The ‘Lucky’ Slim Girl
I have by no means been one of those people who has always had a love for fitness. Yes, I had an active childhood and grew up in the English countryside with evenings and weekends spent out my bike, playing in the fields or riding horses. I loved gymnastics and ballet but as I hit teenage years boys, drinking and fun took over and all health and fitness went out the window!
Luckily I was a slim girl who growing up never had to worry about what I ate (sorry!) and spent my years at university having fun, eating junk food, drinking and not exercising - let’s just say I was having the time of my life!
But it was in the first few years at uni I started to see a change in body and could no longer ‘get away’ with eating whatever I wanted. However I was clueless about how to eat or exercise to change my body composition so went through the usual cycle with health and fitness of trying to ‘watch what I ate’ (whatever that means), and spending hours at the gym doing cardio and abs every day to not going at all and stuffing my face with chocolate and drinking (I am an all or nothing kind of girl). Needless to say I didn’t get the body I wanted and was confused as to why I was eating seemingly so little and exercising so much but still had a soft skinny-fat look about me.
Flying High
Once I left university I knew I wanted a job that wasn’t a 9 - 5 that was instead part of my life and something I loved. I was passionate about travel (I actually studied a Tourism Degree at uni), and so I became an airhostess and that is where my health and wellbeing really took a downturn. The anti social long hours, drinking on work trips and lack of healthy food available would test even the healthiest and fittest person and it was at the tender age of 21 that I really started to really watch my weight as I was conscious I could quite easily ‘put on a stone in the first 6 months’ as everyone I worked with kept telling me.
Back then there was no social media (there wasn’t even Facebook!) so there was minimal resources available to educate myself about how best to look after my health in this situation. I therefore took the unconscious decision to limit what I ate and calorie restrict as it was all I knew how to do.
It was a decision which took me down a road of extremely unhealthy habits – not eating until 4pm in the afternoon and keeping my calories below 500 a day. I lived on cereal and cereal bars and very rarely ate ‘normal’ meals as they would leave me with a full feeling I hated - especially since my stomach was always my problem area and even more so with all the bloating from flying.
When I did eat I would binge on chocolate (always my weakness) and could spend a whole 14 hour flight stuffing my face with only sweet treats, getting to the destination and feeling sick, as guilty as hell and very out of control. My weight plummeted, my hair fell out, I was constantly cold, tired and moody, but when people questioned me about it I just blamed it on the jet lag….I was too far in to even consider how bad I was treating my body. I didn’t care for being ‘healthy’; only looking good and like a little hostess Barbie. As long as I looked good that was all that mattered - or so I thought.
Sydney Sider
5 years later and my weight had plummeted to 43kg (current weight 54kg from 56kg). I had left my job as an airhostess and moved to Sydney, Australia to get a ‘better quality of life’. I knew I needed to put on weight but wanted to do it in a ‘healthy’ way. Social media still wasn’t really around by this point, so again with little knowledge I thought cardio and yoga would help me achieve the body I desired. So I started doing cardio and yoga. And by cardio I mean lots of cardio……running every day, boxing, walking, you name it I did it. I was still living in a world of denial and although I had incorporated exercise into my lifestyle I was still massively restricting my calorie intake. I would run on a treadmill for an hour having not eaten any food (at lunchtime) and think to myself ‘yes! I am burning muscle!’ – I mean seriously looking back now it makes my skin shiver.
Needless to say this was not a healthy sustainable way to live and eventually after a year of living in Sydney I was finally willing to admit I had a problem. It was a long, long road and had its ups and downs but with the help of a very strong support network from my sister and boyfriend at the time I finally managed to let go of my control over food and get myself out of my eating disorder. I was working a desk job I hated as a recruitment consultant and carried on with my cardio routine (I still needed to control something!) and my life was working hard and playing harder. I would exercise all week, eating relatively clean, then go binge drinking at the weekend eating take away and junk food. I thought I had it all figured out. The only thing I wasn’t happy about was my job, so when I turned 30 I decided to change career and qualify as a Personal Trainer.
Skinny Fat
So off I went to get my certification in PT, thinking I knew it all but realising very quickly how little that was the case. I had never picked up a dumbbell or barbell in my life (in fact I couldn’t even tell you the difference between the two!) and had no idea how to squat, deadlift or even do a simple lat pull down.
At this time in my life I had come to accept my body as it was, I wasn’t fat but I was by no means skinny. And I hated that word; being skinny represented everything I had been before when I had been in the depths of my eating disorder and it was not a place I wanted to go back to soon. Our tutor suggested we get dexa scans done to see what our body fat percentage was, so off I went thinking I would come out at 15% having no real clue when really my result was 28% body fat. It was a slap in the face. With clothes on yes I looked good, but underneath I was ‘skinny fat’. I had no definition, no tone, a pudgy stomach…I did not represent all the hard work I put in to doing exercise every day. I was devastated. I didn’t get it…how could I be so disciplined with my meals (I should mention I was a vegetarian at this stage), do cardio every day and have a body fat percentage of 28?! It was so unfair! I became the classes case study, and eventually my tutor took me to one side at the end of class and told me I needed to stop all cardio and start lifting weights if I wanted to drop fat. I cried. I couldn’t imagine my life without cardio, I mean that euphoric cardio high! And how could I possibly not get fatter if I stopped cardio? I didn’t understand nor want to. After some time I decided I had nothing to lose, but knew if I needed to start lifting weights I needed a PT so I found myself a PT at my local gym, put my life in his hands and started to see him 4 times a week for weight training. Strictly no cardio. It was hard, one of the hardest things I have done. I hated it to start with. I missed the endorphin high cardio gave me, I felt I was losing my fitness, I hated feeling so weak and useless in the gym, but I knew I had a bigger goal and pushed through.
Certified PT!
I was still completing my PT Certs on the side, and once I was qualified I was fully immersed in the gym and had started to enjoy lifting weights. My results were slow, both strength and body comp wise, but once I let go of being a vegetarian, introduced more protein into my diet and got to the point where I could add more intensity into my sessions I started to see the changes. It was a revelation to me…I was eating more food than I ever had in my life, doing no cardio and training less but my body was looking better every day! It was a miracle! I felt compelled to educate other women that life didn’t need to be an endless struggle of cardio and calorie restricting and seeing little to no results. Women can eat more, train less and get awesome results.
So I started as a Personal Trainer at Virgin Active still learning the ropes and educating myself as much as I could along the way and the rest as they say - is history. After a year I went to work at a gym in Sydney at the forefront of the industry - Clean Health - which was renowned for it’s education and this is where my knowledge really took off and I started prepping for photo shoots and training girls for Bikini Comps.
During this time I got to the leanest I had ever been, I was working hard, training harder and eating a very strict clean diet. I thought I had it all. But as time went on I realised that living this way wasn’t sustainable either. Double training sessions and eating only ‘clean’ avoiding all dairy, gluten and alcohol just wasn’t making me ultimately happy and I realised it was unrealistic to expect my clients to live this way as well - especially when they had corporate jobs and other things going on in their lives.
Going It Alone
So I finally went it alone and started my own business working for myself. I took on all I had learnt but wanted to do achieve results in a more sustainable way, both for myself and for my clients, but where most importantly the ultimate goal was to be training and eating from a place of self love as opposed to self loathing. I had seen so many girls get on the stage in the hope it would bring them more confidence with their body comp and self esteem when in fact all it achieved was the opposite.
So now I am on a mission to educate, inspire and empower women to be the best version of themselves that doesn’t necessarily mean to look the best or be the fittest, but it does mean to feel the best they can both physically and mentally. My mission is to educate women with the knowledge they need to make the best decisions they can for their life and goals, and not have to go through the same mistakes I did.