Taelor’s Story:

Like a lot of people, my life growing up was filled with team sports, athletics, after-school practices and weekend tournaments. I grew to love basketball, soccer and softball and eventually found myself on competitive traveling teams competing in those sports, nearly year-round, through my middle- and high-school days. Back in those days, it was simply about having fun. No one in my life taught me anything in-depth about eating habits, nutrition or fueling my body for the activities I was doing. After high school, the opportunity to play sports collegiately was thrown off-track by a reoccuring knee injury that I eventually had surgery for. Like most graduated high-school athletes, I settled into somewhat of a fitness routine that I enjoyed and was fortunate to have friends that also prioritized exercise so I didn’t totally “fall off the (exercise) wagon” after high school sports ended.

By 19, I became pregnant with my oldest daughter and grew severely ill with Hyperemesis-Gravidarum during that pregnancy. I spent the entire 9 months battling extreme nausea, weight-loss and appetite loss. My HG was so severe, I lost almost 30lbs before I ever gained a single pound during that pregnancy. By the time my daughter was born, I was so sick of laying around being sick that I couldn’t wait to get exercise clearance at my 6wk postpartum appointment. As soon as I could, I was attending spin-classes twice a week and strength training three days a week. As my baby grew into a toddler, I developed a deep love for fitness and lifting weights. Eventually, I was going to the gym 5-6 days a week just because I loved it.

One day after my workout, I was sitting at the front desk of the gym having a protein smoothie made and found myself chatting with the gym owner. Bill noticed how often I was in the gym and asked if I was training for anything specific. I wasn’t. He asked if I had ever considered training to compete in a bodybuilding show. I admitted I had seen some other women I know compete before, but didn’t know much about it. Over the next couple of weeks, Bill talked more with me about what it took to be a bodybuilding competitor, showed me photos and videos of the most successful women in the IFBB federation, and took me through some workouts that would be similar to the level of training I would need to be at in order to be competitive on stage. I finally decided that competing in a bodybuilding show is what I wanted to do.

We set my first show for April of 2015, with a second and third shows in May of 2015. I did well in my shows and earned myself a bid to a Junior Nationals qualifying show if I had set out to do so. What no one told me about competing before I committed to it, was how intense the dieting/eating was and how rigorous the training expectations were. With my coach’s help, I reverse dieted back to a normal calorie intake after dieting down to an insanely low calorie intake in order to be “stage ready”. By fall, I had decided that I would compete again in April of 2016, giving myself 10 months to build muscle between competition seasons. In April of 2016, I finally earned a Top 3 placing and, since a Nationally Qualified bid is good for a year, decided that would start and end my 2016 season. However, that’s when all my plans were derailed.

By June of 2016, I was being run through the gambit of medical testing to figure out why I couldn’t gain weight after properly executing a reverse diet post-show. With the help of medical professionals, I was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition and began treatment. Everything was thrown off. I gained weight quickly, I wasn’t sleeping well, I was tired all of the time… I didn’t feel well. Once we figured out that my intense exercise wasn’t helping anything, I finally started to make some progress. I found a weight lifting regime that allowed me to make progress with my strength, but also keep my health safe and balanced. My weight eventually regulated and my condition became manageable. And then, injury!

Between my auto-immune condition and my strained muscle, it took me about a year to get back to feeling “normal” again. Throughout this time, I worked as hard as I could to stay on a regular lifting routine, eat well, and not let the body dysmorphia rule my thoughts. Being the leanest you’ve ever been in your life and performing well can have a tendency to make you feel “less than” when you’re anything but lean and performing well. Finally in Spring of 2017, I was healthy, ready to make progress and even thinking about the possibility of athletic competition again. I wasn’t entirely sure that bodybuilding was out of the picture, but I knew I wanted to try something else.

I decided I wanted to spend a year or so “being normal” and having a relationship with fitness because I wanted to, not because I was working towards a goal. I also knew that it was time to eat something besides chicken and rice, and wanted to live a more balanced, less restrictive lifestyle. From 2017 to 2019, I was able to put my auto-immune condition in remission and did end up finding a “healthy relationship” with fitness. It was nice to train for what my body could do, instead of what it looked like. I felt like me, and not like I was striving to fill some idea of what a fitness competitor was supposed to look like or act like.

And then - the world literally stopped. March of 2020 brought normalcy to a halt for everyone. When gyms closed, the only thing I had was a couple of free weights, a kettle bell, a yoga mat and my neighborhood. I did daily walks and tried to keep up with strength training at home, but it was close to impossible to find motivation. When gyms finally did open back up, the gym I was a member at caught on fire, closed and never remodeled to re-open. Amidst all the chaos from the global pandemic, by Summer of 2021 some things were slowly starting to return to “normal”.

In the fall of 2021, I became pregnant with my youngest daughter and, once again, found myself in and out of the emergency room with Hyperemesis-Gravidarum. Despite my nausea, I worked 30 hours a week on my feet daily until one week before my due date. Looking back, the only way I made it through those shifts was with Zofran & pretzels. When my second daughter was born, things were different. I was now a single mom of two daughters and quickly discovered how unaccommodating the local gyms are to parents. It was basically impossible to find a gym that offered childcare, especially during the times I could actually go to the gym and not have to be at work. I finally decided it was time to spruce up my home fitness options and purchased some more free weights, bands and a portable stair-stepper. Because my fitness options have been so limited, my general wellness has relied upon my nutrition choices, and when that’s the case, exercise consistency is more important than exercise frequency. I learned that even if I was only strength training one day a week, I would still make progress if my nutrition intake was intentional.

In two years since my youngest was born, I have been able to completely re-accustom myself to an exercise routine and lost all of the weight from my pregnancy. I have energy everyday for activities with my kids, I don’t crave sweets and sugar, I don’t want to just nap when it’s time for an afternoon workout, and I actually feel well. I have been able to re-learn the fundamentals of wellness; wellness directly correlates to fitness. That’s why I decided to launch Fit/Full! I want to help your fitness be full of vitality, progress, ambition & fulfillment!

Sure, your muscles look nice and full! But how do you feel?!