Contestant: Teresa Kelly
Stats
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 191
Trivia
Biggest Fear: "If anything it's that my body isn't going to cooperate, but I'm going to give it all this body's got," says Teresa. "I'm not scared of hard work."
Biggest Goal: "I want to feel better than I do right now. I want to feel good,"" she says. "Nothing tastes as good as it feels to be healthy."
Teresa Kelly was always an athlete. In high school it was volleyball. Then, she met her husband in college and they took up tennis together, playing the highly aerobic sport for recreation and even in some tournaments.
"When you're young you just do it; you don't even think about it," says the now 54-year-old mother of three and grandmother of one. "Then of course kids come along. The next 10 or 15 years was just a blur."
The Kellys played tennis as a family for a while, but Teresa says she found herself morphing into a sports mom, focused on getting everyone to practices on time and keeping their day-to-day activities organized.
Every now and then, she'd still sub in for tennis leagues and "one time I did it and it had been a long time. I was still that 20-something in my head, but I was over 40 and I hurt myself," she says.
So she had to take her activity down a notch. She got into walking and light jogging but tweaked a muscle in her hip that put her out of commission for a while.
Teresa then looked into lots of quick fixes, fad diets and other clinical remedies, but she knew she just needed to get active again. "I wanted to get back into it, but I had a hard time getting motivated. School would start for the kids, routines would change and excuses would come—things I'd allow to get in the way. I'm kind of mad at myself because I let myself get like this."
However, now that Teresa is an Erlanger Live Fit Challenge contestant, she has Esteban Tamez, trainer and owner of the Fitness Cage in Ooltewah, to give her that motivation. An alum of Southern Adventist University, Esteban opened his business eight years ago in his own garage and, two locations later, has grown his business from there.
"We had a good connection with Teresa from the beginning," he says. "I'm going to start with diet; that's the hardest part of this. We're going to focus on the basics."
