Brunswick personal fitness trainer, Grace Gillespie, has released her latest in a series of fitness books, “The Ultimate Guide To Grocery Shopping.”Brian Lisik/special to cleveland.com
BRUNSWICK — When personal trainer, model, and competitive bodybuilder, Grace Gillespie, dove into the waters of the retail world in 2013, opening her first training facility and smoothie bar, coming up with a name was easy. While she has since expanded and renamed her training facility, now Stop and Stare Personal Training, at 3819 Center Rd., the tenets of Gillespie’s former Passion Juice Bar remain.
In short, Gillespie has never been one to rest on her successes – or keep her passion for fitness to herself.
Her latest venture is a series of books covering topics such as healthy cooking options and “mental preparation for the body of your dreams. The most recent title, “The Ultimate Guide To Grocery Shopping,” is a fun and informative trip to the grocery store with Grace, written in a conversational style that greatly demystifies the process of making a healthy grocery list, reading ingredient labels and actually sticking to a healthy diet.
“My goal with this book is to make this a lifestyle and not a fad,” Gillespie said. “People get healthy for a while, like ‘I’m on this rice diet and all I’m going to eat is rice.’ But anybody can have any body they want, you just have to sculpt it. Before you can do that though, you need a map.”
While many understand, and can be successful, when it comes to cardio classes, taking to the treadmill and keeping to a weight lifting schedule, even the most health conscious, Gillespie said, can fall off the proverbial workout wagon when it comes to diet – and more specifically, how to shop for the best foods to augment ones workout regimen and fitness goals.
“Believe me, I like food just as much as anyone,” she writes in the forward of “The Ultimate Guide.” “But if you can take your favorite meal, alter it a little and make it healthy and delicious, you can have your (sugar free) cake and eat it too.”
Brian Lisik/special to cleveland.com
Long fitness history
Throughout the book, which, at a breezy 53 pages is a perfect grocery store take-along, Gillespie weaves food facts with nuts-and-bolts shopping suggestions creating a true how-to manual for the food-flummoxed newbie dieter. The heavily illustrated and charted pages cover subjects from making a grocery list, to the levels of sugar and sodium one should actually include, to good old fashioned, homespun encouragement.
Gillespie started Fitness By Grace as a personal trainer at the Brunswick Recreation Center. But fitness training, one might say, is in the Pittsburgh native’s blood. The daughter of a competitive bodybuilder and sister of a professional boxer, Gillespie said that by age 3, she was already tagging behind her dad at the gym.
She has been somewhat surprised, however, with how much she has caught the bug for research and writing. Response has been great thus far from readers, Gillespie said, and she has expanded her writing projects to include a motivational e-newsletter that covers many of the areas covered her books do.
Plans for future publications, Gillespie said, include a series of holiday specific titles and a nutrition book geared toward competitive bodybuilders.
“I am planning a book a year,” she said.
All titles in the “Stop and Stare” series are available at the fitness center and online at www.yourstopandstarebody.com and www.fitnessbygrace.net.
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