Page 770 of Filthy Elites

“Sorry. I think I’m still a bit insecure yet. When I first started here, I was afraid everyone was staring at me, judging me… I had to lose sixty pounds so I could donate a kidney to my sister.” She holds out her arms. “I’m down seventy pounds, and my sister is as healthy as a horse now, and so am I. Her needing the transplant probably saved both of our lives.”

“You look incredible!” Dawn gasps. “What did you do? Just treadmill?”

“Exercise is only part of it. Diet has to come into play too. Let me wipe this down quick. You can hop on then, and we can talk. How does that sound?”

“Great!” Dawn glances at me. “You can go check out the weights. Maybe do some squats and lunges.”

“I’m Heather,” the woman says.

“I’m Dawn, and this is Brooke.”

“Nice to meet you. I’ll see you soon, Dawn, okay?”

Dawn barely acknowledges me, but I don’t mind. She needs this, to have passion for her weight loss journey. I just hope it doesn’t take over her entire life. She honestly doesn’t need to lose that much. Maybe ten pounds. Fifteen.

I head over to the weights. They’re a bit intimidating, I won’t lie, and I don’t touch any of them, instead doing some stretches first. Sensei and Declan have both hammered into us karate students that stretching is a must or else you risk injury. I do not want to be sidelined already.

It’s not a surprise that there are a lot more guys over here than women, but they ignore me almost to the point of it being deliberate, but that suits me just fine. Well, to some extent. I lifted weights for a semester in high school for gym class, but I never really learned proper technique, so some guidance would be nice.

I do know how to do squats and lunges without any weights, so I do some of those, making sure my knee hits the floor with every lunge.

“You don’t want to actually hit the ground,” a woman says, coming up to me. She looks like she’s twelve, which makes me pause. “You’ll hurt your knee doing it that way. Just hover above it.”

She grabs two twenties off the rack and demonstrates a perfect backward lunge, her knee barely hovering above the ground.

“Your turn,” she says, straightening, her feet coming together for a moment before she steps back with the other leg.

I feel a bit silly not using any weights, but I do what she says.

“Lower,” she says.

I listen and wait for her to nod.

I start to come up.

“If you aren’t going to use more than just bodyweight, then you might want to do this.” The girl does another lunge, but this time, she gets into position and then moves up and down, just a tiny movement. “It’ll start burning really quickly,” she warns.

She’s still holding the weights, and her form is perfect, but her legs… She doesn’t look all that strong.

“What is it?” she asks.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but you look so young.”

“I get that a lot,” she says with a laugh. “I’m going to be carded until I’m thirty-five!”

“Wait, you’re twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two in a week.”

“No way.”

“Thought I was fifteen?”

“Something like that,” I mumble, my mind blown.

“They say that lifting weights can help keep you young. Who knows?”

“You also… I was worried about looking bulky…”

---