My first class was a disaster.

The exercises were chosen, the stations were set up, and I arrived at 5:15 that morning, groggy from my 3:30 wake-up and two hours of sleep.

I am lucky. 

I looked around the empty gym, quiet from the night, chilly from the cold spring morning, and tried to calm the butterflies in my stomach as I prepared to coach the 20 people about to walk through the doors of what was then, Spurling Training Systems.

By the time the class was over, one person left with a bad knee, others looked bored, and still others were skeptical of "the new coach."

The class ended and I walked to the window, looking at the red sky of sunrise, wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into. 

Before the next class, one of the other coaches pulled me into the office to give me some feedback. From Doug. Who wasn’t there.

“He watched from home,” the coach said, when I asked how Doug was giving me feedback. “There are cameras.”

I walked out to the parking lot and called Sheila.

“I don’t know what the f*** I got myself into, but I'm not staying past April."**

That was two years ago, yesterday. 

April 5th, 2016 marks the date of my arrival. It’s the date when I finally docked my boat after years and years of sailing around, trying different ports.

Remembering dates is a trait I inherited from my dad I suppose, who can tell you with ease the day he finished his four years of service in the Navy, the day he started in the steel mills, and the birthdays of hundreds of cousins and family members. (Yes there are hundreds..)

In turn, I can tell you that I got my driver’s license on October 19th, 1994, we adopted Rooney on July 11th 2008, and that Jamie Gillespie’s birthday is December 12th. (Hi Jamie!) 

But perhaps no date is as important or memorable for me as April 5th.* 

I stayed past April (clearly), but almost left for a second time that same summer. I loved the work, but the hour-drive and long days were wearing on me. It was a tough decision, and was teary eyed as I told my decision to Doug and the staff.  

What happened next, was something I could have never anticipated.

Doug made an effort to keep me. 

It was the first time in my professional life that I felt valued. Don’t get me wrong, I’d worked plenty of places where fellow co-workers and even supervisors valued me and treated me well. But few were in a position to do anything about it. 

Every few months, I send Doug a text, thanking him for my job. It probably seems like overkill, though I know he appreciates it. But so many nights, on the drive home, I think about the long nights I spent keeping stats at sporting events. I think about weekend trips to random places in Vermont spending time away from my family.

I think about the day in 2011 when I was folding t-shirts at a retail Nike store wondering how, at 34 years old, I ended up here. I think about the 70 hour weeks at a local college, making 25k a year, making no impact on the world, and wondering if I was going to die in a job like this. 

I think about the throws of anxiety and depression.

And that’s when I thank Doug.

I get emails like this. 

She's a fellow Yinzer too...

I get to help people.

I get to help older clients feel more independent. I get to help younger clients (hopefully) enjoy the gym. I get to watch women and men do things they didn't believe they could do. 

I get to work with people like Jayne. 

I work with a staff of guys who are beyond their years (sadly, not in musical taste) in their passion for helping others and in their true love for clients and for each other. I work for a guy who works as hard on being a better person as he does on being a better businessman. 

I get to see the world through the eyes of positivity, struggle, and humor.  

I'm reminded as I write this post, that careers and relationships and good things are not always love at first sight. That even when you find yourself on the right path, there is still work to be done, brush to be cleared, and mountains to climb. 

April 5th will never be just a date for me. 

It will be the date that I came home. 

And how lucky am I that I get to say that.

Thank you, to all of you. Who read my site. Whom I get to work with personally. Who support me in my struggles and let me support you in yours. Together, with positive energy and love and appreciation for each other, we get to move this world forward and shine a light through the darkness. 

And we need that kind of light now, more than ever.

Thank you Doug, Josh, Chris, Trent, Melanie, Judy and Amy C.

Thank you to all of the clients I've had the good fortune to meet. To all of the clients who have become such good friends and the friends who trust me enough to be clients. For every facebook message you write or text that you send.

Thank you. 

Did you know I have a newsletter? It's true. I do. If you'd like to have my blog posts delivered straight to your inbox Sign up here.  No, I won't share your email. That's just not cool. 

** I bust Doug's chops about this all of the time now - as a business person, he uses the cameras to check on traffic flow at the gym, and he was watching because it was really important that our group training classes were successful. I told him to give a girl a head's up next time though ;-)

*Except the day I met Sheila of course...:-)

Over the weekend, as I watched my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates tank in the waining days of July, I decided to shift my focus to making a pie chart about fat loss.

Yes, the Pirates played that poorly. 

But I also think that journey to fitness and fat loss can be so overwhelming and confusing, that there is merit to keeping the focus as simple as possible. 

20% Training

In terms of flat out fat loss, some might argue that 20% is a high number. It doesn’t matter what avenue you choose when you begin training. It could be Crossfit, Insanity, yoga, or running. Where we tend to get lost is wondering which method is going to burn the most calories and get us the best results. It’s so easy to hyper focus on the method of training that you can almost paralyze yourself with indecision about which approach is right.

There's a lot of ways to break down fitness. This is just one way to look at it. 

The best approach is the one with which you can build the most consistency. Yes, I'm a fan of strength training for all of the many benefits (increased bone density, muscle mass and independence to name a few), but you need to find one you and enjoy and stick with it. Which brings me to my next slice of pie. 

10% Patience

This number also might be a little low. Patience is the part of the process where you stay the course. Choose one method of training and stick to it. Choose one nutrition approach and stick to it. It’s tempting, even for fitness professionals, to jump from program to program when someone else releases a new product or we find something new. It's tempting for non-fitness professionals when you start a new bootcamp program and then find out a friend lost 50 pounds doing insanity and another lost 30 pounds by joining the new gym down the street. The next thing you know, you've jumped to so many different programs that nothing has worked. 

Choose an approach - choose a gym, choose a coach to work with, choose a nutrition approach and stick with it for six months. 

30% Nutrition

You’ve heard this before and you’ll hear it again - you can’t out-train a bad diet. It doesn’t matter if you burn 1,000 calories in a workout, fat loss won't happen if you aren't keeping your eating habits in check. Nutrition is so important that you don’t even need to train to lose weight. If you are on point with your nutrition, and on point is different for everyone, then you will lose weight regardless of what you do in the gym. 

40% Kindness to yourself

I think I need to be clear about something here:

Kindness to yourself is not apathy. It’s not a free pass to say I’ll eat what I want, drink what I want, and throw in the towel on this whole process because it’s just not working anyway.

That’s apathy and I can promise you from experience, that’s a dangerous place to be. (Click here for a post on apathy.)

Kindness is caring enough about yourself to make the best choices for you on a given day. Kindness is where you take into account your stress level, mood, and life demands and make the decision, especially in regards to the intensity of your workout, that is best for you.

Some days your body might feel so wrecked by a lack of sleep and life stress that you need to make careful choices about your self-care. Maybe it's a nap, maybe it's a massage, maybe it's 30 minutes in a Starbucks with your headphones on and a good book. Maybe it is a kick ass workout. You need to be the judge of that. 

Kindness is most certainly not beating yourself up more when life is already taking its punches at you. Because beating yourself up for what you did or didn't do the day before serves you no purpose. 

There are a number of different pieces to figuring out which approach to fitness and fat loss is best for you. But I firmly believe that if you focus on nutrition, are patient with your approach, self-aware of your own needs and kind to yourself about those needs, and do some type of training, good things will happen for you.

And that is my hope for you. 

The running joke in my family is that my little brother’s First Holy Communion and high school graduation pictures were on the same roll of film.

And that she didn’t develop those pictures until he was in college.

Yes, this is the actual camera my mom used when we were kids. There was this thing called a flash bulb that didn't come out of your phone, but actually went on top.

He was 21 before he knew what he looked like as a baby..

Take a photo of any kid today and her first impulse is to reach for the camera to see the picture on the back.  

We live in an instant gratification world. Put a status on Facebook and get instant feedback. News alerts show up on our watches, phones, and iPads. Hear a song you like and instantly own it. 

Remember sitting by the radio with your blank tape waiting for your favorite song to come on the radio?

And the DJ always talked through the intro. Always. It’s like he knew I was waiting for Richard Marx to come on.

We don’t have to wait for anything. Heck, I don't even have to wait in line at Starbucks anymore. I order my drink on my app and pick it up at the store.

So it should come as no shock that we've run out of patience with the journey to fat loss. Intellectually we know that results don’t come over night. One woman said it best that she didn’t put the weight on over night, so it wasn’t going to come off over night. 

But we rarely have to practice patience anymore. (I'm speaking as someone who has no children. I imagine those of you with kids practice patience on an hourly basis...)

Unfortunately, the intellectual knowledge that the process takes time does little to soothe us. And especially with health and fitness, it becomes very easy to question whether you're taking the right approach.

You cut down on carbs for a week, hop on the scale, and the number hasn't moved. (Which is one of many reasons that getting on the scale frequently isn't helpful). So you throw in the towel.

Your friend lost 20 pounds doing P90X so you try it for 10 days and haven't seen any results. It must be time to switch to Insanity. As coaches, many of us are also guilty of program hopping. We try one program for a month until we see a new one that looks cool and we jump on to that one. 

We hop around from one approach to the next looking for faster results. Not better. Faster. 

Despite the advent of all things digital - despite never having to wait for another REO Speedwagon song ever again in your life - there are some things that we can’t rush.

Regardless of your choice of exercise program, the process of body recomposition and fat loss takes time.  

So how do you learn patience?

Start here:

I kid. But it is a great song. And I'm sure I taped it off the radio at some point.

1. Delay instant gratification

This might be the most challenging and I would argue even more challenging for those of us who grew up without cell phones and digital music and books. We don't have to wait any more so why bother?

Try this: post a Facebook status and refrain from checking every five minutes to see how many likes you got. I'm going to do that after I post this blog to Facebook. Because I'm more guilty of checking for those happy little red notifications than any of you.

There is actually a famous study called the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that focused on delayed gratification and is very much worth the read. A group of children were given a marshmallow and told that if they waited 15 minutes to eat the marshmallow, they would get two marshmallows. Some waited, and some didn't. 

It's also helpful to make a plan and commit to sticking with it. If you are on a new nutrition program, give yourself four months. Stay the course. 

2. Take five slow deep breaths.

In meditation, everything returns to the breath. Focusing on your breathing can help bring you back into the now, into the moment, and doing so can shift your attention from what you want to where you are right now.

Slow down.

Are you Tigger? There's nothing wrong with Tigger, but you might want to tap into your inner Eyore for a few hours. Slow down. Breathe. A great way to slow down is the name five blue things in your surroundings. And then five red things. And then five white things.

3. Make peace with discomfort

When I first started running, I'd get a stitch in my side less than five minutes into a run. In the beginning, all I could think about was the stitch in my side, which seemed to grow worse with every passing step. Once I learned to embrace the discomfort I could get past the stitch, but it took a lot of focus and willingness to embrace the suck. 

With discomfort comes growth. 

Change takes time. Be patient with yourself and the process.