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Chanae Ashlan is a long time fitness enthusiast and a certified nutritionist. Despite this, she struggled for years to lose weight. Discover some of the secrets she used to drop almost 100 pounds and transform her body.
Chanae has managed to build an Instagram following of over 40,000 at @NaeAshlan, check it out to keep up to date and enjoy the interview ✌️❤️
What was the hardest part about making your transformation and how did you overcome it?
I would say there were a few hard parts. My metabolism is SUPER slow. Losing weight never came easy for me, there would be weeks I would workout 6x a week twice a day and not lose a lb. There would be days I would eat bad and give up. After I lost my first 30 lbs, I gained 15-20 of it back during my sophomore year of college.
I decided to really start getting serious my senior year and be 100% dedicated. Losing weight is 20% working out and 80% watching what you eat. I started cooking my meals, drinking lots of water and making sure portion sizes weren’t too big. I also started counting calories. Once I altered the way I ate, the weight started coming off. I hit my plateau of 200 lbs for about a year and a half, so I had to totally revamp my workouts and take out a few things from my diet to overcome that. I started running miles 3x a week and cut out dairy (even though I love cheese!). It’s all about finding out what works best for you and your body and sticking to it.
What led you to want to make your lifestyle transformation and where are you at now?
I guess you can kind of say I was always into “fitness”, although I never looked at it that way. I grew up a student athlete all the way from a little girl until college. I played basketball, and was always the bigger one on the team. I played basketball at high intensity levels 6x a week, so even though I was still overweight, the workouts that we did during practice and games probably kept my size at bay. I never worked out outside of sports, and I ate whatever I wanted. I was 5’10, 240 lbs playing. Once I got hurt for the 3rd time and decided to quit, my terrible eating habits were still there and since I wasn’t working out, I gained 30 lbs my freshman year of college. My biggest was 278 lbs. I knew that I had to make a change, and that summer of 2008 was when I started my fitness journey.
Currently I range between 180-185, I am still working towards getting to my goal weight of 170, but I am more focused on HOW I look than the scale at this point. There are still areas of my body ( stomach, arms) that I want to tone up more. Eating healthy is a lifestyle for me that I adapted throughout the years. I try to keep my meals filled with lots of greens, fruit/veggies, nuts, and lean meats. I also drink between 3L and a gallon of water a day, as well as 3 cups of green tea per day.
Do you have any favourite fitness resources or information sources?
There weren’t any favorite fitness resources that I looked at or used. My undergraduate degree is in nutritional sciences and I have a certificate in nutrition so I was pretty knowledgeable about most things.
If you could only offer one piece of advice, technique or strategy for women looking to transform themselves, what would it be?
My advice would be to NOT give up.
Trust me, there were days I would cry myself to sleep thinking I would never look like the girls in magazines or like my friends. It took MONTHS before I even noticed myself losing any weight.
It will happen. It WILL take time. It WILL be a process. But it also will be totally worth it.
It’s actually pretty amazing that we are able to transform our bodies into what we want if we put in the work. Also, don’t compare your journey to others! What works for one person might not work for you. It might take someone a shorter period of time to lose weight because not one body type is alike. You might not lose in the areas that you want at first. But that’s ok!
Trust your process.