The conversation around fitness and physical health has dramatically evolved in recent years, becoming more holistic and less narrowly focused on just ‘gains’ or losing weight.
That said, many Australians still struggle with their body image and self-satisfaction; we’re still inundated with media that largely champions skinny (white) women and muscular men; dozens of diets, exercises and technologies spruiked as the silver bullet for fitness; and the ever-increasing franticness of our daily lives makes it harder than ever to fit exercise and dieting into our routine.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. If you cut through all the hype and hearsay, there are easily achievable ways to improve your fitness and transform your body.
One American couple’s amazing transformation proves just that: through a combination of straightforward exercise routines, simple dieting and supporting each other’s fitness goals, these young parents have turned their health around dramatically – and they’re sharing how they did it with the world.
Danielle Rivoli, a young mum and fitness blogger from Downstate New York, has garnered over 55,000 Instagram followers by documenting her and her husband’s fitness journey, as well as her trials and tribulations as a mother of two. She recently posted a photo comparing her and her husband’s physiques from before they started training to how they look now, and the results are shocking.
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“We aren’t trainers [and] we haven’t always been into fitness,” Rivoli explains.
“We actually didn’t even go through our lifestyle changes together, Louis started on his CrossFit path a year after I started with Sweat [a popular fitness app].”
“We both had to be motivated on our own to start and be consistent. We had to break habits we made together and had developed from childhood, create new definitions and boundaries, break the chains of what weight loss and scales meant to us, really set small goals, and discover what works best for each of us.”
“For me it was Sweat… the gym, treadmill HIIT and macro counting. For him it was CrossFit… community support, and a primarily paleo/high protein diet.”
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“We are normal people. And I say this only to stress that a huge lesson I learned is that you can be any version of fit that works for you. Not my version. Not a trainers version. Not societies version. But be you, with fitness as a part of your life,” Rivoli relates.
The biggest takeaway from Danielle and Louis’ transformation?
“We are normal people, with jobs, and kids and excuses. We aren’t naturally ‘fit’, but now fitness is apart of our nature. We decided to make time for ourselves and our health a priority, and the rest gradually happened [with] years of growth and learning between these photos, ups and downs.”
It might be easy to scoff at Rivoli’s platitudes but her and her husband’s results speak for themselves. A source of inspiration for others looking to start their own fitness journey of self-improvement should be that none of the techniques the couple used are particularly inaccessible. HIIT, CrossFit, a high-protein diet… Sure, these require some adjustment to your weekly routine, but they aren’t as insurmountable as other fitness fads out there.
The fact that both mum and dad follow different routines and have achieved similar results should also be a cause for optimism, as it proves that you don’t need to follow some ultra-specific workout or diet. Nothing comes without effort, but even simple steps can make a big difference.
Rivoli’s last word on the matter: “It most certainly was far from as easy as this photo may make it look, but the blood, sweat and tears are well worth the journey we each individually went through, and now we can’t envision it any other way!”