When i was first asked if I was going to do a blog to go along with my Personal Training business, I said yes, I was thinking about it.
You see, I wondered if I would have the time to contribute on a regular basis to a blog. I mean, I was already maintaining 2 Facebook Pages, trying to get Zhoosh fitness by design off the ground and I had already started a new venture with my sister back in the spring. Something completely different than a career in the Fitness Industry. Added to all this, I have just started a new job as Manager and Personal Trainer of a fitness gym in Burnaby. I am still in training and will take over as Manager of this gym on the 24th of this month!
Then it was suggested that I add a personal touch to start off this blog, something that would engage it's readers, a background on my own struggle to become the person that I am today. To reach out and inspire the "normal" people, the every day people who struggle along with the rest of us, trying to balance life, work, children, relationships and anything else that falls in our way to lead a healthy, productive lifestyle!
So here goes the boring back ground......
I think I was a pretty normal kid growing up, pretty much a tomboy climbing trees, digging holes to China with my sisters, making snow forts in the front yard and ice skating every chance we could at the outdoor rink at the end of out street in the winter time.
Then we moved.......to the other side of Canada......to B.C. To the town where my mother grew up, my parents divorced. We didn't have a lot of money, so there were no extra curricular activities for us. No baseball leagues or soccer camp, no one to teach us how to ski but I was still active for a kid. Then one day in the summer before grade 4, my mom received a letter in the mail from the School Board saying that her daughter had been chosen for a Pilot Program for "Gifted Children" (meaning: too smart for her own good!)
Of course I begged her to let me be part of this new class.......hey, why not? "They" thought I was smart!
Jump ahead a few years. We were a core group of 21 students brought in from different schools around town, we were all smart, all at the top of our class before the program started. Suddenly, you're not so smart anymore, competition broke out between us peers.....everyone got an "A" but it was how many +'s beside that "A" that suddenly mattered! I became withdrawn, turning to candy and other junk food to find comfort. I stopped wanting to participate in gym class and got doctor's notes to get excused. So of course the weight piled on and by the time I started Grade 8, I was pretty chubby and very introverted.
Kids can be so mean.......the first day of Grade 8 someone called me a "fat green frog" ( I was wearing a green pant suit......the height of fashion........NOT! And my grandfather threw my Grade 8 photo in the fire saying it didn't look like me at all. LIFE WAS TOUGH! And I knew i had to make some changes.
Gum chewing replaced candy and snacking. Gum chewing eventually replaced eating! By the time I was half way through Grade 9, I had grown 4 inches and lost 40 pounds. I was now 5' 7" and 104 lbs........I was anorexic! I modelled clothes for Sears and shopped in the children's department. And then I saw a picture of myself........I didn't recognise me!
I slowly started eating again and levelled out at 114 lbs and by the time I got married at 31 I was a constant 118 lbs. Still skinny but eating better, healthier. Exercise didn't enter my life for another 4 years.
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