There are certain women I look at and think: Okay, but what are you ACTUALLY doing?
Michelle is one of them.
Michelle and I worked together for many years at Benefit Cosmetics, where she’s a project manager on the Global Store Design team. She has two kids (ages seven and four), commutes into the office three days a week, and has all the same after-school activities/dinner/bath/bed chaos the rest of us do.
She also happens to be extremely fit.
As in, placed-second-in-a-bodybuilding-competition fit.
So obviously, I’ve been stalking her about fitness for ages. She’s told me the best peanut butter to get (Teddie), the brand of creatine that tastes great and won’t bloat me (Peach Perfect), and we’ve trauma bonded traded stories about the hardest moves at Solidcore. So this article was my ultimate excuse to get into allll the details.
What I loved about talking to Michelle is that she doesn’t wake up at 4 a.m., spend two hours a day at the gym, or cut out sugar. I mean yes, she has done the extremely intense version of fitness. But now she does Pilates, walks a ton, lifts a few times a week, eats dessert, goes to Chipotle and lets the dishes pile up sometimes (hey, it happens to the best of us).
We dive into..
What her workouts look like (plus when she gets them done)
Exactly what she eats in a day (including the same breakfast she’s eaten for two years)
Creatine and protein (a millennial’s favorite buzzwords)
Weights vs cardio
How many steps she gets in a day
What she de-prioritizes to make time for her health (because something always has to give)
And MORE
A quick heads-up: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Okay. Let’s goooo.
First, give me the quick snapshot. What does life look like right now?
I live in the Bay Area and commute into a San Francisco office from the East Bay three days a week, so it’s pretty busy chaotic.
I’m on the Benefit Cosmetics Global Store Design team as a project manager. I’m actually a Benefit boomerang…I’ve left and come back quite a few times! I quit in 2016 to become a personal trainer (see, the fitness story is already starting), then came back when COVID happened and I had to take a step back from training.
I have a seven-year-old daughter in second grade and a four-year-old son who just started TK. They definitely keep me running around and on my toes!
I’m a very routined person. If I’m in a routine, I’m thriving. Right now, my mental and physical health feel really good, and I feel like we’re in a good routine with the kids and their extracurriculars.
Where I struggle is finding time to see my girlfriends and making time for my husband. There’s just not a lot of time in the day! You have to figure out what can take a backseat at different times. Sometimes it’s, Okay, date night can happen next month. But this is an area I’d love to work on and get better at.
Is there anything you’ve stopped caring so much about?
Spending time with people who aren’t in my top five.
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances, but I don’t care anymore about going to this mom’s party or that mom’s event just because I feel like I should. I’ve really started focusing on my top-tier friends, the most important people in my life.
Walk me through a work-from-home morning.
I wake up around 5:45 and make coffee. I make my kids’ lunches in the morning before they wake up because it’s fresher and tastes better, and I think they’re more likely to eat it.
I do my hair and makeup REAL quick, then wake them up around 6:25. We have a little routine where we cuddle on the couch (for a maximum of five minutes, we have places to be!), then we get ready and eat breakfast.
My husband is a personal trainer and starts work at 5:30, so I’m on my own in the morning. He gets home around 7:15, and by then I have the kids dressed and ready. He takes them to school, and I get on my walking pad.
I typically walk for 20-25 minutes. If I’m just listening to a meeting, I’ll walk during it. I have three-pound weights and sometimes do arms, too. If I’m leading a meeting, I don’t walk because I need to focus.
Then I eat breakfast and start working.
What’s the hardest part of the day?
Definitely 5 to 9 p.m. The witching hour.
The mornings sound like they’d be the most chaotic, but they’re actually pretty chill. In the evenings, my kids have extracurriculars and my husband works a split shift, so I’m not getting any help.
I finish work, pick the kids up from his gym, take them home, make dinner, bath, bed. My husband gets home around eight and helps with my older daughter’s bedtime. I eat with the kids, and he eats when he gets home.
Have you always been this into fitness?
Not at all! I was mediocre at every sport I played. I was not good at anything physical!
After I graduated from college, my parents were going through a bad divorce and I moved to Colorado. I was living in Boulder, going to school and having a good time. Maybe too good of a time. I wasn’t living a healthy lifestyle.
One day my roommate came home and said, “I have a voucher for a free kickboxing class.”
I went (which was very unlike me at the time) and I LOVED it. My brain loves that dopamine high. Boxing was my first real “in” to fitness.
I started working at the gym and teaching kids’ workout classes. Eventually I moved back to California and started going to the same boxing franchise here.
That’s where I met my husband. He was the manager.
And we basically got into fitness together.
And then you eventually became a personal trainer AND competed in bodybuilding. What made you want to do that?
I did my first bikini competition in 2016. My husband was training a few other bikini competitors, and I thought, I can do that. Why not?
But when I decided to compete again in 2025, I was in a completely different phase of my life. I was married, I had two kids, my body had gone THROUGH it, I was working full-time.
It became…Can I STILL do this?
I wanted to prove to myself that I could commit to something and stay committed even with so much happening around me.
And it was REALLY hard.
I was weight training five or six times a week and doing cardio five or six times a week. Sometimes I’d be in my garage gym at 5 a.m. and then have to go back in the evening after the kids went to sleep. I was staying up late and waking up early.
Prep was 12 to 16 weeks. I was on a meal plan, and I might start around 2,000 calories, but then we would cut and cut. By two weeks out, I was around 1,100–1,200 calories.
I was in the office basically crying. I remember apologizing to everyone after my show. Like, Sorry I was a bitch. Sorry I cried.
I was eating protein, fat and carbs, but very small amounts. Chicken, ground beef, ground turkey, white fish, some salmon. Tons of vegetables and white rice. Oatmeal. Some days I could have sourdough bread.
I ate a lot of shredded lettuce just to fill myself up.
Your taste buds really do change. It becomes eating to live. I would basically tell myself: Food is in my future.
Okay, so that was bodybuilding Michelle. But I was actually more curious about what she does now to stay fit and healthy day in and day out.
Paid subscribers get Michelle’s weekly workout routine, what she eats in a day, her favorite high-protein meals and snacks, the supplement she swears by, what she thinks women get wrong about fitness, and her extremely relatable rule for what slideswhen life gets too busy.
