Weight loss story from @empressfit

Despite not initially being happy with her results and giving up, Raynecia was able to transform her appearance, gain confidence and overcome her depression

I’ve always been very athletic and loved everything sports related. However, I never looked the part. I was one of the fastest girl athletes at my school as shocking as that sounds looking at my before picture. I was 15/16 years old and weighed almost 200 lbs. I was really unhappy with my appearance, I felt depressed, angry and unattractive.

The first thing I changed was my diet as overeating was my biggest problem. I slowly cut out soda, overly processed foods, junk foods and replaced those with drinking lots of water and whole foods. In the beginning of my journey, I did a lot of home workout DVD’s. Insanity by Shaun T helped me big time. Ironically, now I actually dislike working out at home and prefer being in the gym. Insanity helped me to get down to a size 6 dress size and lose over 50lbs. I was at my lowest weight which was 130lbs. The hardest part about my journey was never being satisfied with my results. I never gave myself credit and was still unsatisfied with the way I looked. I gave up and regained a lot of weight. I fell into that realm of depression again and it extremely hard to overcome this time around. I was also stressed out with school and keeping my grades up because I wasn’t being true to myself and following my passion which was fitness.




My entire attitude changed when I decided to make my major exercise science. Everything went up from there. I lost the weight again and gained confidence I never knew that I had. I was also not as hard on myself and maintained a weight that I was ok with. I was still not satisfied because I knew I could do better, that’s exactly what I did. Currently, I’m still trying to figure out what I like so my workout routine is quite diverse. I mix in interval training with weight training, crossfit, speed, endurance, agility, functional training and HIIT because I get bored easily.

On my off days I’m usually researching different workouts for myself and clients, taking a nap, editing videos or filming videos. This journey was and is hard because I did everything by myself and had to be my own motivation. The advice I would give to anyone trying to make a lifestyle change is to START. You’re on social media most of the time, use it to help you . There is a lot of free information out there and people to help you. How bad do you really want it!? If you want it bad enough you’ll do what it takes no matter what. No excuses, just do it! Nothing worth having comes easy.