By Sarah Elizabeth Richards for Life by DailyBurn
It took a layoff and breakup on the same day last summer to motivate 28-year-old Meghan Ragni to take control of her health. In the bleak months that followed her boyfriend of two years announcing, “We need to talk,” Ragni embarked on the time-honored tradition of getting over rejection via self-improvement. After losing 30 pounds, and lowering her blood pressure, she knew it was finally time to overcome one last hurdle: “I thought, ‘I need to go farther. I need to do something that’s really going to scare me,’” she says. That meant going to the gym.
Ragni had avoided working out since college, when she’d visit her campus gym on occasion and leave quickly due to embarrassment. “I hated it,” explains Ragni, now an elementary school teacher. “I felt like everyone was watching me and judging how well I was doing. Or they were looking at my body and what I was wearing.” She was frustrated that she didn’t know how to operate the weight machines and felt too ashamed to ask for help.