So here I am… in the wonderful world of WOW! I’m going to make this first post a quick introduction (maybe not so quick, because I tend to be wordy and go off on tangents). My name is Ivonne, and even though I pay my bills by helping others get healthy, I’m no different than the rest of us. We are all women wanting to be everything - educated, beautiful, healthy, sexy. 

About five years ago, I probably would have laughed if someone had suggested I’d be doing anything related to health and fitness for a living. I sat in front of a computer all day and drank and partied all night. I was overweight, inactive, stressed out of my mind and not really thinking about changing any of it. But things happened that made me stop and take a look at my life, and change I did.  The rest, as the tired cliché goes, is history. Or herstory. Or mystory.  There, I like that better.

I feel like I’ve been following diet and fitness trends since before I ever started caring. My mom was always on this diet or that diet, or trying some quick-weight-loss plan. I had cable in my room growing up and regularly got more than an eye-full of perfect female flesh. I read celebrity and fashion magazines the way my grandma read the Bible (all the time). And infomercials! Wow. Holy hell… every video that promised awesome abs and buns of steel, every gadget advertised as some star’s secret weapon for her red-carpet body. I ate it all up and asked for seconds! I was also locked into a 3-year gym membership, and when I add up the number of times I actually used it, it totaled out to maybe two months.

Between my bad habits and little understanding of how our bodies really respond to food and exercise, I pretty much spent many years running myself into a brick wall. No progress, mounting frustration. So I gave up, and accepted I was meant to be a chunky, short chick. If that was the case, I’d rock the chunky-shortness! But I know that somewhere underneath it all, I understood what I really had to do. Eat better, move more, and not be so “oh-well” about it.

In 2002 I got uncermoniously dumped. I lost my house in 2003, and my self respect (temporarily) soon after that. It took me hitting nearly rock-bottom to realize I was making myself unhealthy in every way, every day. So I started to exercise. I bought some Pilates DVDs, and they came with a little “diet plan” brochure. With a little effort and discipline, I did the exercises and followed their basic guidelines - eating 4-5 times a day, eating more fruits and veggies, drinking more water, choosing lean proteins. You know, the “basic” stuff we all know, but ignore more often than not because we want to believe there is a faster, more effortless way. Right. (And there is, but results are usually short lived – another post for another day.)

Wouldn’t you know it, my skin cleared up, my eyes de-puffed, my energy level went way up, and I lost about 15 pounds in 10 weeks. Bigger than that was my self-esteem. I felt like I could do a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g! It was awesome to know that I did this. I learned how to do it, and I did it. Inspired by this painfully simple approach - no magical ingredient (Grapefruit Diet?), no banning of a whole group of foods (Atkins?) - I started reading more about nutrition and exercise, became a certified personal trainer, changed careers and started changing lives. Heck, I even got myself an education! Like, yeah, from a real university. 

So here I am today, doing what I love, loving what I do. I learn something every day, and as often as I can, I try to share that with someone else. Pass it on, pay it forward, help someone else be healthier, too. Blogging is just another way for us all to share the things we learn and make observations about everywoman’s daily struggles and journey toward being healthy and fit. It’s really about much more than just being thin and definitely not as simple as “losing weight will solve all my life’s problems.”

It’s about learning how to live healthy, knowing how to do it for yourself. With all the crazy talk and misinformation out there, with all the internet fitness gurus, infomercial “success” stories, unreal reality TV and everything else we get hit with every day, it’s my goal to call bullshit for what it is and help us all make this journey together in good fun and good health.

Last Modified : July 10th, 2008 Filed under : Ivonne Navigate : / Next post