I walked into CrossFit Northake early in November 2015 a 5’9” tall, 237 pound pre-diabetic. I have always exercised and thought I was eating correctly, but continued to suffer the dreaded roller coaster ride of weight gain and loss that comes hand in hand with yo-yo dieting. When I walked in I met Jason Bright who promptly greeted me with, “can I help you,” but he didn’t know at that time just how much he was going to help me. I started with Sarah in the foundation class that got me rolling straight into my first CrossFit class. It was a team WOD on Thanksgiving day 2015 and I realized then this wasn’t a joke as I struggled to complete the class. Now that I was committed and a member, I quickly realized my limits and mentally struggled with this fact to the point of missing classes to missing a week at a time as I grew slowly in the CrossFit community. I struggled with mobility and pain issues from the training to a point where I stopped going for near a month in March of this year. Then one day I got an email from Jason asking me if I was ok and where had I been and it was truly that moment when I knew I was part of a community that cared because my membership was paid every month he didn’t need to contact me, but he did!
 
The journey was restarted and I was introduced to amazing people who helped me work through my mobility and pain issues and I stopped missing classes. I continued training and doubled up on days when endurance classes were held. I also started yoga on Saturday morning along with the Saturday morning team WOD. As time moved forward I felt I was doing great. I was working hard every day. I was in class, but I started to notice that my body wasn’t changing much and I had some measurements taken to get a reference point. More than 30 days later I was measured again just to learn I wasn’t dropping inches and my weight hadn’t changed at all! Once again I was frustrated and mentally ready to stop CrossFit and do something different and this would have pushed me back to that roller coaster because I would have done everything wrong and defeated the progress I had already made.
 
Once again Jason Bright stepped to the plate, he had me document everything I was eating to the smallest detail and that’s when I learned how poorly I was eating and the entire time I believed my diet was good. Jason then put together a meal plan for me and we started another phase of my training with me food prepping, measuring, eating strictly Paleo and reporting my weight every Monday to Jason so he could make adjustments if necessary. Now just over a year since I walked into CrossFit NorthLake I am at my first goal of losing 37 pounds with a much cleaner diet, a sustainable training program, and part of an amazing community full of amazing people!! I am very excited about reaching my next goal as I know I can do it especially with the support of everyone at CrossFit Northlake.