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PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
I
have over 10 years of professional experience in the health and wellness field. For the last 7 years I have
been working as a personal trainer and wellness coach at numerous locations in
Portland and Vancouver. I have also worked at General Nutrition Center as
a sales consultant and as a weight loss consultant for Jenny Craig. since
the end of 2007, I have be offering personal training exclusively at the Alameda
Fitness Center and have been working with clients in their homes.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
This is me at the age of 18. I was 5"10" tall and
weighed 120 lbs. Yeah, really. I had tried to gain weight
since I was 13, following
 every
bit of advice I could gleam from people at the gym and from fitness
magazines. It didn't help. I finally saw a professional
endocrinologist (they help people with metabolic issues). He gave me
some supplements and sent me to the nutritionist. With some effort
to remember how, she created a
weight gain diet for me. This diet required me sit at the table
for up to an hour after everyone else was done, force feeding myself yet
another portion of high calorie foods. I was nauseated every day of
my life for three years from the age of 18 until 21. Of course, I also saw
a personal trainer who made me worked out at the gym like a maniac.
I went up to 150 lbs in that time and truth is, I did feel a lot better
about myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t stop there. I wasn’t satisfied with
150 lbs; let us not forget that this was the late 1980’s, the heyday of
Arnold Swarzteneggar and Sylvester Stallone, icons of total “buffness.”
My attempt to
build muscle has only led me to soreness, injury, pain and frustration.
However, in the following years of effort and self-torture, I never made
it over 163 lbs.
Many of my early clients would
say, “I wish I had your problem. But I’m overweight and you
have no clue what my life is like. How can
you help me with weight loss?” I understood their perspective
and concern. However, my experience trying to gain weight is similar
to a desire to lose weight in key ways: I dealt with (and still
occasionally dealing with) a distorted body image and resultant
frustration and low self-esteem. Dissatisfaction with one’s body is
a multifaceted issue having to do with far more than the particulars of
weight gain or loss. To understand this more and be more helpful to
my clients, I went back to school in 2004.
While working on my masters
degree, I realized that I was reading and writing about myself, as much as
I was my clients. I found that my desires to "get buff" had a lot to
do with issues unrelated to my body. I believe that this is true for
many of my clients. In July of
2006, I completed my masters degree in Health Arts
and Sciences at Goddard College. My focus was on our relationship with food,
body image, embodiment and community. My thesis was entitled:
Community embodied meals as a source of dealing
with body image, food issues and healing our modern sense of
disconnection. (This is available as an e-book or on CD. Just send me an email request).
What this means in non academic techno talk is that I have come to believe
that HOW we eat is as
important as the WHAT. Most of us eat for reasons beyond nutrition, the
primary one being to change the way our bodies look. We
need to respect that these aspects of our relationship with food and our body
are important and deserve more attention. (If you want to read more on my perspective, click
here to go to the Philosophy
page). Letting go of making my
body reflect and fix everything in my life has been a wonderful release.
Now I eat when I'm hungry and I workout for health. My body image issues
aren't gone, they just don't have the power to rule my life. I now
focus as little as possible on how my body looks and instead work hard to judge
success by other measurements such as strength, flexibility, balance, reduction
in pain, enjoyment in movement and a most importantly, a relationship with food
and my body that is more about enjoyment and less about guilt.
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