Hi! I’m Lauren – a 32 year-old mom and small business owner living with a blended family of 6. You could also add “Ring Leader” to my job titles, because having 4 kids (15, 8, 4, 3) + 3 dogs + 1 lizard + a bunch of fish in my house means our lives can feel like a circus. And a ticket to this circus can get pretty expensive.
There was a time when I had a “Fitstagram” account, which I created after I had lost about 40 pounds in my mid-20s. I thought about restarting that, but I feel like that was a lifetime ago. My life looks nothing like it did 7 years ago. I’m serious – almost NOTHING is the same. I was married, had 2 young kids, and was working on climbing the corporate ladder. Now I’m divorced, self-employed, and living with a blended family of 4 kids all the way from teens to toddlers. And I’m not already fit like I was when I started my last platform… this time I am starting with 50 pounds to lose.
My health & fitness journey began in 2012. My mom, who was morbidly obese when she started her journey, was seeing a personal trainer and wanted me to come along. Ever the “yes-woman,” I agreed. I soaked up a TON of information – from the trainer, books, and online resources. I taught myself how to eat a much healthier diet and picked up running as a hobby. I lost about 40 pounds between 2012 and 2015 including the birth of my 2nd son in 2013. (Oh, and my mom lost 125 pounds and became the poster-child success story. She’s now a personal trainer and yoga instructor. Amazing, right?)
In 2013 I was also really struggling financially. Being a young mom with a lack of household finance management experience had caught up to me. I was in a lot of debt, and I was starting to realize that all of my hard-earned income was being doled out to other people. I’ve always been a numbers person, and always kept a budget, so it was clear to me that something needed to change. I took Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, and my whole philosophy of how to budget began to change. I do not follow DR’s advice to a tee, but to this day I still live by several things I learned through my time in FPU.
By 2015 I was in the best shape of my life both physically and financially. Then in 2016 all Hell began to break loose. My daughter was born in 2016, and though I had managed to stay fit during my pregnancy, the transition from 2 to 3 children proved to be quite the challenge. I didn’t lose the weight. In fact, I started to gain. In 2017 I was laid off from the corporate job I had been working at for nearly 8 years. I like to pretend that the jobs I had between being laid off in 2017 and becoming full-time self-employed in 2020 didn’t even happen. A lot of toxic environments lead to a lot of stress, and a lot of stress equates to total metabolism-sabotage. In 2019 I got divorced. Despite the fact that it was amicable, we are still friends, and we are very good at co-parenting, getting divorced is stressful even in the best of circumstances. And expensive.
Before I knew it I had gained 50 pounds since before I had my daughter. At this point I have had every opportunity to pull it together and get back on track, but it took getting past a lot of my excuses before I finally decided to make changes late in 2020.
I started small, and have started to see some progress. We have started to rebuild some of the savings we lost through divorce. We plan our meals more and eat out less. We also used equipment we already had to set up a gym in our home, eliminating the need for a gym membership.
I’ve lost about 10 pounds, but I have another 40 to go. For the first time I have invested in the help of a weight loss coach. As I am writing this I am on Day 1 of a new 6 month plan intended to optimize my metabolic efficiency and health. I’ll explain why I call this an “investment,” and the different phases of the plan in later blogs.
SO, my point is that this time it will be about the journey to get there and not just the results. I thrive on accountability and support (and admittedly sometimes a little bit of competition), so I have created this blog as a space for me to keep myself accountable and share my experience. I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along!
Fit Body Fit Budget 