Meet Coach Zabrina

Before any of this, I was climbing the corporate ladder as the director of nursing at an ambulatory surgery center. I was building it from scratch: meeting with architects, setting up vendors, staffing the place from zero. I worked seventy hours a week, and I was tired in a way a good night's sleep couldn't fix. Wake up, work, sleep, repeat.

My husband felt like a single parent. My youngest son at the time was growing up without me. And my health was falling apart. How do I know? Six miscarriages.

The sixth was the last straw. The pain was so intense that I shaved my head completely, as a kind of cleansing. All my life people had told me my hair was the key to my beauty, and I didn't want to feel beautiful. I didn't want to feel anything. But without my hair to hide behind, I could finally see how much I had neglected my body. For the first time in a long time I was actually seeing my reflection, not just looking at it. I didn't like what I saw.

I had already tried everything. South Beach, Mediterranean, juicing, fasting. I went vegetarian for three years because I thought meat was the problem, and it made me really sick.

Then the pandemic hit, and my workload went up while the rest of the world slowed down. Everything I'd just built had to be taken apart. But it got me out of the office. My husband and I set up in our garage with some mats, a pull-up bar, and a full-length mirror salvaged from an old closet door. No commercial gym. No barbell on day one. I met myself where I was, with a bodyweight routine and whole-food, protein-first meals, every single day. No weekends off, no cheat days. It was the one thing that grounded me.

The hard part wasn't the schedule. It was feeling weak in the workouts, and feeling the jiggle. It was my family's voices in my head. “Mija, you're Latina, you're supposed to be curvy.” “That's just the way you are.” “Why are you trying so hard? You're already off the market.”

The changes were small at first, and then they stacked. People noticed. My fat loss was so dramatic that there was a rumor at work I was on drugs. In the end I resigned and started ZStrong, coaching online.

I coach women over 40 because that's where my turning point came, and I'm still there. Family, career, midlife. It hits different, and I know how it feels.

You haven't found your why until it makes you cry.