Guest Blog Post: Transformation Pics

A few weeks ago I was contacted by William Allen about writing a guest blog post for his new website http://transformationpics.com/.  Williams motivation to start this new website was his, and his wife Rhonda's, own successful transformations!  While William's own life brought him to start changing his habits of being overweight, and less healthy, he started to look for other stories, successful stories, of change.  And that's when, years ago, he originally came across Mark's and my blogs, journaling our kettlebell training.  Although he found us, and a few others, he noticed a lacking of more examples, but he must of felt sure they were out there and became set out to find them!  And he has, and is posting extraordinary stories of people, regular people, like you and me living new lives that reflect not only health, but well being!

In my opinion two of the most important motivators are "success" and "hope"...not sure what comes first!  But I'll be writing more about that again soon.  In the mean time here is a copy of the post I wrote for William and his readers, but please if more about this subject is of interest to you then visit his website and leave comments of support: http://transformationpics.com/2012/06/06/tracy-lbs-lost-120lbs/

"Transformation is really the key word here used in the title of this website.  Weight loss stories come a dime a dozen, and quickly forgotten, maybe because few are lasting.  This doesn’t have to be the case, and in fact I want to be part of changing that stereotype.  I could share my history of past “struggles”, sad and unfortunate stories, or analogies about how I ended up a fat, overweight, obese, a binge eater, or whatever words you want to use to describe what I looked like or how I acted, but wouldn’t that also be supporting the the stereotype?  It’s almost expected to hear stories of becoming overweight and staying overweight because of life’s hardships.  C’mon, we’re smarter than that and capable of so much more.  And here on this website you see many examples.

At 41 years old I had started to experience symptoms of some potentially serious health problems and to put it in simple words I wasn’t ready to die yet.  January 2005, at 250lbs plus, I set out to get skinny.  And once I put my mind to it I knew without a doubt I was going to lose 100lbs but what would happen next I could never imagine.  First things first though…I stopped doing what was making me fat!  I knew what it was for me, and I believe you know what it is for you, so stop it!  Harder than it sounds?  It’s only hard if you decide it’s hard.

During this time I was married to a lifelong competitive athlete, coach and personal trainer, and it was my husband Mark who taught me relatively new form of exercise and training, now becoming more mainstream, using Russian kettlebells.  In our garage gym, Mark taught me the one basic, foundational kettlebell movement, the swing, and told me to “just do a couple sets of 10 (reps)”.  Reluctantly I swung that darn thing because I knew I had to do some sort of weight resistance exercise to try and build muscle tone for my quickly shrinking body.  During these workouts, alone in my garage gym, I started to choreograph kettlebell swing routines to entertain myself, and unbeknownst while doing so, I was transforming myself from “former fat girl just trying to get skinny” to future “Queen of the Kettlebell Swing” while practicing 100’s and 100’s of swing reps!  But something more amazing was taking shape!  An athletic, strong, firm and shapely body was materializing right in front of my eyes and I knew it was a result of training the kettlebell swing.

April 2006, I earned my RKC (Russian kettlebell Certification to teach).  I stood in front of a group of maybe 50 men with history in the military, law enforcement, weight lifting sports and martial arts to name a few, telling my story of 120lb weightloss, and how I used kettlebells as my main form of exercise to help me.  I was 42, 130lbs, 17% bodyfat and looked as if I never carried an extra pound on my body.  No one could believe I ever weighed over 250lbs.  It was this physical transformation that landed me with my story of how I trained the kettlebell swing a starring role in New York Times Best Seller, “The 4 Hour body” by Timothy Ferris, and then the starting role in my own book, published by Harper One, “The Swing”.

But I’m not writing this story to sell you on kettlebells or my book.  I’m writing this story to sell you on the possibilities of rediscovering living to your physical potential.  It may be training kettlebells, it may be Zumba, it may be running a marathon, whatever it is, success is waiting for you.  It’s not too late, you are never too old, too fat, too “out of shape”.  Don’t settle for skinny, go for the gold!  Many times people have said to me that I’m the exception, not the rule, and I say that rules were made to be broken!  Let’s make my story, and your story, the “rule” because we can change it, we can!  Realizing we can change it permanently and forever gives us hope, and hope gives us belief…..the first steps to lasting transformation.  We can do it! You can do it!"

If you have your own successful transformation story I'm sure William is wanting to hear from you too!