for the past year, my job was sitting down with somewhere between 250 and 400 new gym members every month.
Every month.
Sometimes back to back for ten hours straight (this is not an exaggeration).
And before that job, I think part of me still unconsciously viewed fitness through the internet lens. The aesthetic lens. The "transformation photo" lens. The “discipline” lens. The algorithmic lens where everybody somehow looks hot grocery shopping and acts like they’ve never cried in a Planet Fitness parking lot before.
But consultations changed that for me really quickly.
Because when you sit across from that many people, eventually the masks start dropping.
You stop seeing “leads” and start seeing humanity in all its weirdness and grief and resilience and exhaustion.
I met people who wanted to lose weight, sure... But honestly? Aesthetics were rarely the deepest reason somebody walked through the doors.
I sat with a man whose adult daughter had recently become permanently disabled, and suddenly getting stronger wasn’t about abs anymore. It was about whether or not he could physically help lift and care for his child without destroying his own body in the process.
I met older members whose doctors warned them about bone density and muscle loss and the reality of aging. People who realized, sometimes for the first time, that strength training wasn’t vanity. It was survival. Longevity. Independence.
One of my favorite members started personal training at 95 years old. Ninety. Five.
When I first met him, he walked hunched over, slowly, with frailty. And months later I watched him doing box jumps with his trainer Robin, who is an actual badass by the way. I still think about that all the time. Not because it was impressive in a flashy social media way, but because it felt deeply human. Hopeful, even.
And then there were the people carrying invisible things.
The grief. The divorces. The burnout. The parents trying to rediscover themselves after years of putting themselves last. The women who looked completely composed until you asked them one sincere question and suddenly she was crying, I was crying, and we held each others hands because she felt so overwhelmed by where to start.
I think people assume gym consultations are mostly sales conversations.
And yes, part of my job was convincing people to make the appointment in the first place. I absolutely hounded people sometimes. But once they sat down with me, I took that responsibility really seriously. Because I knew that if somebody already felt intimidated, ashamed, or out of place walking into a gym, one bad experience could confirm every fear they already had about themselves. And that f***ing terrified me.
I never wanted fitness to feel like punishment. I never wanted somebody to leave a conversation with me feeling smaller than when they walked in.
So I spent the last year trying to make the gym feel less scary.
Less like a performance. Less like a place reserved for people who already knew what they were doing. Less like something you had to earn access to by already being fit.
And I learned very quickly that consistency has almost nothing to do with perfection.
Because the people who “fell off” weren’t lazy caricatures the internet likes to make fun of.
sometimes life just hit them in the mouth.
People disappeared because their marriage fell apart. Their parent got sick. They lost a job. Their mental health tanked. Their kid started struggling. They were exhausted. They were grieving. They were trying.
Sometimes I’d call members to check in because they stopped showing up, and halfway through the conversation it stopped being about fitness entirely.
And every single time someone came back after disappearing for weeks or months, I’d tell them the same thing:
The fact that you are here today matters more than you think it does.
Because it's true.
And maybe that’s why I struggle so much with a lot of modern fitness culture now. So much of it is built around shame disguised as motivation. Before and afters. Punishment. Moral superiority. “No excuses.” Hyper-optimization. Constant self-surveillance.
Meanwhile most real people are just trying to survive their lives while taking slightly better care of themselves at the same time.
That doesn’t mean discipline isn’t real. It is. But sustainable fitness has to leave room for humanity too.
Over the past few years, I’ve learned so much about fitness itself. Muscle building. Proper form. Programs. Corrective exercise. Nutrition. How to translate complicated concepts into something people can actually understand and apply without feeling stupid. And I genuinely love that part of fitness. I love learning. I love understanding how the body works. I love corrective exercise and watching people move better and feel stronger and become more capable over time.
But if we're being real, none of that knowledge really matters if someone walks into a gym, feels small, gets in their own head, thinks everybody is judging them, and never comes back.
Because every person walks into fitness carrying a completely different story.
And I think that’s part of why this matters to me so much.
Because contrary to what the dramatic version of this story would sound like, I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with fitness when I started my own journey. I had some foundation already from earlier seasons of my life. I knew enough to understand the basics. I had periods where I took lifting really seriously.
But it was never sustainable.
I would commit for a couple months, become obsessed with results, tie my worth to how my body looked, get discouraged when I didn’t magically transform overnight, and eventually spiral back into the same unhealthy cycles again.
And I think a lot of women quietly live there for years.
Not necessarily because they hate fitness itself, but because they’ve never been taught how to approach it from a place that actually feels compassionate or sustainable.
Four years ago, after having my son, I walked back into the gym around 180 pounds feeling completely disconnected from myself. (More on my lore later...)
But becoming a mom changed the stakes for me completely.
When you become responsible for another human being, suddenly your choices stop affecting just you anymore. I wanted my son to grow up confident. Healthy. Kind. Secure in himself.
And eventually I realized something uncomfortable...
I needed to build those things in myself first.
Because children absorb everything.
The way you speak to yourself.
The way you care for yourself.
The way you handle stress.
The way you treat your body.
The way you respond to failure.
And somewhere along the way, I realized I needed to stop treating my body like a problem I was trying to fix. I needed to learn how to care for myself the same way I would care for someone that I loved. Not through punishment. Not through shame. Not through obsession. Not through trying to become smaller at any cost.
But through consistency. Patience. Grace (lots of that). Learning. Trying again.
And none of that happened overnight.
There were weeks where I stayed consistent and felt amazing. There were other weeks where life completely overwhelmed me and I disappeared from the gym entirely.
But I kept coming back.
Not perfectly.
Not dramatically.
Just consistently enough over time for my life to slowly start changing.
And honestly, I think that matters so much more than perfection ever will.
I still have a ton to learn. I still have moments where I feel insecure or overwhelmed or frustrated with myself. I am absolutely still a work in progress, but I no longer believe fitness has to come from self hatred in order to change your life.
Because after meeting thousands of people this past year, I became completely convinced of something:
People change best when they feel safe enough to keep going.
Not when they are humiliated into it.
Not when they are terrified of failing.
Not when they are trying to become somebody else overnight.
Just supported enough to come back one more time.
And maybe that sounds small...
But sometimes somebody walking back into the gym after months of grief or burnout or chaos is actually a massive act of hope.
I got to witness that over and over again.
And maybe that’s the kind of fitness culture I want to contribute to now.
One where people are still allowed to be human while they’re becoming stronger.