My last post about body shaming got me thinking about my own journey with body issues and how I found my way into the fitness industry.I have shared pieces of this story throughout this blog but this is more of a timeline of how this all started and I have to go back to childhood to tell the complete story.From a very early age, I remember sports and athletics being a big part life for the men in my family. My father was a former amateur baseball player and coached my older brothers baseball teams when I was in elementary school. My brother Jimmy was extremely athletic: he played baseball and basketball. In fact, he was the only white guy the guys in the neighborhood would let play pick up ball with them because he was that good. They called him Larry Bird. Some kind of sporting event was always on the TV in my house and as much as I tried avoiding it, I had no say. I was the youngest and no one listened to me. My mother on the other hand was the antithesis of athletic. I don't think she worked out a day in her life until this year. At 79, she is now a devotee of water aerobics but when I was growing up, her pastimes involved watching her shows and reading. I don't remember whose decision it was to start me in swim classes but when I was 6, I started swimming and I was good! I was the best in my class. At the end of the year ceremony, they were giving out trophies and my mother was terrified that I wouldn't get one because I was the smallest one in my class and they saved me until last. She just thought they forgot about me but they were waiting to give me their highest achievement award. My mother was amazed: she had no idea I was that good. Swimming just came naturally to me and even at a young age, I had an athletic build. I took a lot of pride in my swimming ability and my teachers even wanted to groom me for competitive swimming. I took up diving as well and became really good at that through lots and lots of practice. I remember family vacations in New Hampshire when my Dad and I would swim out to the dock and he would sit there while I dove off the dock time and time again correcting my form until I had it perfect. He was more ruthless than my coaches. He drilled into me the importance of discipline when you are competing. Even though I had this natural ability, it would only take me so far. My parents ultimately decided not to invest in further training for me. They didn't want me to focus on athletics that young because they were afraid it would limit me later in life. A smart decision even though I didn't think so at the time. It also probably would have costed a pretty penny. Our family wasn't exactly rich and I'm sure for me to continue would have taken a huge sacrifice by my parents. I understand that and now am grateful because my life would have turned out very differently had I become a competitive athlete. When I stopped swimming, I immediately started gaining weight and I became overweight very quickly. In middle school, I was teased mercilessly by fellow students and by family members. It was really hurtful and I retreated into myself for a time. I look at picture of myself at age 14 or so and it pains me to see the awkward, chubby girl I was. I was so uncomfortable in my skin. I went from feeling strong and fit while I was swimming to feeling fat and lazy. Not to mention pimply and awkward and deeply insecure.
This is what drove me to begin exercising again when I was about 15 or 16. My brother who is 6 years older than me was long past the days of little league but was still athletic and liked to work out. This was in the early 90s when gyms hadn't yet become a staple. If you wanted to join a gym, the only option in our neighborhood was the YMCA which then was populated by older people and kids. It wasn't cool to go there as a teenager or 20 something so my brother invested in a rowing machine and some weights and would exercise in his room to Guns and Roses and Def Leppard. Pretty soon, I joined him. I didn't really know what I was doing but I thought my brother was impossibly cool and if he was letting me hang out in his room during his precious workout time, I was going to shut up and do what he told me. The early 90s was also the time that super models were putting out workout videos every other week so I invested my hard earned money from working after school at a local pharmacy to buy Cindy Crawford's and Elle McPherson's workout tapes. I had a set of 5 pound dumbbells and I would pop the tape into the VCR and sweat for an hour a couple of days a week. The year I started college, my school opened up a state of the art fitness center on campus and so I started going between classes every day. I would jump on the stair master for a half an hour, watch the cute guys on the football team work out and then go back to class. Pretty soon, the weight began to drop but I was woefully ignorant of how to eat to nourish my body properly. My parents were of the meat and potatoes generation. They fed us well but I knew nothing of protein, carbs and fat. I just knew that salads were good for you and ice cream was bad. I also thought that eating less often throughout the day was good so I got into a habit of skipping meals and then gorging because I was starving later. Now I know how terrible that is for you but then I thought I was doing the right thing. Less calories equals less weight right? Technically I was right but the way I went about it was all wrong. And to be fair, I was probably taking in all of my allotted calories just in that one big gorge feast. By the time I got to college, I was thin but not necessarily healthy. My typical diet looked like this: cereal or just coffee with cream and sugar for breakfast, then at school I would load up a second coffee with cream and sugar. Lunch was a sesame bagel with strawberry jelly and then nothing until dinner which was whatever my mother cooked and that was pretty basic. It was usually some kind of protein, a canned vegetable, a starch and an ice berg salad. So if I break all of that down, I was eating lots of refined carbs and sugars with very little healthy fat or protein. Ugh, sounds awful! Oh and I totally left out the alcohol I consumed on the weekends! My best friend and I would plan for a night out by going to the gym first, eating a huge plate of pasta and then drinking sugary drinks all night. I am literally shuddering thinking of what I put my body through. I also became really, really afraid of gaining the weight back that I had lost over the past few years. I became obsessed with working out and what I was eating or not eating and flirted dangerously with an eating disorder. Thankfully, that didn't stick because I like food too much to treat it so poorly.
Throughout my 20s, I developed a pattern: work out steadily for 6-8 months, watch what I was eating (kind of) and then fall off the workout wagon for another 6-8 months, watch the weight slowly creep back on until my jeans were tight and then repeat the cycle. I just couldn't connect to a healthy habit for long and that was largely because I was so uneducated about nutrition. I also just didn't love working out. I hadn't found anything I really connected to. Yoga wasn't popular yet, running was NOT my thing and lifting weights got boring after a while because I didn't know how to develop a program that would properly progress me. I tried every diet and quick fix out there during this time: Atkins, south beach, etc. I would lose weight but then gain all of it back when I resumed my normal eating habits. I didn't cook for myself and ate out all the time. No wonder I struggled so much to find a healthy weight - I had no concept of just how many calories I was taking in every day. All of this changed for me when I turned 32. I went to the doctor and my weight had reached 172 pounds and I had high blood pressure. I was horrified and embarrassed. My doctor told me he didn't want to put me on medication because I was young but that I had to make some serious dietary changes or else I would be forced to go on medication and probably be on it for the rest of my life. Well, that scared the crap out of me! I regard this as the turning point in my journey.
From that point until present day, I have changed everything about the way I care for my body. I began by teaching myself how to cook. I started watching food network and reading recipes. I realized that the first step had to be eliminating eating out every night. I still ate out but I made sure that I cooked at least a couple of nights a week. I also put myself back on an exercise routine. Before when I used to start my cycle of exercise, I would go balls to the wall for 6 months and then burn out. This time, I took it slow. I started with 30 minutes 2-3 days a week and it stuck. I mixed it up too - I tried circuit workouts, yoga, pilates, and HIIT routines. I never performed the same workout twice in a week as to prevent boredom. Once I felt like I was in a routine that would stick, I began adding in more days or longer times onto my workouts. I also got really interested in cooking and even invested in cooking classes. I became pretty skilled and with that came more knowledge of nutrition. The weight was stubborn in coming off because I was older now but I was feeling healthier and more fit by the day. I was adding muscle and reducing fat. By the time I was 36, I was the fittest I had ever been. I had started a running program and was running 3-5 miles a few days a week along with lifting weights and practicing yoga. I felt great too and I really started enjoying my workouts. Instead of dreading them like I had previously, I began looking forward to them. It became my release, my meditation and my medication. I had learned so much about nutrition at this point by reading and researching and tracking my own intake of calories. My diet now looked like this: breakfast was a smoothie with coconut milk, strawberries, a banana, greek yogurt and flax seeds, then a snack was hummus with cut up veggies, lunch was a salad with protein and then dinner was varied but always included protein and vegetables. This sounds really healthy and it was but don't get me wrong, I had slip ups and I had them often. I just tried not to let the slip ups last longer than one meal. I had cheeseburgers and pizza and chocolate cake just not every day. Before too long, I got to a weight I could feel good about. This was an accomplishment that felt a lifetime coming.
My career in fitness came about because of all of these changes and insights I had about my own journey. I wanted to help other people who were as woefully ignorant as I once was about how to care properly for my body. I began by volunteering at a non profit women's only fitness facility a few blocks from my house. Not only did this allow me to learn the business, but I got to work with some amazing women and I took my own fitness to the next level. I became an inspiration to so many of these women by sweating alongside them every day. I took classes with them, I ran on the treadmill next to them and I listened to their stories many of which were heartbreaking. They all had a specific reason for why they became overweight. One specific one stands out to me: a mother lost her son to a homicide and fed her despair with food. She cried while telling me her story and I was honored to be sitting next to her while she took her next step towards changing her life for the better. I became certified as a personal trainer shortly after and began my true career in the business. My first paying job was at a large facility in New Jersey. I was drawn to it because it had a kids program as well as a members rewards program that I would shortly be running. My first year there was really great. I met some amazing people, worked with my first clients, started teaching the kids fitness program and got along with most of my co-workers. I felt like I had really made the right decision by getting into the fitness industry. I was also keeping up with my workouts and learning so much about how to teach other people the proper form and ways to improve their diet. I was amazed at how far I had come in my own journey. Here I was the expert on fitness and nutrition after years of not knowing a thing about it. It is so very true that education is the key to unlocking your potential. Educating myself on this topic really opened up my mind to living more mindfully and healthfully. It improved my every day quality of life. I had healed myself of all the things that had previously threatened my health and I was proud of that. That is not to say that there weren't downsides. I had trouble getting clients. I am not a sales person at heart. I find it incredibly difficult to sell myself and so wound up not making enough money to sustain my life. I took on more responsibility at the job to make up for my lack of sales ability but I wasn't enjoying myself. The facility itself was outdated. I think the carpet was left over from the 70s but seriously, they didn't have the latest technology or equipment and management was content to keep things the way they were. Fitness is an extremely mutable business. It is always changing and I was frustrated that my job did not want to change with the trends. I tried also to revamp the dying kids program but the owners didn't want to change it and instead of investing in it, they shut it down. I was heartbroken as I felt really strongly about that program. After 2 years, I called it quits there. I felt like I had learned everything I could and I needed to be challenged elsewhere. I found another club in a different part of New Jersey that was on the cutting edge of fitness and began my 2 year stint there in 2013.
My first week there was pretty miserable. Now that I am more connected to my spirituality and inner voice aka intuition, I realize that it was telling me something; that this place was not right for me. There were some really amazing things that happened but for the most part, I wasn't fulfilled or happy there. I felt anxious pretty much every time I stepped foot in the door. Yes, it was on the cutting edge of fitness and had brand new equipment, amazing programming and a very active personal training business but the people were intense and complained about everything. The environment was toxic. Its ironic because I got all the things I was looking for when I left my previous job :clients, paid workshops to advance my education, better location and more flexible hours but in place of that, I felt uncomfortable and unsettled. I can't really put my finger on the exact reasons I felt this way but feelings aren't always logical. I had some really defining moments here though like when I started the cancer exercise program or became the fitness manager. Its interesting that in the place I felt didn't suit me, I kept being offered more and more opportunities to advance my career. If this is what I wanted so badly, why did it feel so wrong? I am still answering that question and it may take some more time for me to get to the answer.Maybe my career in fitness ran its course. Maybe it was just meant to gain me some powerful insights about my self and lifelong struggle with my body. I became an expert in a field that had intimated me for many years which I am supremely proud of. It took a lot of risk for me to attempt this career and I don't think of it as failure. I have learned how to walk away from things that no longer serve me and this became one of those times.
Fitness has taught me so much about myself and my life from the time I was a child until now. Some of us are born with an innate athletic ability and thankfully I am one of those people but that doesn't mean you ever get comfortable with it. I still fight with my body on a daily basis but throughout my journey, I have become stronger physically but also mentally and emotionally. I reached many of the goals I set for myself. I ran a 5K, completed 78 straight days of yoga (on my way to 90 god willing) which has enabled me for the first time at age 40 to do a complete upside down back bend, kept up a consistent workout routine for over 8 years and influenced many people to lead healthier lives including my parents! I feel proud of those things and I hope I can continue to evolve and grow on this journey. One thing I haven't done since I was young is get back in a competitive swimming pool. Of course I have swam many times for recreation mostly while on vacations but never in the way I swam when I was 9 years old and never as part of my fitness routine. I guess maybe I'm afraid I won't be good anymore. I know that shouldn't matter. Its like those high school quarterbacks that were never good enough to go pro but still held onto their glory days of when they were 17 and on top of their sport. I don't want to be that pathetic. Now here is the crazy part: I currently work in a fitness center that is home to the largest Olympic sized swimming pool in New York City. The biggest competitive pool in the largest city in the United States. Ok, ok universe, I hear you: my fitness journey will not be complete until I get back into the pool. Time to buy a new bathing suit I guess!
This is what drove me to begin exercising again when I was about 15 or 16. My brother who is 6 years older than me was long past the days of little league but was still athletic and liked to work out. This was in the early 90s when gyms hadn't yet become a staple. If you wanted to join a gym, the only option in our neighborhood was the YMCA which then was populated by older people and kids. It wasn't cool to go there as a teenager or 20 something so my brother invested in a rowing machine and some weights and would exercise in his room to Guns and Roses and Def Leppard. Pretty soon, I joined him. I didn't really know what I was doing but I thought my brother was impossibly cool and if he was letting me hang out in his room during his precious workout time, I was going to shut up and do what he told me. The early 90s was also the time that super models were putting out workout videos every other week so I invested my hard earned money from working after school at a local pharmacy to buy Cindy Crawford's and Elle McPherson's workout tapes. I had a set of 5 pound dumbbells and I would pop the tape into the VCR and sweat for an hour a couple of days a week. The year I started college, my school opened up a state of the art fitness center on campus and so I started going between classes every day. I would jump on the stair master for a half an hour, watch the cute guys on the football team work out and then go back to class. Pretty soon, the weight began to drop but I was woefully ignorant of how to eat to nourish my body properly. My parents were of the meat and potatoes generation. They fed us well but I knew nothing of protein, carbs and fat. I just knew that salads were good for you and ice cream was bad. I also thought that eating less often throughout the day was good so I got into a habit of skipping meals and then gorging because I was starving later. Now I know how terrible that is for you but then I thought I was doing the right thing. Less calories equals less weight right? Technically I was right but the way I went about it was all wrong. And to be fair, I was probably taking in all of my allotted calories just in that one big gorge feast. By the time I got to college, I was thin but not necessarily healthy. My typical diet looked like this: cereal or just coffee with cream and sugar for breakfast, then at school I would load up a second coffee with cream and sugar. Lunch was a sesame bagel with strawberry jelly and then nothing until dinner which was whatever my mother cooked and that was pretty basic. It was usually some kind of protein, a canned vegetable, a starch and an ice berg salad. So if I break all of that down, I was eating lots of refined carbs and sugars with very little healthy fat or protein. Ugh, sounds awful! Oh and I totally left out the alcohol I consumed on the weekends! My best friend and I would plan for a night out by going to the gym first, eating a huge plate of pasta and then drinking sugary drinks all night. I am literally shuddering thinking of what I put my body through. I also became really, really afraid of gaining the weight back that I had lost over the past few years. I became obsessed with working out and what I was eating or not eating and flirted dangerously with an eating disorder. Thankfully, that didn't stick because I like food too much to treat it so poorly.
Throughout my 20s, I developed a pattern: work out steadily for 6-8 months, watch what I was eating (kind of) and then fall off the workout wagon for another 6-8 months, watch the weight slowly creep back on until my jeans were tight and then repeat the cycle. I just couldn't connect to a healthy habit for long and that was largely because I was so uneducated about nutrition. I also just didn't love working out. I hadn't found anything I really connected to. Yoga wasn't popular yet, running was NOT my thing and lifting weights got boring after a while because I didn't know how to develop a program that would properly progress me. I tried every diet and quick fix out there during this time: Atkins, south beach, etc. I would lose weight but then gain all of it back when I resumed my normal eating habits. I didn't cook for myself and ate out all the time. No wonder I struggled so much to find a healthy weight - I had no concept of just how many calories I was taking in every day. All of this changed for me when I turned 32. I went to the doctor and my weight had reached 172 pounds and I had high blood pressure. I was horrified and embarrassed. My doctor told me he didn't want to put me on medication because I was young but that I had to make some serious dietary changes or else I would be forced to go on medication and probably be on it for the rest of my life. Well, that scared the crap out of me! I regard this as the turning point in my journey.
From that point until present day, I have changed everything about the way I care for my body. I began by teaching myself how to cook. I started watching food network and reading recipes. I realized that the first step had to be eliminating eating out every night. I still ate out but I made sure that I cooked at least a couple of nights a week. I also put myself back on an exercise routine. Before when I used to start my cycle of exercise, I would go balls to the wall for 6 months and then burn out. This time, I took it slow. I started with 30 minutes 2-3 days a week and it stuck. I mixed it up too - I tried circuit workouts, yoga, pilates, and HIIT routines. I never performed the same workout twice in a week as to prevent boredom. Once I felt like I was in a routine that would stick, I began adding in more days or longer times onto my workouts. I also got really interested in cooking and even invested in cooking classes. I became pretty skilled and with that came more knowledge of nutrition. The weight was stubborn in coming off because I was older now but I was feeling healthier and more fit by the day. I was adding muscle and reducing fat. By the time I was 36, I was the fittest I had ever been. I had started a running program and was running 3-5 miles a few days a week along with lifting weights and practicing yoga. I felt great too and I really started enjoying my workouts. Instead of dreading them like I had previously, I began looking forward to them. It became my release, my meditation and my medication. I had learned so much about nutrition at this point by reading and researching and tracking my own intake of calories. My diet now looked like this: breakfast was a smoothie with coconut milk, strawberries, a banana, greek yogurt and flax seeds, then a snack was hummus with cut up veggies, lunch was a salad with protein and then dinner was varied but always included protein and vegetables. This sounds really healthy and it was but don't get me wrong, I had slip ups and I had them often. I just tried not to let the slip ups last longer than one meal. I had cheeseburgers and pizza and chocolate cake just not every day. Before too long, I got to a weight I could feel good about. This was an accomplishment that felt a lifetime coming.
My career in fitness came about because of all of these changes and insights I had about my own journey. I wanted to help other people who were as woefully ignorant as I once was about how to care properly for my body. I began by volunteering at a non profit women's only fitness facility a few blocks from my house. Not only did this allow me to learn the business, but I got to work with some amazing women and I took my own fitness to the next level. I became an inspiration to so many of these women by sweating alongside them every day. I took classes with them, I ran on the treadmill next to them and I listened to their stories many of which were heartbreaking. They all had a specific reason for why they became overweight. One specific one stands out to me: a mother lost her son to a homicide and fed her despair with food. She cried while telling me her story and I was honored to be sitting next to her while she took her next step towards changing her life for the better. I became certified as a personal trainer shortly after and began my true career in the business. My first paying job was at a large facility in New Jersey. I was drawn to it because it had a kids program as well as a members rewards program that I would shortly be running. My first year there was really great. I met some amazing people, worked with my first clients, started teaching the kids fitness program and got along with most of my co-workers. I felt like I had really made the right decision by getting into the fitness industry. I was also keeping up with my workouts and learning so much about how to teach other people the proper form and ways to improve their diet. I was amazed at how far I had come in my own journey. Here I was the expert on fitness and nutrition after years of not knowing a thing about it. It is so very true that education is the key to unlocking your potential. Educating myself on this topic really opened up my mind to living more mindfully and healthfully. It improved my every day quality of life. I had healed myself of all the things that had previously threatened my health and I was proud of that. That is not to say that there weren't downsides. I had trouble getting clients. I am not a sales person at heart. I find it incredibly difficult to sell myself and so wound up not making enough money to sustain my life. I took on more responsibility at the job to make up for my lack of sales ability but I wasn't enjoying myself. The facility itself was outdated. I think the carpet was left over from the 70s but seriously, they didn't have the latest technology or equipment and management was content to keep things the way they were. Fitness is an extremely mutable business. It is always changing and I was frustrated that my job did not want to change with the trends. I tried also to revamp the dying kids program but the owners didn't want to change it and instead of investing in it, they shut it down. I was heartbroken as I felt really strongly about that program. After 2 years, I called it quits there. I felt like I had learned everything I could and I needed to be challenged elsewhere. I found another club in a different part of New Jersey that was on the cutting edge of fitness and began my 2 year stint there in 2013.
My first week there was pretty miserable. Now that I am more connected to my spirituality and inner voice aka intuition, I realize that it was telling me something; that this place was not right for me. There were some really amazing things that happened but for the most part, I wasn't fulfilled or happy there. I felt anxious pretty much every time I stepped foot in the door. Yes, it was on the cutting edge of fitness and had brand new equipment, amazing programming and a very active personal training business but the people were intense and complained about everything. The environment was toxic. Its ironic because I got all the things I was looking for when I left my previous job :clients, paid workshops to advance my education, better location and more flexible hours but in place of that, I felt uncomfortable and unsettled. I can't really put my finger on the exact reasons I felt this way but feelings aren't always logical. I had some really defining moments here though like when I started the cancer exercise program or became the fitness manager. Its interesting that in the place I felt didn't suit me, I kept being offered more and more opportunities to advance my career. If this is what I wanted so badly, why did it feel so wrong? I am still answering that question and it may take some more time for me to get to the answer.Maybe my career in fitness ran its course. Maybe it was just meant to gain me some powerful insights about my self and lifelong struggle with my body. I became an expert in a field that had intimated me for many years which I am supremely proud of. It took a lot of risk for me to attempt this career and I don't think of it as failure. I have learned how to walk away from things that no longer serve me and this became one of those times.
Fitness has taught me so much about myself and my life from the time I was a child until now. Some of us are born with an innate athletic ability and thankfully I am one of those people but that doesn't mean you ever get comfortable with it. I still fight with my body on a daily basis but throughout my journey, I have become stronger physically but also mentally and emotionally. I reached many of the goals I set for myself. I ran a 5K, completed 78 straight days of yoga (on my way to 90 god willing) which has enabled me for the first time at age 40 to do a complete upside down back bend, kept up a consistent workout routine for over 8 years and influenced many people to lead healthier lives including my parents! I feel proud of those things and I hope I can continue to evolve and grow on this journey. One thing I haven't done since I was young is get back in a competitive swimming pool. Of course I have swam many times for recreation mostly while on vacations but never in the way I swam when I was 9 years old and never as part of my fitness routine. I guess maybe I'm afraid I won't be good anymore. I know that shouldn't matter. Its like those high school quarterbacks that were never good enough to go pro but still held onto their glory days of when they were 17 and on top of their sport. I don't want to be that pathetic. Now here is the crazy part: I currently work in a fitness center that is home to the largest Olympic sized swimming pool in New York City. The biggest competitive pool in the largest city in the United States. Ok, ok universe, I hear you: my fitness journey will not be complete until I get back into the pool. Time to buy a new bathing suit I guess!
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