When I am sad, depressed or stressed out I get withdrawn and quiet.

Like most of you, these are emotions I don’t deal with well. When I start to experience these emotions I instantly think, “I have to be really careful that I don’t start feeding my feelings.” Because, if I don’t, I know I am just a few Twinkies away from weighing over 400 lbs. again. It might seem like a drastic leap. But, for a recovering food addict like me, it’s an easy leap to make. My commitment to my own post-operative bariatric fitness program is the only thing that saves me from regain. That’s a true story.
Things have been difficult for me lately.
First, I was dealing with the strange and new grief of my ex-husband passing away. Almost exactly a month later, I starting dealing with a different sort of grief. The grief of a job loss. It’s not that I lost my job. I’ll always have a position as the Head Trainer at GoGirl Fitness Studio, so long as it is in business. But, this loss is the loss of my salaried position as the General Manager. The grief I feel is interesting. I’m sad, not just for myself but for my community as a whole.
This sounds strange at first I am sure. Why does my losing my position as a General Manager effect the weight loss community or the weight loss surgery community at all?
It doesn’t. That is exactly the part that makes me sad.
When I began working at GoGirl Fitness Studio a little over a year ago, one of the stipulations of my taking the job as the General Manager and Head Trainer was that the company had to provide me a way to reach the population that I was most passionate about helping. The weight loss surgery population. I wanted to help other bariatric surgery patients like myself discover the mighty tool of fitness and how much it helps in their pre-operative, post-operative and weight maintenance phases of their journey. Bariatric Fitness. This was going to be my specialty.
I had dreams of being the Chris Powell of the WLS community. My goal was to become a leader in Bariatric Fitness. My passion was to make fitness fun, exciting and affordable for a population that I felt is so often undeserved by the fitness industry. Since this was a passion of mine, and the ability to chase this goal was of paramount importance to me, when GoGirl Fitness Studio hired me, they invested in a state of the art remote training system to make this possible.

Because I believed in myself, and in how I could help this population, the company threw it’s marketing money into helping me get the word out about this program. In the first couple of months we ran focus groups to work out the bugs. Next, we signed up as a sponsor for the Bariatric Foodie Pledge. The company flew me off to San Antonio to run a vendor booth at the WLSFA event. But, no matter what we did, the concept of Bariatric Fitness and remote training for a baratric population just didn’t take off.
I believed they key was to make Bariatric Fitness affordable.
Financial objections always seem to be the biggest issues for prospective clients. “I can’t afford personal training.” – To answer this, I developed GoGirl Resolve, a personal training program specifically designed for those effected by obesity. A group personal training program that specifically catered to bariatric fitness. I priced it reasonably, and even offered huge discounts to the weight loss surgery community. $119 a month for 12 sessions a month. Less than $10 per session for a personal trainer to help keep you accountable on your fitness journey. Under $10 a session for a personal trainer to design workouts that keep things fun, exciting and to help motivate you into doing something that every single one of us knows we are suppose to be doing after weight loss surgery, exercising.
Yet still, the objections were that people could not afford it. It’s so heart-wrenching to me. To hear someone tell me they can’t afford a reasonably priced fitness program that will help them not fall into the pitfalls of regain. Yet, if I followed most of the people that tell me they can’t afford it on social media, I’d watch them post about spending money on all sorts of other non-essential things. It’s not that most people can’t afford it, it’s that most people don’t make it a priority.
We don’t initially see the value in paying for a bariatric fitness routine.

I did the same thing. Told myself I could do it on my own. I’d pay $20-$40 a month for a gym membership I swore I’d use and then never had the accountability factor I needed to actually go. Accountability goes a long way. Knowing that you’re paying someone else to be there tends to make you actually go.
But these are hard things to overcome in a sales consult.
Do I practice empathy and be understanding?
Or do I practice tough love and ask some hard questions?
“Will a fitness routine be valuable when you’ve regained 30-60 lbs. and realize that the fact that you didn’t listen when your surgeon told you to exercise might be a contributing factor to that?”
“What kind of value will a bariatric fitness routine hold when the honeymoon phase of your surgery wears off? When you can eat like a relatively “normal” person again? How about when you start to realize that the only way you will maintain your weight loss is with exercise and activity?”
“Is it more valuable to spend a third of what you would pay for a specialized bariatric fitness program where you have the accountability and motivation factor to actually show up for a gym membership that you might use for the first 30 days and then will likely stop prioritizing?”
Watching someone slide down the slippery slop of regain breaks my heart.
When it is happening, we are acutely aware of why it is happening. We stopped eating as healthy as we were, we aren’t exercising. We started to fall back into bad habits. The carb craving monster reared it’s ugly little head. Sound familiar? I know it does, because I’ve been there. Remember, I lost over 200 lbs. and gained it all back. I’ve been there. I firmly believe that the only reason I don’t fall prey to this downfall is because I have a solid bariatric fitness routine implemented into my life.
Yet, even when we know that it is happening. We don’t see the value in hiring someone to help us. We’d much rather come up with the reasons why we can’t. “I can’t afford personal training.”
“My schedule is to hectic. I just can’t make the time for the workouts.” These are by far our favorite barriers. The reasons we give for not making a commitment to a bariatric fitness routine. Rational reasons we use as an excuse for the truth; that those of us that are effected by obesity seem to be highly predisposed to choose inaction over action. Why? Because it’s a hard habit to break when we have been doing it for such a large portion of our lives.
We’re so use to being sedentary, it’s hard to choose to be active.
This is a harsh, sad reality. A reality that has truly made my dream of bringing fitness to the weight loss surgery community a harder task than I ever realized it would be. Perhaps I set too lofty of a goal for myself.
I’m honestly not sure. What I am sure of right now, is that chasing that goal cost the company I work for a lot of money. Money that didn’t convert into clients in our remote training program. Funds that didn’t convert into my training schedule being full of clients searching for a trainer that specialized in bariatric fitness.

I believed in myself. Believed in the value of what I was doing. I was passionate about helping the population I was attempting to serve. Even now, I wholeheartedly believe in a bariatric fitness program. A program for people effected by obesity designed by people who have been effected by obesity.
Before I started this, I constantly used to hear “I wish I lived closer to you so that I could work out with you.” – I spent a good deal of blood sweat and tears developing a program that broke the confines of distance and location. But where are all those people now?
Now, I’m sad. I feel defeated. In fact, I feel like a failure.
Not because my dreams didn’t pan out. Not because my program wasn’t successful. I feel like I failed because I took someone else down this path with me, the owner of GoGirl Fitness Studio. My reach and potential in the weight loss surgery community was greatly over estimated. As a result, I focused on the population I was most passionate about reaching, instead of focusing on building up the business within a population of people that already see the value in fitness, activity and exercise.
I choose to put our marketing efforts into the weight loss surgery community and a bariatric fitness program that yielded so little results in it’s first year that the company isn’t making enough money to be able to afford the salary they pay me to run it for them.
Now, I’m back to a part time job in the fitness industry. Only getting paid for the time I spend training. I feel so defeated. For the first time in the eight years since I had my surgery and started chasing this dream of being a Personal Trainer for people fighting obesity, I am honestly starting to ask myself if this is all just a pipe dream. If I can’t make a decent living working with the clients that I want to specialize in working with is it time to give up and find a new career path? Starting over again and trying to find a different career path at 42 is scary, and it breaks my heart. Because, there is nothing I am more passionate about than bariatric fitness.
Is Bariatric Fitness a pipe dream?
I dunno right now. I’m trying to figure out how to get back up on this horse and keep riding. Trying to persevere and get back up despite the fact that I feel like I’ve been knocked out of the saddle. Right now, I’m dealing with a huge pay cut. Not to mention, the challenge of standing on my own to feet on a 19-25 hour a week paycheck. I don’t how I am going to pay my bills. It feels like Christmas has been canceled. I’m sad, I’m depressed, and there is a weight of uncertainty on my chest.
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