From Actor to Fitness Instructor/Content Creator - My Self-Love Journey
Hi, I’m Jess and I’m a fitness instructor and certified yoga teacher with 5 years’ experience teaching both in-person and online. I am so excited that you are here visiting my page and hope that you enjoy diving into the personal side of my life. So much of what I share on TikTok is bite-sized, and I want to shine a light on my story - how I went from Musical Theatre performer to fitness instructor and content creator sharing body positivity and a personal self-love journey.
Since the age of 4, you could say I’ve been on a journey to self-love. When I was a toddler in dance class my love of movement began but also that slippery slope of comparison with other girls - specifically my struggles with body image. While I have come so far, I acknowledge that self-love is a daily practice. In the last few years I have finally started finding the joy in my body again - unrelated to its size.
I have always struggled with my body image and confidence. When I was a young girl I would constantly compare myself to others and this did not simply go away with age. When you lose weight, so many people are conditioned to applaud you, like you’ve accomplished some great task and now you are worthy of their respect. I found myself losing weight by dieting and over-exercising all the while hating my body. I would exercise to punish myself for what I had eaten, even if I was exercising at 3am. I tied that my self-worth to attractiveness and that I could only determine by a number on a scale. As a woman in the musical theatre industry, I found myself put in a box - you either have to lose weight so that you fit into your voice type OR you can gain weight and play the “funny best friend”. I worked so hard to lose weight and thought that when I had lost weight, I was succeeding in my career and all of the compliments about my physical appearance would make me happy.
For years, I would diet and exercise and then find disappointment when I couldn't keep up with this “lifestyle”. I think a huge step in my self-love journey was when I started to seek fitness options and really evaluate what I wanted in exercise. I grew up as a dancer and just missed the enjoyment of moving to music. In 2015, I moved back to Toronto after going to school in Boston for my MFA in Musical Theater and living and working in NYC as an actor. I missed the energy of the city and wanted to find fitness classes as a way of moving my body. I tried ClassPass with my roommate at the time and even started an Instagram account called @butt_firstcoffee . I noticed that so many boutique fitness studios had very different vibes. There were bootcamp classes where the instructors would yell at you and shame you for not finishing a push up. I went to a studio where their classes focused on achieving a certain look - they had a class called “Bikini Bod”.
The one thing I noticed about all of these different studios was how my body would feel after class. I was often sore from pushing myself to fit into their style. I wasn’t in tune with what my body needed because I was trying to “fit in”. But after many months of soul searching and taking hundreds of classes, I found barre3. I loved how my body felt after barre3 - challenged but never hurting. There’s the difference between feeling sore, like muscle fatigue, and pain or discomfort in your joints. With barre3 I felt encouraged to challenge myself but not go beyond my limits. I learned to listen more to my body and worry less about what the person beside me was doing in class. After many barre3 classes, I realized how much I loved how I felt being a part of their community as a client. After a class one day, I went up to the instructor after class and we bonded over our matching leggings. It was then that I expressed how much I loved the style of workout and how I’d love to teach one day. In the past I don’t think I ever would have had the courage to bring up that topic, but I was just so in love with the style of class. This was the first step in becoming a barre3 instructor myself - a title I am proud to hold to this day.
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More on barre3…
One of the biggest components of barre3 that I love is the embracing of modifications in movement. Every posture or exercise at barre3 has an alternative to meet you and your body where it is at today. I found myself, little by little, learning to love my body. I loved my body for what it could do and started to think less about what it looked like or what costume I could fit into. Now this doesn’t mean that I was instantly cured from all of my body image struggles or self confidence. Becoming an instructor was a huge step towards finding that confidence but I was still taking baby steps.
Flash forward to early 2020. I was at the tail end of another restrictive diet and working on my feet all day as an educator at lululemon. I was the smallest size I’d been in a few years and it felt good again to be getting compliments. I was working as a fitness instructor and had been recently certified as a yoga teacher. I felt stronger in my self-love journey but again, didn’t realize how much I had tied my self-worth to a body type. I put pressure on myself to look a certain way so I would be accepted as a fitness professional. For the while that this lasted, I thought I was finally feeling confident in my career and my body.
Skip ahead a few months to 2020 and the pandemic. My schedule changed drastically. I went from teaching 10 classes a week and working on my feet all day in a retail setting to teaching one virtual class a week - and that was all. Toronto was and has been the most locked down city in North America during the pandemic so the opportunities to teach fitness were few and far between. I found myself frustrated. After months of working on dieting and restricting so much - I was back to square one in my “goals” and had the shame of failing again. This is when I realized something had changed. I gained weight back but I was fed up with tying my self-worth to it. I found a new confidence and I wasn’t ready to just shake it now that the weight had come back. What if I could disassociate my self worth from a number on a scale? Could I learn to love my body at any size? I learned to love my body for what it could do and not just what it looked like. The ups and downs of weight loss are exhausting and I just wanted to love myself at every step of the journey. Bodies are always changing and adapting.
This lightbulb moment I had happened also around the time that I started my TikTok account @jkmckay . I posted maybe a few videos before April 2021, but it wasn’t until then that I really took it seriously. I wanted to reach 1K so I could teach weekly live classes.
April 2021 is when I started my TikTok and I was so pleasantly surprised to find such a strong community there. I am and forever will be grateful for the connections I’ve made through TikTok. It started as a tool for my own journey and has turned into a job through my influencing with lululemon. My heart is happy if I can brighten someones day with a funny video, or slowly but surely change the narrative that you don’t have to be “thin” to be “in” or to be a leader in the fitness industry. I love representing that every BODY is welcome in group fitness. I also love sharing shopping tips for lululemon, a company I’ve loved for many years and worked at twice. I love how lululemon focusses on the “feel” sensation of their clothing as well as the function for specific activities. Every tag on a product you buy from lululemon will have list of “Why We Made This” that goes into all of the reasons why a piece was made in a certain way or with a certain fabric. While the company has struggled in the past with being inclusive for all bodies, I am seeing a change with their new extended sizing and I hope they continue to move in this direction. I believe in fitness for ALL bodies and I want a company that appreciates that and continues to include more sizing.
It is now 2022 and I am excited to launch this blog, this site and continue to share my journey with you. My husband and I recently moved from Toronto to New York City and I am thrilled to be continuing my barre3 teaching at barre3 West Village. If you’ve ever been curious to try a class, I would love for you to join me for a class sometime. As for this blog, I hope to bring you more slices of life and share with you my experiences as I continue to pursue fitness and content creation.