I was very honored when I was asked to be interviewed by the American Heart Association. I hope that by sharing my story of overcoming obstacles, it empowers women to take better care of themselves. 

"Six years ago, Khrystyne Kaphan of Sacramento was beginning to develop health problems. At the age of 30, she was overweight, had dangerously high cholesterol and had been a smoker for 20 years."

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February 22, 2009
By   Sam McManis

HEALTH & FITNESS / SUCCESS STORY

There perhaps comes a point in all formerly fat people's lives when they stop recoiling in horror at photos of their erstwhile larger selves and actually start to appreciate how far they've come. But few actually go so far as to pin the "before" and "after" photos to a wall at work.

In the case of Khrystyne Kaphan, 35, a mother of two from Sacramento, it is entirely appropriate. She works as a personal trainer at California Family Fitness in Carmichael, where some of her clients deal with the same weight issues that once dogged her.

So if the buff and toned Kaphan, 5-foot-5 and 130 pounds, starts hearing the excuses from gym members for not making the effort to shape up, she leads them over to a wall and shows them the infamous "Poor Santa" photo. It's a shot of Kaphan, circa early 2000s, when she weighed about 210 pounds.

"We call it the 'Poor Santa' photo because my husband's on one knee of Santa and I'm on the other, and poor Santa is leaning way over toward me because I'm so heavy," she says, laughing. "Everyone at the club always gets the lecture of 'Poor Santa.' It was a pretty sad sight. I really need to find that man and apologize to him."

So stark has been Kaphan's physical transformation in the past five years -- when she went from overweight client to fit personal trainer -- that some longtime California Family Fitness members don't believe it's the photo of the same woman. Once they are convinced, though, it becomes a powerful motivator.

"Everyone has this misperception of me when they see me," Kaphan says. "They go, 'Oh, this is the skinny girl.' They don't understand that I call myself part of the former fat girl club. Don't tell me this doesn't work. Don't tell me you can't make the commitment. That becomes a real thing to them."

So just how did Kaphan go from "fat girl" to a svelte woman who has participated in figure competitions? It's a long story, one that Kaphan is happy to tell.

Growing up, she says, she never really had a healthy role model and struggled with a "husky" body. "I didn't take care of myself," she says. "I smoked and didn't exercise. I never ate. And when you don't eat, your body goes into starvation mode. Breakfast was a cup of coffee and a cigarette. So at night, when you wait all day to eat and you're starving, your body hangs on to all that you stuff yourself with at dinner, because the body doesn't know when the next meal is going to come."

When she married 16 years ago, Kaphan's husband, Gary, got them a dual gym membership. "I hated it," she recalls. "I couldn't understand why he'd want to spend a couple of hours there. The running joke, where I work, is that I had a gym membership 10 years and never used it."

What started her path to a healthy lifestyle was wanting to have children. She quit smoking, ate slightly better but still didn't exercise much. Her weight ballooned easily over 200 pounds after the births of her son, J.T., now 10, and daughter Lauren, 7.

Then came what Kaphan calls her "a-ha moment," an incident that made her change her life.

"I remember lying down with the kids and trying to read them bedtime stories and being out of breath," she says. "Being that round, it put a lot of pressure on your lungs. It was just so sad to me that I couldn't do the one simple thing I wanted to do -- read to my children. It was devastating."

So Kaphan began working out -- with a vengeance. And she tried a novel dieting concept: three square meals a day.

"I kid you not, the first month I started eating breakfast and lunch, I dropped 30 pounds -- and 24 of that was just from making better choices and being active," she says.

It took Kaphan only eight months to drop the first 80 pounds. She's lost a total of 97 and now fluctuates between 130 and 135 pounds -- "depending on whether I have a cheat night," she says.

She says her motivation was simple: being healthy for her children. And she says her goal is now to inspire others who face what she has. "They need someone to connect to," she says. "I'm a mom in my 30s with two relatively small children, so when people say to me, 'I'm too busy,' well, there is a way to do it."