I have been working out consistently for four years. I think it's funny when some medical professionals assume I'm not doing anything for my physical health because of my curves. Not true. Size does not always indicate the health of someone's body.
So with that, let me tell you a little bit about what I have been doing to keep this thing going.
First shout out goes to Planet Fitness for having free personal training included with my membership. For the first three years, if there was a personal trainer on staff, you could book them anytime during business hours when the trainer was on site. Sometimes it was just me and sometimes there were a couple other people. This not only helped keep me accountable because when I have human pressures, I do the thing, but it also helped me make some new friends in my neighborhood. It was absolutely fantastic.
I started by just doing roughly two days a week with this trainer and roughly just two hours total of fitness. If I wasn't at the gym, I tried to do something else instead. And I kept that going for a very long time. The only way I started doing that was being comfortable with being at the gym. I do not love the gym, but I do love when people encourage me. While at that gym, I had three incredible trainers who all changed my life in different ways while they were there. It was absolutely incredible!
One thing that I have learned about myself over the years is that I need a human to hold me accountable to my goals. People are like, Shaily, you go and you do things. How amazing. And I'm like, yeah, because I pay people to kick my butt in different areas of my life when I need a kick butt. And that's what the trainers did.
After a while, I realized I needed to kind of take my health game to the next level. Having this baseline in my system meant it was a lot easier to keep going even on the hard days. But it also meant that I kind of wanted to change things up.
I moved ever so slightly farther from the gym, and I knew my laziness to walk that extra few minutes to the gym could stop me from going out there. The idea of having to make sure my shoes are on, I'm wearing clothes, I smell OK, that I've planned enough time to walk places, that I've booked my session, all of those things I realized were becoming more and more annoying for how my brain likes to work.
I saw a post from an influencer I've been following for probably more than a decade who said that he does all of his personal training with a company in India where you get to work one on one with someone in the type of fitness that you're trying to achieve. Everybody typically goes through this program five days a week. And you see, just like you would on TV with all those weight loss commercials, you see photo after photo after photo of people going through insane amounts of weight loss. And it blew my mind because they all looked fairly normal. And they didn't look like the over dramatized stuff we see here in the States.
So I said, screw it, let me take a chance on this. I’ve had good experiences outsourcing things to other countries. And I said, why not outsource my fitness? And so I started working with my trainer and we do Zumba roughly five days a week. I've been doing it since November. And I've absolutely loved it because now I get a message from her that helps me get out of bed and do something ideally more fun to get me moving and grooving to start my day. And I found that it helped my focus so much.
What does this have to do with you? First off, if you want to find out about my company that I use, I'm happy to send it to you over DMs. Second off is that even with social media, you have to do little baby steps that you can stick with, because I could not do more than two hours for the longest time. And maybe that's not enough for someone to be “healthy.” But it was enough for me to build up the momentum I needed to do something like this. And that was something to be proud of. It goes through the same thing with social media or any skill, right? You have to find a way to make it doable for you and find a way to make it work so that you don't hate it. So that's what I did. I found somebody overseas that did the kind of workouts that I did. And in the process, I actually also made friends with people that I sometimes work out with through my trainer. And now I have my own squad of Indian ladies that I absolutely love.
So shout out to me for being a fake Indian, despite having a name that is also common in India.
I will see you at the Bollywood Zumba gym. Bye.