Advertisement
32-year-old Cori Magnotta stands at six feet tall, but she doesn’t consider herself athletic at all. She’s struggled with her weight for her entire life and has never been able to get herself to go to a gym for more than once before she quits.
When she was pregnant with her son, however, Magnotta developed preeclampsia, a condition of high blood pressure that can be fatal for both mother and child. Doctors told Magnotta go to on bedrest for two months – an order that only made it easier for Magnotta to gain weight.
By the time Magnotta was ready to give birth, she weighed 265 pounds. Immediately after birth, Magnotta worked on losing weight, but she was only able to shed about 15 pounds.
In October 2014, Magnotta weighed 250 pounds and was ready to try any other weight loss method to make it happen.
That was when she discovered a fun workout that centered around, shockingly, hula hooping.
Magnotta was stunned. “When I was 5, Hula-Hooping was my party trick. I was really good at it,” she recalled. “As I got older, I Hula-Hooped less and less and eventually joined the real world, put the hoop aside, and forgot about it.”
Once she saw this FXP Fitness class online, Magnotta knew she had to give it a shot.
From the first minute Magnotta went to the class, she knew she’d fallen in love. “It's impossible to not smile while Hula-Hooping. I wore a fitness tracker and a heart-rate monitor and watched my heart rate spike like I was doing a high-intensity interval training workout,” she said.
Magnotta took home her hula hoop with her that day and began to practice at home. It was the easiest workout she could have chosen because now, it didn’t matter that her son’s toys were still all over the floor – they were never in the way.
Soon enough, Magnotta began training to become an FXP Fitness instructor herself and over time, she saw that she’d reached her weight loss goal, all while massively enjoying herself.
Magnotta now weighed 165 pounds. She’d lost a total of 85 pounds just by hula hooping.
Now, Magnotta makes it her goal to help everyone and anyone she can by helping them become more fit by learning to hula hoop. “The most important thing is that [hula hooping is] fun,” she explained. “Most people crack up when I tell them I'm a Hula-Hoop instructor and tell me they can't hoop. But I have yet to meet someone I can't teach to hoop!”
