Summer 1998 Ms Fitness Magazine – Blast from the Past!
Note: this article was found in a binder, 25 years after it was written. It’s the story of how I got started in the fitness industry after a herniated disc caused me to rethink my approach toe tin and exercise. Looking back now, I see an intensity and focus to overcome whatever is ini my way, and always end up on top. Who knew 25 years later I’d be kicking MS’s a$$ every day at the gym. I am still winning and always coming out on top. Yes, and two Cory Everson photos still on my nightstand to remind me what am fighting for, and to remember how I felt at 25 striving to be like her. It’s still me.
MS. FITNESS, SUMMER, 1998
Total Body Rehab
A herniated disc forces Vickie Smith to re-examine her eating and exercise habits.
by Karen Asp
In January 1997, the unexpected happened to Vickie Smith. One day she felt her leg and foot go numb. When she attempted to walk down a flight of stairs, she missed the step and fell down, further injuring herself. For two weeks, Vickie was confined to lying flat on her back in bed. The diagnosis? A herniated disc.
The fall sent a wake-up call to Vickie to shed some of the excess weight, part of the 200 pounds, that draped her 5-Foot-10-inch frame. It also told her to get serious about her exercise program, forcing her into total body rehab, as she calls it.
Active since childhood, Vickie learned at an early age that it was food causing her weight problems. “I grew up on frozen dinners and Little Debbie snacks,” says Vickie, who moved to New York with her mother when she was nine. They moved in with Vickie’s grandmother who always kept food around the house – and lots of it.
“Two lamb chops weren’t enough,” Vickie says. “You had to have three.” Sitting in front of the television to eat meals, she was also taught to eat everything on her plate to avoid waste. Then after dinner, she indulges her sweet tooth with dessert.
“Eating really became more of an emotional thing than a necessity,” says the now 25 year old.
While food was the problem, exercise wasn’t. Vickie and her mother exercised daily to Jane Fonda videos. At 12 years old, Vickie began to feel uncomfortable with her body. She wasn’t the only one noticing changes in her weight. Classmates teased her about her weight, calling her chubby. For the next four years, Vickie’s weight bounced up and down. finallv stabiliizing when she was 16.
“I skipped lunch and just ate two meals a day,” she says. “Even though I always felt hungry, I didn’t know any better.” Besides, at 16, she also had her first date: She still uspects that her thin figure caught the boy’s attention.
After graduating from high school, Vickie joined a gym with a friend, but as often happens, she began to compare herself to her friend who dropped weight quickly. Vickie would Iater learn that her friend was battling with anorexia and bulimia.
As a marketing major at BaruchCollege in New York, Vickie’s weight increased, and although she knew it, she tried not to let it bother her. “I carried my weight well, but I still wasn’t happy with myself.”
Wanting to encourage others to exercise with a buddy, Vickie started a fitness club called the Brooklyn Fitness Buddies. Through the matching service that paired people with similar interests, she took groups from neighborhoods on walks, even bowled a few times, but the club never took off as she’d hoped.
Then, with only one semester left before graduation, Vickie suffered the herniated disc. She spent the next two weeks flat on her back in bed. Walking was impossible, and the possibility of graduating on time was remote.
Vickie spent two months undergoing rehabilitation at a local rehab center. In addition, she worked toimprove her strength with her boyfriend, Matthew Katz, an exercise science major and certified personal trainer. He encouraged her to begin
strengthening the muscles in her body, paying particular attention to the stabilizing muscles.
Vickie began slowly, and as her walking improved, so, too, did her strength. Meanwhile,
Meanwhile, she completed her college courses and in May, graduated with a degree in marketing. Rather than pounding the pavement for a job. Vickie started her own business,
a unique training program for women known as Women’s Outdoor Workout (WOW). At the same time, she became certified as a personal trainer through the American Council on Exercise.
WOW classes consisting of cardiovascular activity, strength training and flexibility were offered for advanced and beginning students. While Matthew taught the advanced classes,
Vickie instructed first-time exercisers.
They worked in the outdoors, rain or shine. Although winter halted the program, they’re now back outdoors training women. Vickie’s also currently training clients at Gold’s Gym in Brooklyn.
In the meantime, Vickie has overcome her back problem and has dropped a significant arnount of weight through healthy eating and exercise. As of December, she’d lost 40 pounds
since injuring her back. Her body fat had also decreased by 15 percent.
Although exercise has played a large part in helping Vickie lose weight, more importantly, adopting new habits has allowed Vickie to reshape her figure. She hired a naturopathic nutritionist who also used applied kinesiology and manual muscle testing to determine which foods weakened Vickie
“Eating foods that aren’t good for me slow my metabolism and take my body’s concentration off what it’s supposed to be doing,” Vickie says. Now she doesn’t eat foods, for example,
that contain wheat, oats and corn. Yet Vickie cautions others about following her eating habits. “Nutrition is very personal,” she says. “Everybody responds differently to different foods.”
In some areas of eating, though, Vickie urges others to follow her lead For example, she no longer eats in front of the television. Nor does she eat many sweets, choosing fruit instead, or snack between meals, opting instead to eat five smaller meals a day. One of these meals includes a Balance Bar.
Vickie has also begun supplementing her meals with a protein supplement called Designer Protein, especially after she exercises. You need to replenish your body with the fuels it needs,” she says, adding that she’s also recently added creatine into her diet.
“I wasn’t a big believer in supplementation,” she says, ‘but I also don’t think that someone who’s exercising like I am can get all of the fuel that need with just food.”
For Vickie, working out now consists of a heavy emphasis on strength training. Under Matthew’s guidance, she manages a four-day split, focusing one day on legs without calves, back and biceps, chest and triceps and then shoulders, calves and forearms. For each muscle, she performers 9 to 12 sets of 8 to 10 repetitions. “I like to use a variety of muscles to hit the muscles from different angles,” she says. Her cardio program involves four to
five days of aerobic activity for at least 30 minutes. In fact, this past October she picked up running, an activity she never thought she’d do because of her back and her weight.
“With my weight, it was like I had another person running with me,” she says. “Now no one’s running behind me, and I love the feeling when I run.” In November she completed her first five-mile fun run. Vickie’s hoping this work pays off for her big goal: a body building championship within two years. “Steroid free,” she adds. “I like my voice the way it is.”
For Vickie, getting her weight under control has been a tough challenge, one that couldnl’t have done without pictures of her role models. “When you see what you want to attain physically, it helps keep you going,” she says, adding that she’s always respected Cory Everson.
Now that her weight is under control, Vickie doesn’t ever want to step backwards again. “I used to cry at the shopping mall because I couldn’t buy jeans that fit so I’d wear Spandex,” she says. She now wears jeans regularly. ”There’s nothing extraordinary about me except my drive. Anybody can do what I did.”
For tips on starting your own fitness club, send a SASE to Vickie Smith at 510 Brighton Beach Ave., Suite 146, Brooklyn, NY 11235-6445.
Every gem that I find but I can share here on my blog with you serves to wake up on memory that was long forgotten. My life is very different now that I left the corporate world when I had my son, and I really don’t think of all the things that I used to do.
Some of these skills are incredibly valuable and lead over into other things that I do now. Especially photography skills. The best camera that you have is the one you have now. And that is my iPhone. I don’t have the time to go and find all of my
Gear, like tripods and such, and how could I set it up anyway with two crutches? Anyway back on topic.
So there are a lot of things that you used to do that you don’t remember right away. One of the most valuable tools that I had with me when I was doing social media marketing or marketing online, especially on a website managing person. Was SEO. SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It sounds like a very scary term that might push you away from reading further. Just remember, I am a mom with a chronic illness who is on a journey to keep reinventing herself, and getting better every day. I’ve got my fitness down to get my health better, but it wasn’t until I started blogging that I realized how important my mind was too. And using this as a tool before I go into the gym, at 4:50 AM now, just stirs up memories that are really important.
Back on topic, I know I get easily distracted. I’m working on that.
SEO is valuable for what you do on the Internet if you want to be found. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you’re blogging and no one‘s there to hear it, will it be read? If someone is looking for you on the Internet, and has a link to where you want them to go, like your blog, the search engines that will serve you up need to hear what you have to say. An image is not alone enough for a search engine to know what’s on the image.
So now I fast forward to the reason for this link age of SEO to this article that I found. The article is not an article when I loaded into my blog. It is a JPEG. A graphic, an image that the search engine scans the website for, but it is pretty much blank. If there is an image on the page, the search engine will look to see what’s on it, like facial recognition, or just getting a general idea of what kind of image is on the page. But it won’t get the value of what’s actually on the page to serve it up to you and know it’s relevant.
I read this article with great interest because it was around the time when I was graduating Baruch college, and it was a very stressful time in my life and I did not know that I had MS. It was thought that I had MS going back to the age of 21, when I was experiencing symptoms of double vision and nystagmus. But that’s irrelevant now.
The picture in the article is when I went to a plantation in Louisiana on a class trip to a marketing convention. I graduated with a degree in marketing management in 2000. This article was a couple of years before that. I was in pretty bad shape, overweight and I really had problems with my back. I did not know it was because of the way I walked due to MS. I wouldn’t find that out until 15 years later after surgery did not correct a herniated disc and symptoms still remained, like clonus. I am way better now, and on the path to being better every day. Don’t feel bad for me.
So I’ve got this article, right? And I don’t want to just throw it up on the web, because I know that the search engines will not really see the value or Contant on it, but because I was an SEO, or search engine optimizer, I remember is valuable tool that I used when I was scrambling to find Contant for a very empty website that I created. Multiple websites actually, in different industries like the restaurant industry, tradeshow industry. You name it SEO is the name of the game if you want to be found. It’s like your bread crumbs, and you want people to come.
I remembered when I was scanning various brochures or articles, I needed to use OCR, which is optical recognition, using a scanner. I haven’t tried doing it on my smart phone, because I really haven’t had a need.
Until now. That I am documenting my whole journey. I’m going to have to find the latest tools to help me do that, and I hope you are liking the WordPress format for this blog. I can change it and make it look a little different, but the Content will be still be the same. It’s still me under all of this sitting here in my car watching people go into the gym behind me. But I come early every day so I can write this out and get it out of my head. The thoughts are scratching on the inside of my head to get out. OK so now I’m going to get that tool when I finish my work out in a couple of hours. And I will check you later.
