Mercer alumna Meghan Dorman turned an interest in how the body works into a career helping other people discover how to take full control of how they feel. Dorman is a certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, fitness trainer, blogger, speaker and entrepreneur.
She started her Mercer education in 1999 as a pre-med major, but after struggling with chemistry, she realized she needed to take her education in a different direction. She switched to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, graduating in 2003 with degrees in communications and Spanish. At Mercer, she gained collaborative skills, learned the value and power of language, and got practice in using those skills to help and empower others, she said.
After an internship with a local news channel in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dorman took a job with a small public relations firm and found she really liked that line of work. She went on to work for Tech Data Corporation in Clearwater, Florida, first as a copywriter in the corporate communications department and then as a business development manager for Cisco Systems.
Meanwhile, Dorman was also pursuing her passions for health and fitness and her interest in entrepreneurship. She got certified as a CrossFit, CrossFit Kids and prenatal coach and started the first CrossFit Kids affiliate on the west coast of Florida.
With a desire to exit the corporate world, she left Tech Data in 2011 when her first child turned a year old. She continued to teach exercise classes and began leading quarterly nutrition challenges, which she found she enjoyed even more than the fitness work.
“It’s very cool to teach someone that their body is more capable than what they think it is,” said Dorman, who now has two children with husband Eric. “I loved that part of fitness, coaching and training, but nutrition is where people’s lives change.”
Dorman enrolled in a holistic nutrition program and graduated in 2016 as a certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. She began doing holistic wellness coaching with clients one-on-one, all the while continuing to coach adult CrossFit classes, and has seen her business expand and evolve since then.
“People come to me for a myriad of reasons,” Dorman said. “Most of them want to lose weight, but there is usually something else going on. I like to work alongside their medical practitioners to support them from the inside out.”
As a wellness coach, she serves as a “support guide” as she educates clients about how their body works and how food functions, she said. She works with them to create new habits and strategies that can change the way they feel and live.
Dorman and her younger sister, Haley, who is a licensed mental health therapist, found that their two areas of expertise often went hand-in-hand as they were working with clients. They hosted a weekly podcast called “Nourish Joy” in 2019, and now they are poised to launch a joint venture this year. In addition to their own private practices, they will co-run a business that’s centered around treating the body holistically. They hope to offer large-scale events, digital courses and e-books that will help people reconnect with their own bodies and learn how to take that empowerment back into their everyday lives.
“What I love about my work is getting people to come back into themselves, come back home and fully inhabit their bodies,” Dorman said. “There’s an awakening that comes when you realize that you have full control of how you feel. You have all of that within you. My favorite part of the job is showing people that’s true and how to access that themselves.”
