My Story

So you think Personal Trainers don’t know what it’s like to be fat and unfit? … Well I’ve been there and it ain’t pretty!

Turning 40 was my ‘aha’ moment.

I wasn’t even in denial – I knew I was overweight, unhealthy and embarrassed about my body. I had suffered from chronic fatigue for 3 years, had been running my own 7-day a week tourism business for 9 years and couldn’t get the energy or motivation to do anything about it.

At 40 there's a big part of you that tells you that you should grow old gracefully, (another excuse!), that you should accept your body for how it is, blah blah blah. Then came the spate of body “make-over shows” (great to watch whilst sitting on the couch drinking wine and scoffing pasta.) So I started thinking that I suppose I could have surgery like on those shows – amazing seeing as you see these people in complete pain and looking like they’ve been assaulted. What was I thinking?!

My husband and partner in crime (ie eating and drinking together!) had also slipped into bad habits and was pretty shocked to find out he had put on 20 kilos! (See Murray’s before and after photos in the Gallery – yep he lost the 20 kilos!) And with a big history of heart disease in his family we decided that we both needed to do something about it, so we set ourselves a 12 week challenge by entering the Body Blitz competition in an Australian Health and Fitness Magazine.

Even though I’d been in the industry off and on since having my first fitness business at age 19, we still chose to employ our own Personal Trainer to help with motivation and goal setting. We knew it was going to be tough at the beginning as we had really developed some bad habits so we knew we needed all the help we could get!

Once we got into the exercise side of it we learned to really love it again. I think our biggest challenge was cutting down on our alcohol intake. With my husband working in the wine industry we were used to drinking nice wine every night. And of course with drinking comes lots of eating. I’m embarrassed to say but we worked out how many bottles of wine we didn’t consume over 12 weeks and we reckon it was about 120 bottles between us! Can you believe it?! So we think our livers are happy again, and at a conservative price of $20 a bottle we saved about $2,400!! Well and truly paid for our Personal Trainer!

We decided we didn’t want to suffer by not enjoying ourselves because we wanted this to be a permanent lifestyle change. We still had cheat meals – breakfast out every Saturday and the occasional glass of wine. The benefits were enormous – energy (a new phenomenon for me after chronic fatigue), clothes that fitted and felt comfortable and enthusiasm for life.

After seeing our great results and new zest for life we were inundated with people asking us how we did it, so I started helping out friends by writing fitness and nutrition programs using my own experiences and my qualifications as a Physical and Health Education Teacher and Home Economist.

Fitness and Health information is always changing, so recognising the importance of keeping up to date, I decided to add to my qualifications by completing my Master Trainer qualifications in Personal Training through the Australian Institute of Fitness.

Now, 7 years later there is no way I would ever let myself get back to the ‘before’ me.

At Age 45 I entered my first Figure competition in Natural Bodybuilding (who’d have thought I’d be comfortable posing in a g-string in front of an audience at my age!) and am continuing to train for more competitions. (see my competition photos in the Gallery Section) I continue to study new techniques and nutritional information having just completed qualifications through the International Federation of Physique Conditioning.

I thoroughly enjoy training others and seeing their amazing body transformations and because I’ve been there I know how great that feeling is when you’re proud of your body.