As a Personal Fitness Trainer it is my job to educate and motivate people on how to become more fit and overall more healthier. I promote the importance of living an active lifestyle on a daily occurence both to our clients and to others through the power of social media. From my training videos on Instagram, to my workout tips or “tweets” on Twitter, to even my healthy muscle-building recipes posted on our Facebook Group Page, I try my absolute best to remain a constant resource for the latest health and nutritional information to everyone who supports my efforts. As much as I enjoy providing our clients and others with this useful and helpful knowledge, I feel that I myself have been living a lie. See, as much as many of my own clients may think that I have always practiced living the healthy and fit lifestyle just as much as I preach it, this in fact has not always been the case. There actually was once a time in my life where I considered working out to be a complete waste of time and the thought of eating healthy was an absolute joke.

So without further ado I bring to you, my confession…..

As a young boy I grew up in a somewhat rural town on the outskirts of Downtown Montreal, Quebec. The primary language spoken in my neighbourhood that I lived in was French. The primary language spoken in my household was English. My parents both grew up in Montreal however they were raised in the English speaking parts and therefore spoke very little French themselves. This made things extremely difficult for myself and my brother as we were forced to learn a foreign language from a very young age just so that we could communicate with our peers as well as make our way through the schooling system. Both my brother and I attended a French Immersion school. We were taught all of our subjects in French and were expected to write and complete all of our assignments in French as well. As if subjects like Math and Science weren’t already hard enough in our own friggin’ language!

Anyways, my brother and I both struggled in school. We had difficulty making friends as no one could understand us, nor could we understand them. I should also mention that at the time we were living in Montreal, Quebec was going through the peak of it’s referendum. This was a time when our province became a few mere percentage points away from separating from Canada. There was a clear line drawn between the French and the English (at least in our town anyways). And if you weren’t a Separatist or at least French speaking you were considered to be an outcast.

This led to many incidents in which we were picked on quite a bit by the other kids in our neighbourhood. We were involved in many fights (most of which we lost) and there were countless vandalism attacks on our house. Despite all of this my parents tried their absolute best to raise us to be respectful and accepting of others no matter what their nationality, religion or race was. I must admit though that this was extremely difficult to accept when we were being beat up and made fun of on a regular basis by one particular group of individuals.

I went through my childhood with very few friends. This made me somewhat of a loner and also very angry with world as I entered my teenage years. I eventually learned how to protect myself and fight back but this only seemed to fuel my rage and hatred towards others even further. Like most teenagers, I became rebellious to the law and disrespectful to my parents. I disobeyed authority and started to make my own rules. I started to hang out with the “wrong crowd” which led me to unprincipled and immoral behavior. And this was all before the age of 14!

My life soon went on a downward spiral and actually almost ended before it even had a chance to truly begin…..

Check out next week’s blog for Part 2 Of “My Confession”

Yours in Good Health,

Nick Cosgrove