Iron Fit Personal Training

***Shawna is a client of our ours, that’s willing to weekly share her weight loss journey. She’s a mother, wife and works a full time job. All of her comments are in her own words, unedited. Please contact us to start your journey, info@ironfit.ca, 7807184805***

Introduction/history

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror?  No….REALLY looked?  I don’t mean the times when you are brushing your teeth and you have nothing better to do than to stare at your face in the mirror and critique every new blemish, or hair that has sprouted on your chin.  I mean…naked, nude, in the suit that you were born with.  Well I did that just the other day. And what I saw kind of took me by surprise.

I saw an overweight woman.  But I saw more.  I saw someone who was beautiful.  Someone who was strong and motivated.  Someone who has been through the fire.  And she came out alive. I saw someone that her kids could look up to.  Maybe even her friends. But…I didn’t always think about myself this way.

I have been struggling with my weight for many MANY years.  My struggle was the classic one…didn’t have any issues until my first pregnancy.  Before I got pregnant, I never had an issue with weight.  And in fact, I was so slim that I was accused of having an eating disorder from more than one person.  I was maybe 115/120 pounds (I don’t know, I didn’t own a scale) and at 5 feet 8 inches, 120 pounds is nothing!  I wore a size 8/10 pants (depending on the style).  I was still pretty self conscious of my body…not because I thought I was fat or anything.  It’s just something I had…I had a very low self-body image.  Anyway…when I got pregnant with my first daughter I weight 170 (I had been working at Mcdonald’s for a few years and on a low budget, 50% off food was pretty enticing) but again, I never felt fat.  I was still in a size 12 pants, and I felt “okay”  I gained over 50 pounds with that pregnancy.  Of course, 10 pounds of that was JUST my baby 😛

After she was born, I didn’t really do much to lose the weight, but I also didn’t really gain anything extra.  And when I got pregnant with my second daughter I decided to be better with my eating and I ended gaining just 20 pounds with her.  She weight 8 pounds of it.  So not bad…

So fast forward to my weight issues…I ended up with many health issues over the years.  I won’t go into detail at the moment…I don’t want this to become a novel.  But I suffered a miscarriage, which I allowed depression to creep in.  I ate junk…stopped caring.  So along with many doctor visits, blood tests, ultrasounds, blah blah blah…I ended up being diagnosed with tons of shit.  Depression, hypothyroidism, polycystic ovarian syndrome (pcos), and the funny thing is, all these things were related…the pcos causes depression as an example.  Pcos also causes weight gain, difficulty to lose weight, and my stupid body was also producing too much male testosterone…damn you male hormones!

I didn’t do much about the diagnosis.  I had a doctor who didn’t want to treat my pcos.  His comment to me was “I normally treat my patients with pcos if they are trying to get pregnant and since that’s not the case here, I don’t feel like I want to treat you” and yet here I was, a WOMAN with male hair growth EVERYWHERE…I mean, I can handle one or two hairs on my chin…but I had (have) a FULL CHIN OF HAIR!  How is it that I can feel like a real woman?  Also, the pcos causes the body to produce extra male hormones, hence the hair growth in places no woman should have hair.  Needless to say, this just kind of caused a dominoes effect on my depression.

So through the years I tried so many things…TOPS, weight watchers, slim fast, nutri system, herbal life, herbal magic, visalus, isagenix, cabbage soup diet (I DON’T RECOMMEND THIS ONE!!!!  LOLOL)  I managed to lose weight, gain, lose, gain.  I’m sure with all the gaining/losing cycle I must have easily lost over 500 pounds over the last 15 years.  No word of a lie! I can go into detail in a future post…

Fast forward to 2013.  I started competing in triathlons.  Yes, overweight me did those.  I wasn’t very fast.  Couldn’t really run.  In fact, my first triathlon I came in second last, and the person I beat was an 85 year old man doing his first one!  Sheesh….But I did finish.  So the next year, 2014 I did TWO triathlons.  Hubby joined me this year.  2015 I was a bit bigger than the previous years and my times weren’t getting better…I was coming in dead last every year.  It was starting to bring me down.  Then in 2016 I couldn’t race…I had knee pain and my physio therapist suggested I not doing my races until the pain was under control grrrrrrrr  2017 the pain wasn’t getting better so I went to my doctor and I got sent for an xray and it was shown that I have arthritis in my knees.  BLAH.  I am only 42 for crying out loud!!!!!  Well I still competed in 2 triathlons, but I didn’t do my usual sprint distances.  Instead I did the “try-it” distances.  More about triathlons later…

So now fast forward to November 2017.  I decided enough is enough.  I have said that before, many many many times, but this felt different.  I contacted a personal trainer who I had used a few times before.  We would work out together off and on, I would stop for this reason or another.  I always used finances as the reason.  I mean, yes, sometimes I really didn’t have the money, but I would somehow have money to eat out several times a week…excuses.  So I contacted him.  We started off with once a week.  I don’t remember how long this lasted before I decided to do twice a week.  But we upped it to twice a week.  I was doing just my workouts with him.  I wasn’t doing much in between.  Maybe the occasional treadmill at home…

January 2018…I started a weightloss challenge.  I’ll talk about that in a future post.  I don’t want to bore you all with my first post.  If you made it this far…Welcome to my weightloss journey.  I will likely fill in blanks of some of my history as I blog my journey 🙂

Shawna