My Fitspiration Story

My name is Eva, co-owner of Fit Buddha Fitness studios in Ventura and Santa Barbara. To some of you, I am your fitness instructor. To others, I’m your spin cycling class teacher or personal trainer. If you know me, you know I’m passionate about transforming peoples’ lives through exercise with the Lagree Fitness Method and our state-of-the-art Megaformer machines. It’s truly a unique blend of Pilates, yoga, stretching and strength training. I’ve seen firsthand how it can positively impact our clients’ physical health and mental well-being.

What you may not know about me is that I am also a spiritual teacher and sound healer. I transform addictions into empowered mastery with a program called Phoenix Rising. I’d like to share my own transformation story. It’s a very personal story about my past, and how I came to recognize that I always have a choice. I learned that if I allow myself to be open to change, everything can change.

I was a very athletic child and teenager. I was always strong and flexible until I fell in love with someone that didn’t appreciate me and made me feel unwanted and ignored. At age 25, I had already been divorced. My ex-husband treated me like a trophy wife.

Wanting to make a change, I decided to go to study holistic medicine. Every day while studying I tried to overcome the heartbreak from the man that completely abused my friendship. He had dropped me like a hot potato for someone else, and it hurt.

I’ll spare you the details, but it was definitely an emotional trauma that caused me to feel a deep self-hate and unworthiness. My way of coping was to eat something every 30 minutes just to make myself feel better. After reading a couple of pages, I’d treat myself to a snack. This way, I could ignore the pain that I was feeling deep inside. I couldn’t stay present with the pain as it simply felt overwhelming.

After about two months of consistent preparation for an exam and my new self-love ritual of eating chocolate, I had gained 60 pounds. I looked to myself like a different human being. I couldn’t fit in any pants, looked like a sausage in my stretchy leggings and could not look at myself. I felt heavy, sluggish, uninspired and tired. I didn’t want to exercise, every movement felt too much and too hard and I decided I couldn’t put myself out there to be seen like this and so I was pretty much living a life style in depression and loneliness.  I felt suicidal as a result of feeling sorry for myself and comparing myself to the way I was before. I found all kinds of reasons why this man dropped his interest and felt so dissed, that I created a very dis-empowering self-talk inside of myself. This is what led me to put on all the weight.

By that time, I had become a struggling food addict. I never threw up food but a cycle of horror began for me. I woke up every morning thinking about what not to eat, as food had become the enemy that I needed to fight on a daily basis. It became my nightmare, day and night. I thought of every kind of diet and since I wanted my “old body” back as fast as possible, I came up with trying out the “zero diet” and abused myself for days with nothing to eat until my psychological strength faded and I went back to eating about everything that I came across. I wasn’t even choosing what would make me “feel good” — it was simply everything. I again fell into my excruciating cycle of feeling disgusted about myself and my inability to stay strong and disciplined. When I was invited to a party, I would sample every dish on a buffet. I was eating enormous amounts even though I was only eating a couple of bites of each item. All in all, it was probably three meals in one sitting.

This cycle continued on for at least two years. I didn’t allow myself to have love in my life, rejected every possible man figure approaching me, thinking that they all would never like me “NOW” – where I lost my “good body” and even then I got rejected. So what did I even have to offer – at all? What would attract anyone to me? I asked myself that question every day and every day I declared that I would end the cycle. But I’d wake up to a good start, then break my own promise, telling myself, “only today; I can eat all this today, but tomorrow I’ll start to eat differently.” Food was the worst addiction to overcome because it was everywhere and I couldn’t ignore it. It was in my face every day. It’s also a way to feel connection and love.

I learned so much about myself in this time, learned about my unworthiness patterns that are ingrained in all of us from childhood and even past life traumas. We create scenarios in this lifetime to revisit these traumas to heal them and we tend to project and blame the people that help us gain access to them and we start this blame, abuse, self-pity, guilt, shame cycle that is hard to get out of.

My life felt as if it took an upside for a bit, but then didn’t really get much better, as I was now working in the holistic medicine field with my own practice and patients. I focused on the problems that other people had and were bringing in and that made me feel better about my own issues. It got me definitely distracted and it helped me access more and more of the truth. I was nowhere ready though to deal with myself and that lead me to attract a very abusive addicted boyfriend that I had major karma with. It was one of those relationships where your whole body tells you – this is not going to be good for you but you simply can’t resist as it is a karmic relationship that you won’t get out of – only through it. I don’t want to bore you with the details of this relationship even though it was a movie in itself, but the gist of it was that I attracted this “addicted personality” into my field in a time where my self-esteem was so low and this person was a perfect match vibrationally to me at that time. I was also still carrying the need of the “healing syndrome” and thought I would be able to help this man. All this did help me in one area. His problems and the problems that rippled into my world were so much heavier than my food addiction issue that my food addiction didn’t run my life anymore 100%. I shifted my focus onto his problems and forgot my own more and more. I took on an even more unhealthy life style that involved staying up all night – helping him to recover from horrible drug abuse. I never took drugs myself but became a “victim” of how drugs affect not only the person but their entire world around them and became “co-addicted” to the psychological abuse that was going on and I allowed it all in.

Today I know why I allowed all this drama into my life as it helped me to learn about addiction from a perspective that was so intense and close to my heart that it had huge impact on my life. I learned about my own addiction patters, my co-addiction patterns and I was then able to cure my entire being by unraveling every single mindset and emotion and bring in a new context for myself that allowed me to heal my underlying unwillingness to take full responsibility for my own healing. I saw how I sabotaged myself and allowed others to distract me, I saw my excuses and how I blamed and projected. I had to be real with myself before any progress could be made.

This story might help you understand why I care so much about how you feel about yourself. Changing how we feel will change what we express. It will also change what you attract and what you manifest and create. I am here to support your individual journey — from where you are now to where you want to be.

If you are going through something that you feel you would like to receive some help with, please email me at: eva@fitbuddhafitness.com for a 30-minute strategy session.