Winners / Ricky C.
Ricky C.
Orland Park, IL
As a personal trainer, one would think that they are perfect inside and out. This 60day story could not be further from the truth. Let me share with you my journey and struggles working as a fitness professional during my 60day challenge.
Working as a fitness professional there are many pressures for being healthy, looking shredded and staying educated in fitness. With eyes always looking up to me, both for my knowledge and physical appearance, it made me a little bit of self-conscious. Being smaller than most trainers and not super shredded created a lot of self-confidence issues as well. When I was younger I used to always get picked on for being skinny. This, in turn, pushed me into starting exercise to put on muscle so I would have more self-confidence, or so I thought. I have been a trainer for about 4 years and have seen some good progress, but it never was enough to me. I wanted to use this 60day to push myself to get in the best shape of my life to inspire my clients and improve my health. This time I changed my focus from trying to look a certain way and focused on my overall health and being comfortable in my skin.
The struggle with staying in shape was that every time I would eat, there would always be some sort of food that would cause stomach issues, such as bloating, nausea, vomiting etc. I wanted to challenge myself in this 60day by really taking in the core 3 philosophies which are integrating metabolic testing, nutrition and exercise programming.
Since I had so many gut issues, nutrition was the main focus for my health and fitness journey. For my metabolic testing, I invested in Life Time’s food sensitivity test. I found out that there was a myriad of sensitivities from my test. With that being said, it makes sense to me why past progress was only ok and never great, I had too many barriers slowing me down. I could never lose fat like I wanted to or gain the muscle either. I found I was sensitive to dairy, gluten, eggs, peanut and many more. This knowledge helped tremendously with the 60day to keep inflammation down and lower my aches and pains, improving mental focus and overall body fat. This set the precedence for the D.TOX Kit for my nutrition and meal planning. Using the D.TOX Kit I was able to follow the recipes they offered and helped with creating a better shopping list for myself when I would meal prep.
In closing, I can truly say I am happy to walk around in my skin, I feel healthier than ever and I have already inspired some of my clients to train harder to see better results. I also hope that my story was able to motivate everyone out there who may be struggling because despite the many barriers we may face, we can fight through the struggles and come out on top.