I wasn't meant to be skinny

It was 1991 and I was getting ready to start high school.

My best friend and I stood in her kitchen and measured each other's height.

I had done it!

I made it to 5' tall before I started high school! Praises be!

This was so significant to me and I recall the details perfectly.

At 14 years old, I was 5' tall and weighed an even 100lbs.

Google tells me that lands me at the 10th percentile for weight and the 15th percentile for height for a 14 year old girl.

I guess I was tiny, but although I was ALWAYS on the front row for all my class pictures, I always just felt strong - not tiny.

Around that time, my sister started working at The GAP, and I would visit the store frequently and drool over all the cool clothes that I was much too small to fit into.

The GAP also had grass smelling perfume - and that was my favorite - so I bought that.

I wonder what people thought of me smelling like freshly cut grass all the time. (They probably knew I shopped at The GAP and therefore thought I was cool) haha!

I clearly remember being a child's size 13 and wishing I could fit into some of the clothes at The GAP.

Come to think of it, had I tried, I probably could have, but I knew I was a

"size 13" and GAP didn't do kids clothes or sizing at the time.

And then I went through a growth spurt.

And I could not freaking wait to get something at The GAP.

My friends and I gathered our hard-earned babysitting money and headed to the mall.

I floated around the store trying to determine what to spend my money on, knowing that I HAD to fit into the clothing by now.

And when I finally picked something to try on...

I was a flipping size 8 while one of my friends was a size 0. (Can we talk about how I'm a size 8 now so cleeeeaaarly there's been a shift in those numbers sewn into clothes cause I was a good 30 pounds lighter back then.)

I clearly remember the explosion that went off in my brain when I was forced to choose size 8 clothes while my friend got to pick the tiny ones.

I don't know what happened between size 13 and size 8, but one thing is for sure - I was loaded with muscle with not an ounce of fat on me.

But somewhere within a 2 year span in high school, I went from being super excited about weighing more to wondering if I weighed too much.

And by the time I was a junior, I was convinced I was fat.

There are so many external and societal influences I can pinpoint that led me to this conclusion, the size 8 in that moment was just one of the minor ones.

Looking back, I wasn’t struggling because of my size.

I was struggling because I thought I was supposed to be smaller.

That belief—that my body wasn’t okay unless it looked like someone else’s ideal—burrowed in early.

It’s sneaky. And it doesn’t go away just because we "grow up".

That same mindset follows a lot of women right into their GLP-1 journey.

But if we’re still measuring success by shrinking, or judging ourselves for not doing it fast enough, it becomes just another way to wreck our health.

Luckily, I'm a total rebel by nature, and so in those early years I refused to "diet", though deep down, I would judge the foods I was eating based on the popular diet principles of the day.

Looking back, not dieting was actually extremely beneficial and something I wish I had kept doing.

At some point, years down the road when my health was in the absolute toilet and I was dealing with much bigger problems than my perceived weight (which was still normal at the time), I shifted my focus from wanting to look skinnier to just wanting to feel healthy and normal.

(Unfortunately, trying to deal with my other health issues led me to specialized diets (all low-carb, by the way), which led me to sudden weight gain in massive chunks over the years. But that's a different story for a different day.)

If you find yourself just wanting to feel healthy and normal (and please bless lose the blasted excess weight too), you are absolutely in the right place.

The women I work with just want to feel healthy, have energy, and be able to feel productive throughout the day.

They want to feel like their body isn't working against them, although they feel broken.

Broken metabolism, broken hormones, broken thyroid, broken sleep, broken sex drive.

And yes, they want the excess fat off too because that's not who they truly are on the inside.

But I believe your body isn't broken.

I believe the body is meant to heal, and is always trying to heal.

And I believe that with the right inputs, the body can heal.

But we're living in a world where our body is stressed out by bad inputs all the time.

The first step to healing is to lower that stress load. (This is the crux of what I'll be teaching in Overcoming Fatigue Done Right, by the way... it'll be available inside The Vault soon..ish!)

There are so many ways to lower our stress load, but I know it can be hard to know what to do as well as change old habits and ways of thinking. (Healthy Habits Done Right is a fabulous resource to help you with creating new habits!)

What I advocate for is giving the body the inputs it needs to facilitate healing.

This can absolutely include the strategic use of tools like GLP-1 medications.

But we may also need to make some other changes to how we're living, sleeping, eating and moving. Or maybe all of the above.

But we also need to live in the real world and work with what we have available to us now, in terms of energy and ability.

And that's my specialty.

Small, simple changes that meet you where you're at and lead you to a better you. No overnight overhauls. No strict diets or cutting out foods. No lifting heavy crap or spending hours doing workouts you hate.

In order for me to heal, I had to take baby steps. I had to workout less and eat more (this is still a huge struggle for me but I'm working on it). And I had to use powerful tools like GLP-1 to do things I wasn't able to do on my own (not for lack of trying).

Now I teach baby steps. Cause they're simple and doable, even for someone that feels like they have to spend half their day on the couch. I was there - I lived that and fought my way out.

And sometimes you just need more time and consistency. Which is why my programs are designed to be "stupid simple" - so you can actually BE consistent over time.

We all have our own life experiences and details on how we got to where we are. I would imagine you have your own high school "I'm fat" story.

But what I can offer you is over 27 years of obsessively researching health and nutrition, and a way to move towards real health that feels simple and doable.

So you can feel like yourself again.

No, I was never meant to be skinny.

But that's no longer my goal.

Jumping on the trampoline with my kid,

running a 5k once a year,

lifting heavy feed bags and hay bales,

sleeping all night,

living a long life without aches and pains,

and feeling healthy, strong, and being a force for good are.

And maybe also beating you at pickle ball.

Those are my goals.

What are yours?

Hugs & Smoothie Smiles,

Coach Camille

PN, SSR

P.S. I'm waaay behind on my 5k training this year (race is July 4), and started with Day 1 yesterday. My MCAS is slightly improved from last week, but send me all the good vibes that I can get back to how I was 2 weeks ago so I can actually run! I'm legit nervous about it.