Who Inspires You? \\ Celebrating My Mom

Disclaimer: The following post is sponsored by adidas. As always, all opinions expressed are genuinely my own. 

Who inspires you? 

There are a lot of women who inspire me to be a healthy, driven woman. I have friends who amaze me after giving birth, running marathons, or have amazing injury recoveries (and sometimes all three!). I think of powerful women I don’t even know that have been inspirational – athletes like Serena Williams and plus-size models rocking their bodies with confidence like Ashley Graham. But in teaming up with adidas to talk about who has inspired me the most throughout my life, the answer was a no brainer: my mom.

My mom has been inspiring me to be a strong woman for as long as I can remember. She raised 4 kids while being committed to a healthy lifestyle, regular workouts and nutritious eating. My siblings and I used to go to the gym’s babysitting room as kids while she exercised – and as an adult, I get it that her time at the gym was her “me” time. She didn’t compromise on that, and I think that seeing her incorporate fitness into her daily routine as a little girl resulted in me growing up and looking at fitness as a daily habit.

To this day, there’s never been a long stretch of time that I’ve gone without working out. In fact, even when I’ve had injuries, I’ve still worked around them to stay active, because it’s a mood boosting part of my healthy lifestyle that I miss if I skip.

These days, when I visit my mom we often will exercise together – whether that means at-home Jillian Michaels DVDs or going for long walks with the dog. In recent years she’s gotten into yoga too, so sometimes we’ll do yoga in her living room while we chat.

My mom always made sure to have healthy snacks in the house, and she made homemade dinners every night. I didn’t grow up going to fast food chains or eating potato chips for a snack. Not in my household! My mom would have fresh fruit out when we got home from school, and our dinners always included a veggie. To this day, I feel like dinner is incomplete unless there’s a nutritious veggie on the plate.

Nowadays, we have fun cooking and baking in her kitchen together. I think that my love for creating homemade meals stemmed from both her and my grandmother being in the kitchen often. They taught me that one great way we can care for our loved ones is by nourishing them with good food.

In addition to her healthy lifestyle inspiring me throughout my life, my mom has also inspired me with her career. She elected to be a stay-at-home mom when I was younger so that she could be there for us all the time, and then when my younger siblings were older, she started a whole new phase in her life that led her to a career that she loves: My mom earned her Masters degree and became a licensed social worker who deals exclusively with sexual assault victims.

She often tells me how she loves her job counseling women who are working to deal with trauma and get themselves out of difficult situations. I’m inspired by her finding work that she genuinely enjoys, and even better, a job that makes a difference in people’s lives.

When I think about how I was raised, I feel fortunate that my mom’s (as well as my dad’s) healthy lifestyle are habits that have been instilled in me, and are also things that I hope to ingrain in my kids when I become a mom someday. Seeing how hard my mom has worked in so many aspects of her life is a constant inspiration to me, and I feel like I’ve grown up to be a strong, hardworking woman too, largely because of her.

THANK YOU FOR ALL THAT YOU DO, MOM!

So tell me, who has inspired you?