Yoga Teacher Who Gained 40 Pounds on Purpose Learned a Valuable Lesson (VIDEO)

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
by Maressa Brown 14 hours ago

If you can't possibly imagine a yoga teacher making it her mission to forgo all healthy habits and deliberately gain weight, you're not alone! But that's exactly what Dallas-based yoga instructor Trina Hall did after a particularly emotional phone convo with her best friend.

Trina told The Huffington Post that her friend had been "lamenting the fact that she didn't want to be known as the 'fat' yoga teacher. I felt empathy for her and what she was going through ... But it triggered me in a personal way." So personal, in fact, that she decided to let go of all dietary restrictions from March to July of 2013, initially feeling as though her weight had nothing to do with her value. She says she did it to show her friend and herself "that it's not about the physical. That it's got to be about something else." Instead, she says she "found something completely different throughout the process."

Trina wrote that she learned it really wasn't that people in her life cared about her weight ... but she did. She'd mentally beat herself up and found herself tying her self-worth to how good she looked in spandex, which was something she said she "completely denied giving a sh*t about before this experiment –- and that pissed me off." Furthermore, she admitted that her weight gain affected her ability to practice and teach yoga. Ugh.

How many of us have done one or ALL of the above at some point? It's so sad that we all seem to fall into these very same traps, no matter where we stand with our personal fitness -- or the often-inaccurate scale. Tina confessed:

The difference came in my own perceptions of myself, and I began to treat myself differently. I was very judgmental, and I would look in the mirror and critique myself... I would pick apart my body. Instead of looking at the whole of my body, I would look at different parts and analyze what's wrong with them.

Oh, can I relate. I have such a tendency to do the same. And it's so aggravating, especially, to think that you're your own worst enemy. That you're giving yourself a much harder time than anyone else possibly could!

Though it sounds like she put herself through a brief but torturous experience, the biggest takeaway from Tina's weight gain was that she tuned into her fear of not being loved ... and she tied her self-love -- and self-esteem -- directly to her outer beauty. Yuuuup. I can't imagine that most women haven't been there.

Nah, Tina's is not exactly a groundbreaking discovery, but it is one we should all be more conscious of. We deserve to be loved for every aspect about us -- not just our bodies. But we need to love our bodies, too, and cut out all the negative self-talk! Thankfully, it sounds like the upshot of Tina's experiment is a thoroughly wonderful one. She's newly committed to "empower[ing] people to love their bodies... if it's going to start somewhere, it has to start within." Love. It.

What do you think about Tina's experiment? Can you relate to what she experienced?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Maressa Brown

has enjoyed reporting and writing for a variety of entertainment and women's magazines and websites. More often than not, you'll find her blogging, hitting the gym, reading, researching something on her iPhone, laughing, chatting at an above-"normal" volume, or getting her caffeine fix.

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