Welcome to Healthy Vida Fitness! I’m Tara — a 32 year old fitness enthusiast and mom of a sweet little boy named August, and I want to share with you my journey of finding my passion in fitness.
In 2008, I was your typical college student: attending classes during the week and indulging in some college-style fun on the weekends. In the food court at my university, the restaurant always with the longest line was the “build your own pasta” place. My favorite dish consisted of broccoli (well that’s a healthy start, right?), mushrooms (again, not so bad!), chicken (protein, yeah!), aaaaand alfredo sauce with white penne noodles (ok, there it is). I can still remember how this dish tasted. Just thinking about that delicious taste reminds me of freedom — the kind of freedom that you only experience when you’re finally out on your own in the world for the first time in your life. I thought, well this is great! I could eat this every day for the rest of my life. Then the weight gain began.
We had a great workout center on campus called the Kress Center. I would walk over there one or two times a week and do a few casual exercises — run on the treadmill for a mile, do some random crunches and maybe some pushups. These casual workouts would only burn about 200 calories. So one workout helped me burn off about 1/5 of what I was eating in pasta nearly every day. I went on like this, doing my casual little workouts for a good majority of my first year and consuming thousands of calories on the weekends drinking warm, crappy beer.
I was involved in an on-campus community service organization called Circle K and through this club I met Ramona. There’s no better way to describe Ramona than saying she was a complete bad-ass. I had never met anyone like her before. We became quick friends and she told me about this workout she was doing called “Insanity.” She said it was a great workout program, but really intense and I would be very sore afterwards. She was definitely right! We started doing Insanity a few times a week together. Insanity lit a spark in me that hasn’t ever gone out.
Fast forward to 2012 — I had just begun my first teaching job, turned 22 years old (cue Taylor Swift’s “22”), and was living alone in my very own apartment (I’m thinking back to that broccoli pasta taste of freedom, but without the broccoli pasta). In this new city I had a group of friends who were also in their first year of teaching. We would go to the bars 1–2 times a week (yes, teachers do know how to have fun). But guess what, here come the calories again! I hadn’t lost the spark that Insanity created inside of me — it was just taking a break while I started my teaching career.
I downloaded the digital version of Insanity and jumped back in, and not casually this time. Insanity was something I prioritized every day. Whatever I had going on, I made sure I got my workout (and a shower) in before proceeding.
Over the next few years, I tried many different crazy workouts. I was always doing something! I even trained for the Tough Mudder but never competed in the actual competition. These “bad-ass” workouts remained a constant in my life, keeping my passion for fitness strong. Whenever I caught myself falling out of the habit, I would do a few days of Insanity to get me back into it.
In my story, we are now in the year 2020. I think we all know what happened then. I was teaching from home in March of 2020 and I was, quite frankly, bored! My job only required me to work for about 4–6 hours a day, and without an hour of driving every day, I had a lot of extra time on my hands. This is when Healthy Vida Fitness was born. I started off creating a YouTube channel, making a banner, and jumped in making some very beginner workout videos. I’m not talking beginner in the exercises involved, but beginner in every sense of the word in terms of video production! I had no idea what I was doing, but it was fun. And, hell, it gave me something to focus on when the world was going nuts around me!
That’s enough background information on me for now and how my passion for fitness began. In my next post, I’ll dive deeper into Healthy Vida Fitness and what that looked like in the beginning.
