Hay I'm Elysa James, 20 years old, Gluten intolerant and a total fitness addict. 

I have decided to start this blog to help me track my journey and to hopefully help others on the way. So let me tell you a little bit about my self. 

So my whole life I have had body confidence problems suffering from an Eating Disorder for many years though my teens and missing a lot of school life. The eating disorder started when I was about 12 years old, I was just back from a holiday abroad with my entire family. It was a fun holiday, I was a young teen who didn't have a care in the world if I didn't have that perfect bikini body. But on return home and to school I fell ill with intense tummy pains and extreme bloating.  Needless to say the doctors had no idea what was wrong with me as every test was coming back negative. So I was sent into hospital. 4 months went by where I was in and out of hospital and still no luck to find out what was wrong with me. This is when I decided food was the problem. I thought that whenever I ate the pain got worse so I decided I would not eat. 

So anyway, when it got to my second operation they realised there was something wrong with my appendix. Post taking that out they decided the problem was solved and sent me home. 

By this point my body image was so messed up from being bloated for so long, feeling lost in my own body and still scared to eat that I had developed an eating disorder. 

I received some of the best help I could ask for from a wonderful child phycologist. He helped me fight the thoughts that were in my head and got me on the road to recovery. 

Me and my family then moved away and I started a new school with the hope to not be the girl who is always off ill. This was a short lived dream as I was still in pain and ended up missing pretty much the rest of my school life and missing the social life you develop though those years. 

In this time I actually developed a love for makeup. It was the only thing that made me feel good about myself so decided that was what I was going do when I left school. 

I got a unconditional into beauty care and makeup at college even though I had left school with 4 standard grades and a very bad attendance record which sadly did continue though college. Luckily for me, whilst I was at college, we also found a doctor that could finally help. He found out that I have Celiac disease, meaning I can't eat anything with gluten containing ingredients. Since this discovery I have been 1 million times better. 

Having finished college I managed to get a job working in the makeup industry and doing photoshoots, both as a makeup artist and a model.

Because of my illness I have always been quite small built 5 ft 5 and never above 8 st. I have always found it hard to gain weight because my body dose not digest food the same way other peoples bodies do. 

Anyways lets skip 3 years. I got out of a pretty serious relationship and hit rock bottom but I found something, a new love, something that would take my mind of the life that was going on around me, I found the gym. 

I joined the gym in august 2015 as a coping method but developed a true passion for health and fitness. changing the way I was to think about life and making me a stronger person. The gym has also helped me find my true passion in life which is to become a personal trainer and to help people through body troubles and weight problems, to make people stronger both mentally and physically. 

So this is the reason behind the blog. to track my way to competition and to getting my personal training qualification. I hope I can help anyone to achieve something they dream to achieve, because in life anything is possible.