And the more he progressed, the better he got, the higher he climbed, the more he destroyed himself each and every day.

That’s not a euphemism for “playing hard” or “putting his body on the line.” Patrick Devenny was sick, and getting sicker – especially after his NFL dreams flamed out before ever playing a game with the Seahawks — and no one around him had any idea anything was wrong. Patrick Devenny, big, fast, strong, had a disease a lot of guys get but don’t talk about.

Patrick Devenny was bulimic.

The Picture of Perfection or the Edge of Disaster?

“People ask me when the food issues started,” the now-29 year old says. “I don’t want to say it happened in college or high school. I know I’ve always had this ability to eat a tremendous amount, but I was also working out so much. So I don’t know if it was disguised by lifting, running, practice, all of that, so it just seemed normal.”

“Normal” during his playing days was around 5000 calories daily, not an outlandish amount for an elite athlete of his size. Normal also meant that even through high school, his schedule gave him structure, kept him driven and accountable, and in general helped him become a fine student-athlete. Football, and all that came with it, was life.

In hindsight, however, Devenny believes that his ordered life helped plant the seeds of disordered eating – and thinking. All of that structure, including monitoring the macros (protein, carbs, and fat) he consumed and working out a certain way at the gym, wasn’t just geared for results on the field. It was designed to achieve continual improvement with one endgame: perfection.

The problem was, no one ever talks about male eating disorders. Or acts like it’s something that’s even a possibility for a masculine, muscular man, especially any athlete.

Each year of school, each new level reached, meant he had to work harder to raise his game and physicality. And once he hit that truly elite level – a chance to be signed by an NFL team – all those seeds from all those years sprouted.

“I became obsessed about my body,” he says. “By the time I had my Pro Day, I had to be perfect. You walk into a room full of scouts and you’re shirtless and they’re grabbing every inch of your body, measuring body fat, measuring your hands, doing all this stuff, so in the months leading up to that I knew I had to present this image that would blow them away.”

It worked … briefly. He was indeed signed by the Seahawks, but before he could suit up he was released. And just like that, his football career – something he’d based his entire life on – ended. “Every day there was always a next step,” he says. “School, then football until 5, then homework, always on a schedule, always planning something. But once I was released, it was like, ‘Now what?’ In one day I had lost my identity. Suddenly it’s Monday and I’m like, ‘What do I do?’”

The Fine Line: Muscle Gain, Fat Loss, and Psychological Health

A man who had been trained to catch passes and throw blocks in front of 100,000 people was now untethered and unemployed. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to – or could – do. This wasn’t just a case of a guy having difficulty accepting a new reality, or making a rough transition. He truly felt worthless. And the only thing he could cling to were the habits that he knew: The structure of regimented diet and training.

“That was where I started to become obsessed,” he says. “The only thing that ever provided comfort has been the gym. All I knew that day was that I could go work out like crazy. I became obsessed with trying to achieve some sort of body perfection so I could justify my life. I can impress the women, impress the guys, do whatever I could to achieve that because I lacked so much confidence in myself. I overcompensated, thinking that the perfect body would solve all my issues. I was trying to find my identity through some kind of physical perfection – and it spun out of control.”

And would become more and more out of control for six years. Following his release from the Seahawks in May 2010, Devenny manipulated his diet to disguise his eating disorders, while also using the gym to present the façade of a healthy, go-getter lifestyle.

“I became fascinated with intermittent fasting,” he says. “I’d set a clock for 16 hours every day. If it was 15 hours and 55 minutes, I would wait those last five minutes. I was obsessed. That allowed me to completely overeat and binge at night. I would feast. I weighed everything, had everything tracked down to the exact macro.”

Here’s the crazy thing: That doesn’t sound crazy. A lot of people follow similar eating plans. But Devenny was taking it to another level. “I was in this bro-science world of ‘carbs and fats are bad, eat vegetables and protein.’ So when I got into intermittent fasting, I started to eliminate a lot of food from my diet. Looking back, it was primarily food that I considered healthy but also forbidden myself to eat. Then I would get stressed out and crave an entire jar of peanut butter, or granola, or cereal.”

Every night, the feeding frenzy would begin. Some nights, Devenny would pound down as much as 12,000 calories. At one point, for a three-month stretch, he ate 4 boxes of cereal and a gallon of almond milk every night. Another night, he ate 16 Quest protein bars (“They tasted fantastic and I could’ve had more.”). This is also when his behavior began to mirror classic addiction: “Afterward, I’d be like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to do it again, I’m fine, it’s no big deal.’ But during, it was like an out of body experience. All of a sudden I’d get done, it’s midnight, and my stomach hurts beyond belief, and then I go into self-beat-up mode.”

In the morning, his fast would begin again and he’d head to the gym for a three-hour workout. But if you ask Devenny today, it was punishment, and very much a part of his condition. “I needed to do the gym work as much as I needed to eat,” he says. “Definitely hand-in-hand. It would suck, too. I was lifting like a madman, sweating everywhere, and then do an extra hour of cardio and never once did I see any gains. I just maintained. Every time I squatted I tried to go as heavy as I could, or I’d go light and do 100 reps. And every rep was me pissed off at myself for what I did the night before. My body was wrecked.”

An interesting thing: When Devenny abused himself, it was always with exercise or “healthy” foods. Protein bars. Organic cereals from Whole Foods. That was part of the charade.

“If you had looked at me, especially during that time, and I told you I had an eating disorder, you wouldn’t have believed me in a million years,” he says. “I still looked physical great, and look in the pantry — it’s all healthy food. But what I was doing behind closed doors – because I wouldn’t do this in front of anybody –was so secretive. But everything that you can’t judge with your eyes was horrible. My stomach was destroyed. My hormones, too. No matter how much I ate or exercised, I was running on fumes at all times.”

The exercise-eating cycle went on for months. In 2014, Devenny’s mother passed away and he began bottoming out. He knew he had a problem but maintained enough denial so he didn’t have to do anything about it. But one random event helped crystalize things in his own mind.

“I was listening to a podcast with Layne Norton and Sohee Lee [Physique Science Radio]. They had a therapist on who started describing a lot of food issues and how she didn’t believe in counting macros because it can lead to a lot of disordered eating. And I just froze. Just her describing those symptoms really hit home for me. I did not expect to listen to that podcast and find that out.”

A second event: Devenny had a frank and “vulnerable” conversation with Adam Bornstein, Born Fitness founder, a friend who had been providing him with diet and workout programs for years (which Devenny followed only in spirit, naturally). He refers to the phone call as “a left-handed Hail Mary. But for me just calling the play was the biggest thing I could’ve done.”

Bornstein was up-front: Man, you need help. Devenny knew it, and in the meantime had already reached out via email to the therapist he heard on the podcast. It was the beginning of his recovery.

Why No One Talks About Male Eating Disorders (And Why It’s More Prevalent Than You Think)

His first therapy session was both unsurprising – “In like 2 minutes she asked me a couple of questions and it became so obvious how much I needed help.” – and terrifying.

“She told me, one, I had to get back to a normal eating schedule with healthy meals, and two, really cut back in the gym,” he says. “She told me a lot of things that I was deathly afraid of. I’m like, what? That’s my life.” The first day he tried his new program was the first breakfast he’d eaten in months. “It took 13 weeks just to regulate my eating.”

He learned many other things as he progressed. First and foremost, he was officially a bulimic, which he found difficult to wrap his head around – at first. After all, since when are male eating disorders a thing? Especially, not for a guy that looked like Devenny. But the more he learned, the more he found that he fit a profile, especially for men with eating disorders.

“I mean, guys don’t have eating disorders, right?” he says. “So I had to allow myself to admit that. It’s a complicated subject, but there are three ways people get diagnosed with bulimia. One is the traditional concept: You eat and then throw up. I definitely struggled with throwing up. Two is using laxatives, which I didn’t even know was thing. But the third one? You over-exercise.”

Therapy brought another revelation: “At one point we started talking about my mom, who had passed away,” he says. “All of a sudden it hit me. I remember times as a child hearing my mom throw up and thinking maybe she has a weak stomach. I never put 2 and 2 together. I was predisposed. She didn’t like how much she ate so she was gonna throw it up.”

Devenny’s initial therapy program was 20 weeks long, and when he finished, he was eating 3 normal meals each day along with one snack. “It’s funny,” he says. “People would ask me what I was up to, and I wanted to say, ‘Well, I’m finally eating breakfast.’ A huge accomplishment for me, but nobody gets that, nobody understands the hell you go through when you have an eating disorder. I was afraid to share it because people wouldn’t understand it.”

That feeling has passed, for now, and Devenny wants to get the word out to people who might be going through what he did. He doesn’t believe they should suffer for one more minute. He hopes that talking about his own experience will help shine a useful light on the problem, which can be both underdiagnosed and misunderstood.

“My goal now is to hopefully change the image behind what eating disorders are, and that guys and women get them for every reason possible,” he says.

“I also talk about the downfall from such rigid eating. There’s now a big push in the fitness community that’s more about moderation than eliminating foods, and I’m all for it. About 10 percent of diagnosed bulimics are men, and the majority of them are athletes. I would like to be a voice of reason for male athletes who have gone through this.”

Today, Devenny is able to have cereal for breakfast (and stop at one bowl) and spends about a quarter of the time he used to in the gym. Meanwhile, the proper fuel and sensible workouts have changed his body in surprising ways. “I’m physically stronger than I’ve ever been – without being in the gym all day, every day.”

If Devenny has any regrets, it’s that he didn’t seek help faster. Still, he’s on the sunny side of 30 and has the life perspective and mission of a guy twice that age. And that’s okay, because now he can do some good with it.

“I missed out on a lot of things in life,” he says. “If you had asked me on a Saturday to go on some adventure, I’d be like, ‘Well, if you’re willing to wait ‘til after I’m done at the gym.’ And I wouldn’t go out to dinner with friends because I couldn’t control what was on the menu. That would scare me to death. I just didn’t know any better. For years. I wouldn’t have ever known the difference except now that I’m on the other side of it and have received help. All I had to do was ask.”

The post To Hell and Back: The Untold Story of Male Eating Disorders appeared first on Born Fitness.

“I’m going to drop 50 pounds.”

“I’m going to run a half-marathon.”

You’re not gonna get anywhere if you’re not lifting something. You need to do it. If you want to change your body, pick up something heavy.

“I’m going to get my high school body back.”

These are common goals – common enough that reading them here surprises no one – but what do they really represent? Change? Yes. But random change.

Maybe you could even call it shotgun change, in that your goal is scattered and unfocused. Maybe you hit it, and even if you do, what does it mean?

Think of it this way: losing 50 pounds is a nice accomplishment. Few people do it. But why not 54 pounds? 48? And that half-marathon. Hey, not many people can run 13 miles. It’s awesome if you can do it … but then what? Are you now considered “fit?” By whose standard?

You start to see the problem. When we toss around fitness goals, they – like muscles hidden by flab — lack true definition. That’s what Kristen Buter found out the hard way. Great intentions don’t mean great results.

Buter found herself in the same situation millions of new moms find themselves – saddled with bundles of joy and a body that’s beaten up from carrying those bundles around and finally pushing them out. Buter has two children. They bring her incredible joy, but also posed new challenges.

“I used to be very physically active before them,” she says. “And I had two very rough pregnancies. When they’re little, life is just crazy. You take a back seat and that first year it’s so hard to get back to a normal life.”

How to Lose Baby Weight (Or Achieve Any Weight Loss Goals)

A few years ago, Buter and her husband found themselves talking just after Christmas. They realized on that holiday break that the kids had been well-behaved and more self-sufficient. And the proverbial lightbulb went off.

“I don’t do the New Year’s resolution thing,” she says. “But we were talking about things we wanted to do in the coming year. I thought,

I thought, You know what, you’ve had such a great week with the kids and they’re so much older now. There’s no point going another year where you feel uncomfortable in your own skin. So I decided this would be ‘the year of Kristen’ where I’d get back to the old me.”

She didn’t know it, but Buter had just stepped in a fitness trap. “Get back to the old me” sounds so tempting, so empowering, so promising. But without a defined plan – a clear definition of what “fitness” meant to her – she had no clear path. And she soon realized it.

“I started doing what I used to do and wasn’t getting the results I got before,” she says. That’s when she sought out help. She found trainer Adam Bornstein from his online writing and then his Twitter account. Even though he was based in L.A., thousands of miles from her native Ontario, she signed on. Bornstein’s first question: What do you want to accomplish?

It’s not an easy question when you are forced to really think about it. Buter had to admit that she really wasn’t interested in dropping a brag-worthy amount of weight or run a half-marathon.

Once she thought about it, she realized she didn’t really know what “fitness” meant to her. Here’s what she discovered: “It’s not so much about weight. It’s about how I look and feel.” That meant focusing on how to lose baby weight, but not hitting a random number goal or athletic accomplishment. It meant total body transformation.

Weight Loss 101: Long-term Weight Loss is Not Starvation

Bornstein adjusted her exercise and eating plan. The biggest shock – and something she still can’t believe – is the counterintuitive act of eating more food to get leaner.

“When I compared what I had been eating to what I should be eating, the difference was huge. Even now, I’m eating more than I ever have before, and I’m smaller, leaner, and tighter than I’ve ever been.”

The glitch? People sometimes forget – or never know – that when you work out, you have to eat to see results. You also have to eat the right things – a balance of protein, carbs, and fats – so a bag of chips doesn’t qualify as “more.” “It changes your mindset,” she says.

“For the last 10 years, I’ve been eating pretty healthy. But I never ate based on whether I’m training or not training. I never thought about the food and how it might affect my workout later. You’re eating to enjoy it, but also for a reason. What is your fuel for?”

This: She works out 4 times a week for about 45-60 minutes because that’s what works for her schedule. But when her schedule changed, it was a shift to 30-minute sessions. The length isn’t what’s important, but the flexibility.

It’s a foundational principle of her Born Fitness coaching program: build a program that meets a client where they are, not sets the bar to something impossible. After all, consistency is one of the highest predictors of body transformation success, so it makes no sense to create workouts that are too long for your schedule or require you to go to the gym more often than you can handle.

Her workouts are split into roughly half resistance training and half metabolic training. This was also new to Buter and helped crystallize what fitness meant to her. Within two weeks she saw and felt results.

She hadn’t lost any weight – which would be a sign of failure to some – but her body was transforming almost before her eyes. “During that first two weeks, I saw a couple inches go and I was amazed,” she said. “I had been working out before and hadn’t seen anything change. To see something fall off that quickly was huge.”

Beyond The Scale: Understanding Weight Loss and Transformation

Buter was experiencing something that few women do because few women engage in heavy resistance and metabolic training. Her body was burning fat like crazy, but it was also adding muscle. Her weight didn’t fluctuate very much, but her body fat percentage was dropping and she began to see muscle definition.

After a little over three months, “bingo-bango, mom’s got a six pack.”

Buter has dropped only nine pounds since starting her new plan, but she’s lost 15 inches of fat and dropped her body fat percentage from 25 to 19 percent. Next stop: 16 percent.

“Right now I’m in my best shape ever,” she says. “More energy, way more self-confidence, better sleep. And when you sleep better you’re in a better mood.”

Buter recommends this style of training for women who want to transform their bodies. But she’s also heard the myth that women are afraid to lift weights because they’ll bulk up. Ladies: it simply won’t happen (for the record, you would have to consume a lot of food – like a bodybuilder or football player – to bulk up from resistance training).

Buter puts it simply: “You’re not gonna get anywhere if you’re not lifting something. You need to do it. If you want to change your body, pick up something heavy.”

Because of all this, Buter is now a rare species: A woman who loves to do the dead lift. That’s not to say she doesn’t have a least-favorite exercise, as well. “Bulgarian split squats,” she says with a laugh. “Though my ass doesn’t hate them as much as I do.”

Is Born Fitness Coaching For You?

The program is not for everyone. To see if a one-on-one approach to health and fitness is what you’re looking for, learn more here. 

The post Mom’s Got Abs: A Practical Look at How to Lose Baby Weight appeared first on Born Fitness.

Can a new way of looking at diet plans and eating, a new fat loss formula, along with a new way of exercising make a chronic disease go away and restore health? For David Musikanth, the answer is a resounding yes.

The Ultimate Weight Loss Battle

A good plan is one where you eat what you like. It’s something you don’t see in most diet plans.

For most of his life, Musikanth had suffered from Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disorder that brings on unpredictable spells of pain, diarrhea, bleeding, and constipation. It also causes fatigue and, in general, makes your life miserable.

“You can be at home and you want to go out and all of a sudden your stomach isn’t 100 percent and you can’t go out,” he says. “You absolutely can’t. You have to stay somewhere where you have facilities. Crohn’s ruled my life.”

Musikanth was medicated for the condition, and he did exercise, but even then he says it’s still difficult to control symptoms. Finally, a little over two years ago, at age 43 with a wife and two children, he reached a point where something had to change.

“You realize you’re not getting any younger,” he says. “Health is a bigger issue and it was hitting home much harder than it ever did. I wanted to do something for myself that didn’t involve doctors and treatment.”

His first stop, as it is for most of us, was the internet. What could he find? Who could help? He didn’t really have a set diet (“I didn’t think much about it at all”) and his workouts had never changed his body in any meaningful way.

Soon he stumbled on trainer Adam Bornstein’s Twitter feed. “I was intrigued by his posts,” Musikanth says. “So I just asked him some basic questions about nutrition and exercise.”

Bornstein engaged and suggested that Musikanth overhaul his approach to both eating and working out. The first change? Instead of eating the way he’d always had, Bornstein suggested intermittent fasting. It’s a simple concept: Between the hours of noon and 8 p.m., you eat all your normal meals. The rest of the time you consume nothing. “It sounded completely crazy,” Musikanth says.

Ditching Diets for Nutrition Plans

He and his wife decided to try it together – “It’s a lot easier if you have someone to do it with” – along with a change in what he was eating. “Before, there was no concept of diet. A typical meal would be like hot dogs or hamburgers and chips. And a Coke. I wouldn’t even think twice about it.”

Musikanth eliminated the garbage food, but also changed what he eat for the majority of his diet. He’ll eat chicken and vegetables. Fish. Eggs for breakfast. An occasional steak. “It was very strange at first, fitting all my meals into a set timeframe,” he says.

The biggest difference, though, was the flexibility. There was no talk of removing family favorites like pizza night and sushi. Instead, it was understanding how to build a eating style around a lifestyle, and then make sure the plan was doable.

The first three months were tough because of the adjustment of the “good foods” to eat, not because of what was restricted.

“What was amazing was where I initially struggled,” says Musikanth. “It’s not strict in terms of avoiding all foods. A good plan is one where you eat what you like. It’s something you don’t see in most diet plans.”

“But the bigger issue is how much you stay on plan versus having flexibility. In time, your body becomes trained for it. Now it’s second nature. More importantly, Adam set expectations so that when progress stalled, we knew that the plan didn’t stop working. Instead, we discovered how plateaus can be part of progress.”

Bornstein also gave Musikanth a new approach to fitness – a combination of strength and metabolic training that he’d never encountered before. “I did go to a gym, but what I did was very old fashioned, very boring kind of stuff,” he says.

“Now I walk into the gym and have to do all these strange movements. It was very weird at first. But in four months, my whole body changed. Even the people at the gym were asking me, ‘What kind of training is this?’ These were exercises that no one had ever seen.”

Reinventing The Fat Loss Formula

In those first months, Musikanth dropped 22 pounds, which took him from flabby to shredded – an unexpected side benefit. “I hadn’t been majorly fat. It wasn’t like I needed to lose this weight, but it was simply my body shedding fat. Now I look completely different.”

But again, to really appreciate Musikanth’s story, you have to look past the aesthetics. In those first months, along with the physical changes, all of his Crohn’s symptoms disappeared.

Musikanth has been on Bornstein’s plan for 2 years, is now 45, and is quite literally a changed man. “I changed everything. I did a complete change in what I ate, a complete change in how I train. I’m still on the Crohn’s medication, but I have no side effects. It’s in complete remission.”

There’s one more eye-opening bit of information you should know. Musikanth lives in South Africa. Bornstein splits his time between Denver and Los Angeles. This man managed to engage a trainer and successfully implement his plan from half a world away.

Think about that. Some people live 10 minutes from their gym and still can’t make it work with trainers.

Musikanth has thought about this. “I go to a beautiful gym,” he says. “But you look at the trainers and they’re very young. To me, what makes the relationship work is having commitment on both sides. When you see the results, obviously, you see the results. Then it doesn’t matter which side of the planet you’re on.”

The Born Fitness Family: David Musikanth

The Results

I went from 83 kgs to a constant 69-70 kgs. My body fat dropped from 20 percent to below 10 percent and my fitness level just improved like mad enabling me to do my 1st 10km run as well as complete 2 Impi challenges, which is a 12km trail run with 20 odd obstacles in between.

These would never even have been contemplated before Born Fitness online coaching. More importantly to me is that in the now 3 years of Born Fitness I have not had one incident of  Crohn’s disease throughout this period which is quite astonishing!! Even my doctors are at a loss. For me this has been the real success of Born Fitness, helping me get my life back.

Why Born Fitness

I grew up in a home where diet certainly wasn’t an issue, so I was always overweight even though as a kid I went to the gym and did routine weights. In my 20s I was diagnosed with the chronic disease Crohn’s which affected me really badly both from a diet perspective and a training perspective, it all went flat from there on.

Even though I still trained I just had no plan and I ate pretty freely as well as being on chronic medication daily. This went on until I discovered Born Fitness when I was 44! Once I had joined Born fitness my life did a complete u-turn even at this late age. I got a managed, educated, designed and completely different training and eating plan that delivered the results I so desperately craved in its 1st month!!

Certainly a plan designed just for me and diet constructed around what I eat just made it easier and much more simple to negotiate. I would definitely say that a new world of exercises in a structured plan was what instantaneously made a difference. A mix of functional cardio and focused weight training just breathed new life into my system.

Want to Join the Born Fitness Family?

Learn more about your personalized approach to fitness. Apply here. 

The post The Fat Loss Formula for Any Age: The David Musikanth Story appeared first on Born Fitness.

Mary Beth Eckersley’s story has so many entry points, so many rollercoaster-in-the-dark ups and downs, that it’s hard to decide. But it’s harder still to distill an entire life into “entry points.”

That’s what you come to understand after hearing her story and learning about her total life transformation.

Losing weight is a side benefit. Fitness and diet are all about making the attempt and taking the best possible step forward.

A life is epic. A life has meaning. Mary Beth Eckersley’s life – even just the past 10 years of it – is worthy of examination. Why? Because she’s one of the most inspiring people you’ll ever meet…

Your Past is Not Your Future

Ten years ago, Mary Beth Eckersley weighed 400 pounds.

Okay, technically it was 395, but coming in 5 pounds light doesn’t have quite the same psychological effect as, say, pricing a vacuum cleaner at $395 so you don’t feel like you’re paying $400. At that level of obesity, your heart, liver, and pancreas won’t give you credit for five pounds. For Eckersley’s part, she puts it dryly: “I was exceptionally large.”

She had all the baggage that goes with that kind of weight: Lousy diet, no fitness, low self-esteem, the works. At her age – then 45 – she knew that when it came to her long-term health, it was quite literally do-or-die time. She made some changes and she dropped 100 pounds.

Wow. Huge, right? That’s like losing a set of Michelins. That’s worth celebrating. And yet … Eckersley didn’t feel as triumphant as she thought she would.

For one thing, she’d plateaued and couldn’t seem to drop any more weight. For another, deep down she knew something no one else around her knew.

“My weight loss was half-assed,” she says.

“It happened, but it felt like a lie. I wasn’t eating healthy and I was still lying to myself. ‘I’m making healthy choices.’ No, you’re not. I reached a point in my life where I really had to look at who I was and what I was doing.”

That moment of self-honesty – what addicts call the moment of clarity – was one of the biggest in Eckersley’s life because it finally got everything out there.

“Part of being exceptionally large is that you still blame other things,” she says. “It takes a while for you to come to that honest realization that, yeah, you’re fat. You need to do something about it. It’s truly affecting your life and you need to fix it. No one will fix it for you.”

The problem? “I knew I had to move forward but had no idea how to do it. You know how you can get stuck in a too-much-information-and-don’t-know-where-to-start kind of thing? That was me.”

She shopped around for a while, followed some fitness folks on the internet, and finally signed up with trainer Adam Bornstein for Born Fitness online coaching in May of 2012. All was well. She was ready. Now she had the coach she needed. Then, as she describes it, things “went sideways” three months later.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“One of the worst emails I sent I had to send to Adam because I’d finally made it to the point where I wanted to fix my life and now I had this on my plate,” she says. “But Adam sent me the best response anyone could’ve sent,”

Today we get stronger.

The Only Choice: Live

Mary Beth and Adam decided to work together through all her treatment. You rarely hear of people who exercise through chemotherapy, but Eckersley was resolute.

“I decided I’d face breast cancer with the best possible attack plan I could and be as positive as possible. I did small workouts. For some people they might not even qualify as workouts. But if you have a port in your chest and are doing chemo for a year, it’s a workout.”

At the gym, she would warm up on a spin bike. The first time she tried it, she lasted 10 minutes. Eventually she worked her way up to an hour and a half. When the really hardcore chemo started, a friend would stand beside her so she wouldn’t fall off the bike.

She found a rhythm with treatment, which repeated 3-week cycles. Week one: Your body is inundated with drugs. Week two: Your body gets rid of the drugs (“You can’t do anything that week,” she says). Week three: You heal, then start over. Her workouts ran the same cycle.

“Every cancer patient should be given the opportunity to be in a gym,” she says. “It really does make a difference in your treatment and how your body can process the drugs and refresh itself afterwards. For me, it was huge. It doesn’t matter how fast you go as long as you keep moving. As long as you’re moving, you’re moving forward.”

As exhausted as she felt on chemo – and she literally felt physically done – she’d force herself to climb on that bike. And always, once she warmed up, she got that pleasant surprise; she felt like doing more.

She’d do some floor work, crunches, maybe a half-plank and some light kettlebell work. “Exercise gave me a positive place to put the stress,” she says. “And physically it gave me more strength and stamina to deal with the next treatment.”

Success is Part of Life…If You Pursue It

Today, now 55 years old, Eckersley is a cancer survivor. She’s also dropped another 100 pounds. “I’m 30 pounds away from where my doctor would like me to be, 170. I’m half the size I was.”

Her message is simple: Anything is possible. You can change your life. When necessary, you can fight for your life. The key is making the choice to start. And it is a choice, she says, no one will do it for you.

Most importantly, you shouldn’t let the fact that you may be obese keep you from getting out and doing the work. Take Eckersley’s advice and start slow. But start.

“When people see someone who’s really large, they say, ‘Oh, they should just exercise.’ Well, you can say that to a woman who’s 180 pounds. But say that to someone who’s just over 400 pounds? You can’t.

You can’t say, ‘This is a burpee and this is how you do it.’ It’s not gonna happen.. You don’t have the reaction time. It’s embarrassing for you and you could hurt yourself. So you need to find the space that lets you learn that reaction time, learn how to get up off the floor safely and without being embarrassed.”

Bornstein helped by offering encouragement along with the exercises and healthy eating plan. She used her own bodyweight to start. She’d use a wall for support and go slow. Then she moved up to using a table. Then floor work. She did her very first half-squats while holding on to a TRX suspension trainer. Now those days are a memory.

“I wrote Adam a note yesterday,” she says. “For the first time in my life I did a squat with a 20 pound kettlebell and did figure-eights with it around my legs. I thought, This is cool. I have proper form and I have the strength to DO this.”

As the saying goes, you can’t out-train a lousy diet, and Eckersley had to change her eating habits as well. Bornstein helped with that, but during her cancer battle, she found an unlikely ally: Chemotherapy. And no, not because it made her feel sick and unable to eat.

It forced her, amazingly, to eat healthy foods. “If I ate something that was made with chemicals, it tasted disgusting to me, like a filthy ashtray or a science experiment. I ended up with a bizarre craving for spinach. I couldn’t get enough of it. Even though chemo is the nastiest thing in the world, it gave me clean eating that my body craved. So I ended up with an appreciation for clean eating that I never had before.”

Once she beat the cancer, however, the crap-food-cravings returned. Those aren’t easy for anyone. By then, however, Eckersley had been able to make new food rules like “no drive-thrus.”

Much of her eating is now based on a simple change in attitude she learned from Bornstein.

“Now I remind myself that I’m worth a healthy meal. That I have the right to prepare a healthy lunch or dinner. A lot of the reason so many of us are overweight is that we have no confidence in ourselves. We don’t think we have any value. Now I see the value in myself. Now my lunch bag is filled with vegetables, protein bars, hummus, and fruit.”

It’s underselling it to say that Eckersley has a new life. Or that she is a walking inspiration not just to people who want to lose a lot of weight, but fight through a cancer diagnosis. It’s a matter of making your decision. Asking for help. And fighting every day.

“Even going through chemo I managed to get healthier and fitter than I’ve ever been in my whole life,” she says.

“Now my goal isn’t to lose weight. I want to be healthy and stronger. Losing weight is a side benefit. It’s all about making the attempt and taking the best possible step forward.”

The post Real People, Real Results: The Total Life Transformation appeared first on Born Fitness.

People just love playing word games with themselves and each other. When you work in the health and fitness industry, you often encounter the word “change.” You could argue that it’s the most common word you hear.

“I want to change.”

Do it because you can do it. It’s your life, your health, you don’t want to not try.

“I need to change.”

“I’m afraid to change.”

“Why is it so hard to change?”

Change in habit. Change in physique. Change in health. Change in mindset. Change is hard for a lot of people because admitting you need to change is admitting failure.

In other words, you were wrong.

Now there’s a word, “wrong.”

Some folks have a serious problem with being wrong. You can also add that change is all sorts of unpleasant words, from “painful” to “intimidating” to “[insert preferred profanity here].”

Simple words dictate our actions, and that explains the lack of change we see again and again. People start, people quit. Some never start at all.

If you’ve had a hard time getting the change you want – in habit, physique, health, and mindset – it’s time you met Lindy Cunningham and her husband, Chad. She’s thirty-two, he’s thirty-one. They have a two-year-old son and live in Nashville, Tennessee.

Not long after their son’s birth, they decided together to make some changes.

Lindy wanted to dump the baby fat and get back to her pre-marriage weight. Chad wanted to gain weight and get back in shape; he’d had a recent bout with mono and had lost 30 pounds.

They found trainer Adam Bornstein through his Twitter feed and eventually signed on so he could guide them to two very different goals, though both would be based on eating better and exercise.

Like most folks, they were jarred by the sudden change – adjusting their eating style, upping activity, logging workouts. But both of them had been athletes in high school. They stuck with it.

They changed.

Chad found it amusing that he had a harder time gaining weight than Lindy had losing it. Six months passed. Their son grew. Their bodies changed. They found change – or dedication to change – to be a good thing. Lindy was 5 pounds away from her goal weight.

Then everything changed.

Falling Down and Getting Up

On a ski getaway in Jackson Hole in January 2013, near the bottom of a long run where several trails filtered together, Lindy hit an ice patch or caught an edge – no one is quite sure – and she fell. She slid to the edge of the trail and hit a signpost, back-first.

“Nothing crazy,” Chad says. “Nothing fast. It just happened.”

“It” was a life-altering moment: Lindy had a burst fracture in her C5 and C6 vertebrae, which is technical terminology meaning the bones in her lower neck shattered and damaged her spinal cord.

She was paralyzed from the armpits down.

Lindy sums it up this way: “Being young, being married to someone I was just crazy about, having a baby, being close to a six month goal when it happened, the only word that touches it would be sorrow.”

Lindy, however, would not stand pat on that word. She had lung function, so she didn’t need breathing help. Her brain was fine, as well. That made everything else a work in progress, and a goal to strive for.

She has impaired arm function – her biceps work, but her triceps run at about 10 percent. Her finger dexterity is sketchy, but she can grasp things.

In July 2014, after 18 months of almost daily PT, she graduated to walking therapy assisted with harnesses. But no one knows if she’ll ever truly walk again.

“Who can tell how many thousands of hours she’s worked just to get to that point?” says Chad. “Or earlier on, to eat with an adapted fork. I don’t have anything to compare it to.”

But an interesting thing has happened in the last year and a half. All those negative terms we attach to change are still there, of course, and always will be.

Find Your Pulse

It turns out that Lindy’s approach to a new and difficult daily life isn’t all that different from the approach she first took to lose her baby weight and get results. And that fact alone has made a monumental difference not just to her own well-being, but the mindset of everyone around her.

You can hear the marvel in Chad’s voice as he describes it all.

“From the whole time it happened, the moment I found her, to the hospital, to now, Lindy’s never freaked out, never panicked. She was always good. She’s been kind and pleasant and positive and hopeful as you could ever want someone to be. She has bad days and bad times like anyone, but every day she works really hard, she’s good to whoever’s helping her, she’s nice to all her doctors and therapists and nurses. She does what they say and tries to do anything she can. She tries to help other people who have her injury. She tries to make the absolute best of it which for me and everybody else around her makes it doable.”

Lindy, true to form, deflects credit.

“How you approach a spinal injury depends on where you are in your life at the time – how are your relationships, etc. Fortunately, at the time I was surrounded by so many wonderful people. There was an incredible outpouring of love, support, and encouragement. That made it easier than a lot of people have it.”

Part of that support came from the man, who, despite her accident, still finds himself as Lindy’s trainer.

Immediately after the accident happened, Bornstein was interacting with Chad offering support and trying to find answers. And within a week of hearing the news, Bornstein wrote a bog post about her accident – ending with the hashtag “#BelieveInLindy.” It went viral.

Suddenly there were fundraisers. T-shirts. Posters. A Facebook page and endless hits on social media. And the Cunninghams found themselves buffeted on a wave of incredible and constant positive energy.

“It was a rallying central theme, what everyone circled around,” says Chad. “It was a really big deal for her recovery. Something like that helps you move forward, head towards something, and try to make things better.”

Bornstein still acts as a trainer and motivator, culminating in the Cunningham’s visiting Los Angeles when they were finally able to spend time together, after 2 years of interacting without ever meeting face-to-face.

Lindy’s workouts are a little different, of course. Each day, in fact, is one long workout. But Lindy says that one piece of advice from Bornstein stands out from the rest.

“Be strong and be relentless.” she says.

“That translates really well into a rehab situation. Do it because you can do it. It’s your life, your health, you don’t want to not try. You have to do everything you can to get the max, you know?”

As if that by itself isn’t enough, Chad puts her effort into even clearer perspective.

“You have to understand, the injury is like a nonstop 24/7 assault on your body between therapies and the sicknesses and infections and skin problems and urinary issues. It’s something all the time. To be able to work through all that and stay positive, it’s impressive.”

“For spinal cord injuries, so much of it is an emotional and mental battle,” Lindy says. “What Chad and I have discovered is we have so much to be thankful for. I’ve had positive results in my therapy and I’m learning to walk again. There’s so much joy to be had and things to look forward to.”

Their two year old son is a big part of that. “He’s an inspiration point for Lindy,” says Chad. “We laugh a lot.”

Building Unstoppable Motivation

Now … take a pause.

Let’s let some of this sink in.

First, we state the obvious: Lindy Cunnigham’s tale should serve as an inspiration to all, especially those perfectly mobile humans who use word games to get in the way of discovering real, positive change.

Second, and less obvious: Finally admit what’s really holding you back.

It’s not a word or collection of words.

It’s an emotion.

A corroded piece of consciousness. Fear? Resignation? Self-loathing?

We’re not regressing into word games just now. All people have their reasons and the real tragedy is allowing those reasons to rule. You can change.

Do it because you can.

Be strong. Be relentless.

And #BelieveinLindy. Doing so means that you believe in the power of you. 

What’s Your Story?

You have something amazing within you. Whether chapters have already been written or the book has just started. If you’re ready to write the ending, learn more about joining the Born Fitness Family.

The post The Unstoppable Force of Change appeared first on Born Fitness.