Have you ever thought about being a fitness and health coach?

Last week I booked a ticket to see my cousins on Easter weekend and I’m SO excited. My mom, who is understandably sad about me leaving, told me she wasn’t going if I wasn’t going, because it was my last month in Boston before I fly south. I am thrilled to be moving to Florida, but leaving my family and friends is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Leaving my mother is the hardest. 
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I've never been someone who travels a lot. I LOVE to, but because of heavy duty grad school loans and a penchant for fine dining and boots, I’ve always felt bad spending the money. I’ve done it, but only occasionally.
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This Easter trip will be on the last weekend I’ll have in the northeast, and I’m so happy that I get to spend it with my family. And it occurs to me that I wouldn’t be able to do this if I didn’t have the extra money from being a health and fitness coach so I am SO thankful for this opportunity.
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I never ever in a million years thought I could help people improve their health and fitness. I never thought I could help people with something I’ve struggled with my whole life: feeling comfortable in my own skin, and having a healthy relationship with exercise, food, and my body. I thought I needed to be this perfect example in order to help people, in order to be in this industry… But I was so wrong. I don’t need to have perfect nutrition, fitness and mindset -- or a perfect physique -- to help people.
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If this is something you’re interested in, I would love to talk to you. You can dedicate as much time as you want to it. I started by giving it half an hour a day, but I gradually upped my time because it’s honestly SO fun and SO gratifying to be part of such a positive community. I love my team smile emoticon
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If you have questions, get in touch! Comment, message, or send me an email. Ask me anything smile emoticon

I totally understand why… today’s teens make such poor fashion choices.

 NOTE: This piece was inspired by an experience I had during hall duty. I looked around at my seventh graders and realized that 11 of them were wearing skintight leopard-print leggings. 

Today's adolescents make extremely poor fashion choices as a result of blindly following trends in an attempt to fit in. Guess what? I TOTALLY GET IT. Middle school is the time for experimentation, growth, and asserting individuality. If you’re going to wear skinny jeans despite the fact that they make your legs look like sausages, then 7^th grade is the time to do it for the following reasons:

• You can get away with it, and pass it off in later years as an endearing childhood story. Once you hit high school, your fashion choices go from dry-erase to permanent marker in the minds of others, and trust me, you don’t want anyone remembering those platform Velcro sneakers you rocked for 3 months sophomore year. Not that I would know. 

• Most of the 7^th graders around you are inevitably making equally or more horrible fashion decisions, so you’re in good company. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they certainly make one of those wrongs look less wrong by comparison. Fact.

• You don’t have enough money to do much financial damage with unfortunate impulse buys. How much can you really spend on distressed mustache t-shirts from Wet Seal? It’s not like in the real world, where you have one beer too many, come home to an Amazon account with your credit card saved, and order a pair of grey slouchy boots while watching The Vampire Diaries in your room so your male roommates don’t mock you. Not that I would know. But hypothetically speaking, those boots did cost more than 4 mustache shirts. I mean WOULD cost more. If I had in fact purchased them. Luckily, this is just an example. That’s not about me. Clearly.

• Seventh graders, developmentally-speaking, are incapable of taking halfway decent photographs. All photographic evidence falls into one of the following categories:

a.     slanted

b.     poorly-lit

c.     partially obscured by the phone you’re holding to take the picture in the mirror (when did that become okay? NO. Just NO.)

d.     Instagrammed beyond recognition

e.     blurry

f.      grainy

Bad photos = LESS PROOF THAT YOU LOOKED TERRIBLE. Roll with it.

So go on, 7^th graders. Rock those cringeworthy fashions. You’ve got bigger fish to fry anyway. If you make it through middle school, you'll be so thrilled you survived you won't care that your ill-fitting rompers were documented.