THE LONGER VERSION
 

I lost over 100 lbs in my NJ living room. No gym membership, no fancy equipment... just yard-sale weights, a bookshelf to stack them on, and workout DVDs I'm pretty sure you can't even buy anymore. I did it that way because gyms terrified me. Someone made fun of my size on a treadmill once and I never went back. So I figured it out at home instead.

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That was 2009. I've maintained the weight since then... not perfectly, not without seasons where everything fell apart, but I never stopped coming back. That stubbornness is the whole thing. It's the only reason any of this works.

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I started blogging about it at getfitwithnikki.com because I wanted to share the journey while it was happening, not after I had it figured out. I built a real following that way... people who showed up daily because I was honest about all of it. The hard days, the gains, the times I wanted to quit. That was the whole point.

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2019 was the year I had to start over in ways I wasn't expecting. I had to figure out who I was on my own again after almost 20 years. It was hard and it was necessary and I'm grateful for it even on the days I wasn't. That's also the year "Fail Forward" stopped being just a phrase and became the whole operating system.

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In 2021 I moved from New Jersey to Arizona because life is too short to only know one way of living. I remarried in January 2024. Turned 50 this May. I work at a brewery, I drive a Jeep, I walk every morning before it gets too hot to breathe outside, and I still work out in a spare room to the same bootleg DVDs from 2009.

I'm navigating perimenopause, rebuilding strength without wrecking my nervous system, and learning that taking care of yourself at 50 looks nothing like taking care of yourself at 30. I'm figuring that out in real time and sharing it as I go.

This is not a transformation story. The transformation already happened. This is the maintenance... the real, unglamorous, still-hard part that nobody talks about enough.​