe in myself again.
However, BodySlims wasn’t helping me address the remaining underlying issues that were keeping me stuck. And I started struggling with food obsession, calorie fixation, and other unhealthy patterns.
I couldn't bear to continue with the significant calorie restriction anymore. The calorie limitation was excessive for my needs and contributed to severe low energy, hair loss, and significant loss of strength. I went from being able to curl 20-lb dumbbells to only 8-lb weights. That shocked me then (though now I understand the science behind it).
I acknowledged that calorie restriction was one part of the puzzle of weight loss. But ONLY one part.
The calories-in vs calories-out model couldn't address the things I was struggling with like the temptations of stress eating, negative thoughts, and sugar cravings. Constantly tracking every morsel and focusing too much on calories contributed to very unhealthy food obsessions and damaged my relationship with food.
It was time to go deeper into the psychology of weight loss and personal transformation.
Digging deeper, I started to see that there were some things inside myself that needed addressed – things beyond calorie counting and exercise.
I continued researching and reading voraciously to understand what it would take to create permanent transformation in a positive, healthy way. I experimented on myself, worked with others, and observed what seemed to be helping all of us along the way. I found that there are foundational principles at work in creating permanent transformation.
Eventually I understood how to move forward consistently again - but in a way that wouldn't have negative side effects or create conditions for rebound.
I learned about the concept of Deep Health, how all aspects of our lives are interconnected. I learned how stress management, sleep, and focused recovery is a missing link in facilitating health and overall wellness.
The remaining key puzzle pieces were clicking into place to create permanent transformation.
I finally lost the weight I regained after BodySlims, but finally in a way that met all of my needs and created the conditions for permanent change.
Discovering Principles for Permanent Transformation
Scientific studies, my own experiences, and my observation of others throughout my life show that transformation includes many things, such as habits, skills, and mindset shifts.
Ultimately, transformation involves a change in perspective, a focus on goals that proceed from a vision, and consistent actions to reach those goals.
It requires doing things differently or doing different things.
Most of us who have struggled with our weight (or health issues) for a long time are already aware of these things, at least on some level. And many of us have already experienced some success in losing weight with such tools.
But it seems like something always happens and then our hard-won achievements reverse, sometimes alarmingly fast. And especially over holidays, special events, bereavement, or some other trigger event.
So, how do we go deeper still? How do we achieve permanent transformation?
Permanent transformation requires metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis means a “change of physical form, structure, or substance … a striking alteration in appearance, character, or circumstances.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metamorphosis)
Consider the humble caterpillar and butterfly. A caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly is a permanent transformation. Once its transformation is complete, a butterfly never goes back to being a caterpillar.
It is the same being, but changed from the inside out to become something new. That something was always possible deep inside.
How to Facilitate Your Own Metamorphosis
Each of us is like a caterpillar with the potential to be a butterfly. When you harness the power of metamorphosis, you create a permanent, positive change in your life. You never revert back to your caterpillar stage.
Unlike the caterpillar, we don’t always know what to do or how to do it. Coaching helps you unlock your transformation potential.
Three aspects of metamorphosis include preparation, action, and support. We get the best results when these are implemented simultaneously through small, manageable adjustments over time.
Preparation: A caterpillar has to consume the right things to prepare for its metamorphosis. And so do we. We have to gain understanding about nutrition, exercise, mindset, stress management, and other aspects of healthy living.
Action: We have to take the key, consistent steps that create our own chrysalis. We practice and build the skills, habits, and mindset needed to transform from within.
Support: Connect with others who are either going through the same journey and/or who have already completed their journey. Coaching and community support significantly improve outcomes.
Studies show that success rates increase when people are in community with like-minded people going through similar challenges or with similar goals. That’s why I’m not just sharing about books, podcasts, websites, or programs that I think are great. We need community and connection, to not feel alone in our journey. We need to know that most of our struggles are normal and real–but not insurmountable!
I want to share this very real hope with those who have struggled, like me, to find the means of transforming their lives.
That’s why I founded Chrysalis Health Transformation Group. That’s why I’m committed to continued learning and on-going certification in nutrition, stress management, and other topics foundational to cultivate health and wellness.
My passion is to share hope, to build community, and to provide support where it’s needed.
So, if you long to transform your own health and life, don’t give up!
If I, with all my health challenges and setbacks, can make progress, you can too.
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