Meet Our Leading Ladies…Rhonda

For many women, “balance” is that goal just beyond grasp that seems so attainable on paper but just never seems to work out in actuality.  Do you know that feeling?  Rhonda not only knows it, she has a degree in it and has made it her life’s work to help women achieve personal balance.  This Leading Lady’s personal journey towards self-balance guided her from her modeling career into holistic health and nutrition.

Rhonda grew up on a farm near Calgary, Alberta Canada.  After her mother enrolled her in self-improvement courses at a modeling agency, Rhonda asked to take another series of classes and she slid right into the agency’s modeling school.  Rhonda did her first photo shoot at age 13, and by age 14 she won the YM Magazine high school cover girl contest.  Her career took off and she began traveling for modeling jobs during school breaks until she moved to Miami Beach when she turned 18.

After living in both Miami and New York for five years each, Rhonda finally settled in Los Angeles with her husband, Neal, who is a film producer.  She is represented by Ford Models.

Rhonda’s modeling career has taken to Australia, Europe, South Africa, South America, all over the US and around the world. While she has fond memories of the beautiful resorts she’s visited, from the tropical Mexican Rivera to the wine country in Napa Valley, Rhonda admits that modeling is not all luxury and glamour.  She often modeled bathing suits in a very icy ocean during winter climates and sported heavy jackets in the dead of the hot, humid Miami summer.

Rhonda has been featured in several commercials but does not consider herself much of an actress.  “I’m fine for a 30 second TV commercial,” she says, “but acting terrifies me.”  She says she loves her husband dearly but has no plans to be the next Leading Lady in one of his films.

Rhonda is, however, the Leading Lady of her own holistic health and nutrition company, Awareness Within.  After years of stressful dieting and traveling for her modeling career, Rhonda felt disconnected from her own body.  She knew she wanted children one day so she decided to make it a priority to reestablish balance in her body.  She began consulting health practitioners and doing her own research, and she ultimately learned over time how to restore the wellness she was seeking.  Rhonda’s personal discovery made her realize her passion for health, so she went to school to educate herself before starting the Awareness Within.

Rhonda’s holistic approach takes the whole person into account by examining their lifestyle in total.  This analysis includes inspecting the activities and relationships in someone’s life, which she calls primary foods, and the actual foods one consumes, known as secondary foods.  The tricky part is that every person is different and therefore their needs and means to balance are also unique, which is what she works with her clients to uncover and achieve based on individual goals.

One of the areas Rhonda focuses on is helping women who are trying to conceive by reconnecting self and body, finding the body’s natural rhythm and creating a safety zone for the body.  Rhonda’s goal is to help her clients “connect and listen to the body and find what feels right and loving.”  She works with her clients to figure out how different foods affect them in order to establish nutritional safety as well.

Rhonda’s Leading Lady experience has been the combination of two very important aspects of her life:  modeling and helping women improve themselves.  She connected with Leading Lady through her fellow model friend Becky.  Rhonda was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable and attractive nursing bras could be.  “I didn’t know you could get really pretty maternity and nursing bras,” she says.  While she is not yet a mother, Rhonda is very much looking forward to having children in the future.  And luckily she has a Leading Lady family waiting for her with open arms when she does.

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