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Spring woman describes her journey to fitness
Miriam Blanco of Spring talks about what inspired her fitness journey.
SPRING, Texas - It's hard to stay fit.
Even people who are good at it know how hard a habit it can be to create, because everyone has stressors – work, a pandemic, politics, family or mental health.
Miriam Blanco’s story might help push you in the right direction, because she knows how impactful it can be to prioritize yourself.
She's 5’4” tall and was pushing 220 pounds.
Her inspiration to lose weight came from many sources, starting with a pretty bad car wreck.
“I went to a couple of doctors and I was told I only had a couple of choices. I did the whole cortisone shot on my back four, times actually. And then I went to another doctor. Told me he wouldn’t do the surgery on me because, being so young, that he wouldn’t even do it on his own sister,” Miriam says. “So I was left with either trying the surgery and maybe not working – you know, a 50/50 chance – or being dependent on drugs, which wasn’t an option for me.”
On top of that was a very unsupportive ex.
“It was a lot of negativity there. And I knew it wasn’t healthy. But you know, I grew up with the same type of thing," Miriam says. "You know, as Hispanics you mostly, you have to stick it out in the marriage, because you don’t want to raise your kids without one parent. So that’s what I did. I stuck it out as much as I could. And after everything happened, even after the whole split up and him being gone, in my head I was still thinking, ‘He’s right. I’m overweight. You know, you don’t see happy marriages, happy endings for people who are overweight like me.’”
Even after her journey began, Miriam hit bumps here and there, but she worked through the pain.
“And then I got the bad news about my father being killed. And I think that was like the hardest thing to ever deal with. But I still kept going at it. You know I had a couple workouts for months where in the middle of it I would just breakdown crying. But I’m doing these pushups while crying. I’m running while crying," Miriam says.
Her biggest motivator was her four girls, and not repeating past mistakes.
“I feel like what got me through it, I put in, I held to all of that negativity,” Miriam says. “I see my girls, and I know I don’t want them to have the future, to live the life that I did. Which was to be unhappy and try to make everybody else happy. So I thought, your kids see you on how you are, just like what I did. I did everything exactly what my mom did. I saw this cycle of women doing the same things as their mothers did. I knew that’s what I didn’t want for my girls. You can’t just expect that life is going to stop and be like ‘OK, you know what, let me give you a break because you’re having it hard’. That’s not how it works. If there’s something that you’re gonna want you have to try every kind of way to get to it.”