What do you do when you’re a 27-year-old accountant from Canada and want a career change? While there are a million ways you may answer that, for Nadine Dumas, 40, becoming a health and fitness guru in the Cayman Islands was the perfect option.

Her journey into the health and wellness industry started at the age of 24 after Dumas moved from her hometown in Canada to the Cayman Islands where she discovered her love for fitness.

“I originally got into fitness because I started to fall into the trap that most people fall into down here which was going out too much and drinking and eating, so I joined a gym and noticed a lot of people training for fitness competitions,” Dumas says she was invited to watch a competition and consequently fell in love with the idea of training and competing herself.

“I thought ‘oh I can do that’ but the reality was, I was totally in over my head… But kept doing it anyway.”

Despite ranking third in her first competition, Dumas wasn’t the only one who noticed she still had some improvement to do, she said that a lot of people were outwardly criticizing her physique and calling her “too small,” among other comments, to compete.

“The comments only made me want to prove them wrong,” she said, and that’s exactly what she did. Nine months of training later she took home first place.

It was around that same time that Dumas was starting to consider a career switch. While she didn’t hate her accounting job, through her competitions she discovered a new passion she wanted to instead pursue.

“I thought I wanted to be a personal trainer so I moved back to Canada for a couple of years, kept competing and took classes for health and wellness. During that time I learned to diet and train women for fitness competitions, but I didn’t realize the extent that you had to put yourself out there and promote yourself,” Dumas says she wasn’t making enough money with coaching and had to continue doing accounting part-time just to keep it afloat.

It took only half a year before Dumas was feeling burnt out trying to juggle both her job and passion, she soon had to make a choice between the comfort of her steady finance job or the uncertainty and excitement of a new adventure.

“[By 2007] I went full steam ahead with fitness and built an online business with it.”

A few short years later, Dumas relocated her online endeavors and moved back to the Cayman Islands in 2010. She wasn’t competing much anymore and instead shifted her focus to shooting for magazines and landing magazine covers features on Oxygen, Women’s Health and Fitness Wellness and more. Dumas attributes many of these magazine features to helping her businesses really take off–and not a moment too soon. Dumas got pregnant with her now-nine-year-old son, and her career path would change yet again.

“After I got pregnant and had my son I really transitioned into your ‘average everyday woman’ focusing more on dieting and keeping weight off and less on competition–not only for myself but with my clients too since a lot of people contacted me about their inability to keep weight off and how they continue to gain it back over and over again, and I thought, ‘there’s something clearly missing.'”

Dumas wanted to discover the missing link, so she again went back to school, this time the Institute for the Psychology of Eating to become a mind-body nutrition coach to help people look into the root cause of their eating and weight loss troubles.

Dumas was featured in Forbes a couple of times for her mind-body coaching and while most people would be satisfied with the number of accomplishments she had achieved by this point, she continues to have a hunger to do more with her knowledge. That said, she’s currently attending classes with the Institute of Functional Medicine to work alongside a functional medicine doctor.

All meanwhile, Dumas owns and operates the only spray tanning company on the island and has recently created her own sunless tanning product line, LuxeBody Tan.

“I look for gaps in the market and I try to fill them, and people are conscious about their skin tone in the Caribbean so I brought down spray tanning,” she says. “I know what women want and how they want to feel.”

This is just one of her many ways to help the women she works with on a daily basis feel better and more confident about themselves–and perhaps most miraculously, she does it all by herself! “I bring the Caribbean glow to you,” she says.

She’s also written five books and hosted luxury wellness retreats –which were also featured in Forbes.

“It’s’ not easy, sometimes I’m clocking well over 80 hours a week, but through it all, I get to connect with a lot of great people and I get to help a lot of them. Overall it’s rewarding and fun. I really, really enjoy what I do.”

Dumas has a 10-15 year goal of growing her sunless spray products while continuing to take on clients for wellness coaching.

You can get connected with her through her social media and websites posted below.

www.nadinedumas.com
www.luxebodytanning.com
IG @nadinedumas and @luxebodytan