FUELING YOUR BODY

Aloha, my name is Isabella Jade Kawailani Stephens, born and raised in Kona on the island of Hawaiʻi. I have always had a passion for fitness and exercise starting at a young age. Swimming was where it all began when I started swimming at the age of three for Kona Aquatics, I did that until I was about 13. Around the same time, I was also doing Karate, which I did until I reached my black belt. Paddling has also always been a part of my life and still is, I started at 7 years old and now I am a varsity paddler on the girls paddling team.

Freshman year I found my love for the gym and lifting but really didn’t have much knowledge on it and went but felt embarrassed and found myself not reaching out of my comfort zone because of that. I would scroll through my social media feeds and see all these “gym influencers” and famous people promoting the gym and showing their before and afters but not showing how they got there. I’d try and try to get what they had, to get those “quick and easy gains” that they were showing but see no progress. That left me in a state of feeling I couldn’t do it and it was impossible for me to reach. I would try for a month and then see nothing and give up and that same cycle repeated. It wasn’t until April 2020 (sophomore year), it was the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown when I got a huge amount of motivation to work past the mental block and figure out what I was doing wrong. Through tons of research, I found my problem. I wasn’t putting the right foods into my body to reach the goal I wanted to see. The work outside of the gym was just as important, if not more important to reaching the goals I had been wishing to see. It took a few months to get the hang of it all, but once I caught on it was easy.