Fitness Professionals
Are Human Too
Lindsay Juranek, NASM C-PT
I wasn’t always about being healthy. In fact, about 9 years ago I was the most unhealthy 24 year old I knew. It was a pretty ironic situation for someone who was a fitness professional. I was just starting out in the Fitness Industry and I was about 50 lbs overweight. I was just like your average individual. Getting healthy was something I wanted to do, but really didn’t feel like doing it. I was a new mom and working a full-time job. I worked at a gym and still didn’t make the time to take care of myself. I always thought, “I’ll start tomorrow”. Tomorrow would come and I would find another excuse to “start tomorrow”. I didn’t want to take the time, nor did I really care. However, I wasn’t really excelling in my job either. No one wanted to train with me because if I couldn’t take care of myself, how could I tell someone else how to take care of themselves.
A couple of years into my job, the group fitness director came to me and wanted me to start teaching aquatics classes. When you teach aquatics, you teach from the deck. It’s not as easy of a job as it sounds. The room temperature in an indoor pool is usually maintained around 85 degrees. It’s also humid. Jumping around on a concrete deck for 45 minutes was not an easy task for me at 199lbs on a 5’6’’ frame. My stamina was terrible, my knees were always bothering me and I could tell my class participants were not enjoying the class very much. I knew right then and there I had to make a change for the better. wanted to excel in my career and really inspire people, I was going to have to lose weight and get healthy.
. If I wanted to excel in my career and really inspire people, I was going to have to lose weight and get healthy.
A co-worker introduced me to a calorie tracking app that I could use on my phone. That was my first step on my weight loss journey was tracking what I was eating; and boy was it a reality check! The next step was exercising regularly. I started increasing my cardio sessions and began weight lifting, something I had never really done before. Slowly but surely, I started to lose weight. The only problem was I have a very demanding sweet tooth. Dropping chocolate and cookies has always been the singular most difficult thing for me to do. I had to learn to cut back without completely depriving myself into a binge.
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Well, it worked. I lost about 15 lbs. Then, I plateaued. The plateau happens to everyone after a certain point because your body has to readjust to a new weight. So I stayed at that point for a while, got comfortable, and guess what happened? I started to put some weight back on. So I began getting back on my routine and started losing weight again. I lost another 10 lbs and plateaued, got comfortable and went back up. I stayed at this point for a couple of years. Then I started again with my routine, lost a little more and pretty much stopped. By this point I was teaching more and different classes and figured I was doing enough to maintain where I was and could eat whatever I wanted. I was completely wrong about that.