My Health Journey

Fitness

Feb 4

How this young music student went from adamantly hating working out and healthy eating to pursuing a secondary career as a personal trainer...

Disclaimer: Before I begin, I would like to state that this is simply an account of my experience. I in no way intend to shame anyone for their decisions through talking about my own path. I just hope that sharing my experience can positively impact others. It is incredibly important to love yourself and make changes that make you happy and allow you to live your best life. I was unhappy where I was, and my writing reflects that. If I offend you with anything I say, please let me know so I can better my writing to avoid that in the future.

Before

Ever since I could remember, I hated gym class. I cringed at the smallest hint that I would need to walk further than ideal. I was upset at the thought of not being able to have a second (or maybe a fifth) cookie at parties and other free food events. Put simply, I just disliked everything about the health and wellness space. I convinced myself that I was happy being out of breath after climbing a flight of stairs or walking more than five minutes. I convinced myself that a slice of pizza that hurt my stomach was worth more than feeling good after eating a serving of vegetables.

Don’t get me wrong, I had lost weight before, but as many people do, I gained it back. The first time was in high school when I did keto while on the JV tennis team. I managed to lose 40lbs, but I gained back 50lbs as soon as I stopped the diet. Then, since I didn’t learn my lesson from the keto diet, in freshman year of college, I did a Daniel fast to lose 60lbs. As expected, with my return to normal eating combined with depression from a traumatic racial experience, I gained another 90lbs. I was convinced that I was not able to lose weight—that my body just didn’t want to cooperate with the science. I almost lost all hope, until, I graduated college.

How I Started

A week after graduation, I discovered the show My 600lb Life. I was sitting on the couch with a family sized bag of potato chips in hand, mindlessly eating as I typically did when watching shows. But, something snapped inside of me at around the third episode of my binge session. At 285lbs, I was dangerously close to hitting 300lbs, a number I thought would be hard to bounce back from. Seeing images of people who had been the same weight around my age now struggling to do their daily tasks frightened me. So, I quickly threw out my bag of chips and decided to make a change. This time, I would lose the weight AND I would keep it off.

(Gretchen Rubin refers to this as the “lightning bolt” strategy for habit change in her book Better Than Before. That lightning bolt moment along with the “clean-slate” of just having graduated allowed me to enlist changes in my mindset and habits quickly. If you are curious about any other ways to change your habits effectively, I highly recommend this book!)

The Journey

I downloaded Myfitnesspal and began to track everything I ate. I started without judgement, just tracking my consumption to become aware of the 3000+ calories I consumed on a daily basis. By the second week, I began limiting my calorie intake to the recommended levels of the app. In addition to monitoring my eating, I started to exercise.

When I first started incorporating exercise in my life, I picked the cardio machine that seemed the least "horrible" to me—the recumbent bike. I carried my tablet with me into the fitness room and set it on the dashboard. Then every day, I sat watching episodes of Black Mirror while pedaling away. This was doable for me and was made much more enjoyable since I was doing something I would already be doing on the couch. As soon as I moved home, I went and purchased a gym membership, promising my frugal self that I would make use of the investment. And, I did, 6 days a week for most of the summer.

I was seeing progress but not fast progress. Finally, after my brother convinced me, he started teaching me about resistance training. In the beginning, this did not seem too important, but now I am aware that it is imperative to weight loss. The scale started to move faster as I focused on building muscle to speed up my metabolism.

As summer came to an end, I moved to Michigan to begin my master’s program. There, I know nothing and had no one. After a few rough weeks in the beginning, I was able to get back on track. I made sure to bike to school when I could, and I convinced a new friend to get a gym membership with me. The only reason I was able to find time to go workout 3 days a week was because I scheduled it in my calendar like a course. There were no excuses. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 2pm I would be working out. On my “off-days,” I would have an hour dedicated to walking or using the elliptical. This persistence in exercise was the only thing that kept me balanced as I tried to adjust to my new environment. Without the endorphins and clarity from my regular activity, I don’t know where I would be today.

Throughout the semester, I experimented with different strategies for nutrition. One was intermittent fasting with one meal a day or eating only every other day. This worked for me to cycle away from the typical caloric deficit and avoid too much of a plateau. In the end, however, these techniques proved unsustainable for my lifestyle long term—especially during the pandemic.

During the Pandemic

When March came and the pandemic hit, I was of course thrown off-guard. The last place I went on the day everything shut down was to my gym, little did I know that I would probably never step foot in it again.

I had made such a habit of exercising that I could not bear to have that taken away from my life along with everything else. I started working on bodyweight training with basic push-ups and sit-ups. I started running outdoors rather than on the treadmill. I walked every day for at least half an hour. I started to do yoga to begin each morning. While it was difficult for me to conceptualize not working out in a gym, the novelty of bodyweight training began to yield incredible results—I was making much more progress during the pandemic than I had before it. But, the scale stopped moving 5lbs from my goal weight. It was frustrating for me to not focus on the stagnant numbers for the 5 months they didn’t move. When I decided to look in the mirror, however, I noticed how much my body was changing. I was successfully doing body recomposition—losing body fat while simultaneously replacing it with muscle.

While I had finally attained my “goal,” I made sure I did not stop there. I realized weight loss had no finish line—the healthy habits I established for proper nutrition and daily exercise needed to become a part of my normal life. This weight loss was different than the previous two times as I was able to use truly sustainable changes to make it happen.

Developing My New Passion

The second half of my journey is how I ended up so interested in health and wellness that I decided to become a personal trainer.

I realized I also needed the public accountability to help me keep the weight off, so I posted about it on Facebook. Sure enough, that post garnered a lot of attention and became my most-liked post ever. I was suddenly bombarded with messages about how to lose weight or achieve fitness, and as I took the time to respond to each one of them, I realized how much I liked helping people to achieve their fitness goals.

For me, eating better and moving more drastically changed my life, and I wanted to guide others to discover the same for themselves.

Between the desire to help others and the countless hours I spent reading articles and studies about fitness and nutrition, I realized that I was being called to become a personal trainer. In the past few months, I had been going back and forth between getting the certification (since I’m in the middle of my master’s degree), but I finally decided to do so in January. As soon as I paid for the certification course, I was overjoyed. Other than my tubas and chinchillas, I cannot think of a purchase that generated that level of excitement within me. That is how I knew I made the right choice and found my secondary calling.

Conclusions

Weight loss (or developing general fitness habits) is not easy, but it is not necessarily difficult either. If you would like to lose weight or pursue a more active life, with some determination, you will be able to do it just as I have done.

I hope you have learned something from my experience. Please let me know in the comments or on my contact form if you have any questions! Next Thursday, I will outline how to start and provide some quick tips to make the beginning easier. I plan on posting at least every other week on activism, health/wellness, music, or the way the three areas can intersect.

Ashley Killam